HealthyGamerGG - How to Harness Perfectionism

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

Perfectionism can be a curse for many, but in today's episode we're going to learn how to turn it into a blessing you can use every day. Check out HG coaching: https://bit.ly/47dF7rF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're going to learn how to take the curse of perfectionism and turn it into a blessing. So we have to start by understanding where perfectionism comes from. And usually, perfectionism comes from very, very high or unreachable standards when we're growing up. So this can look like parents who want you to be perfect all the time and won't settle for anything less than 100%. Sometimes this also looks like a situation of golden boy syndrome or even having an older brother who's a golden boy or golden girl. your older brother or sister did a great job at this, went to Harvard, was valedictorian, did this, got married at the right time, had kids at the right time, and so you've got really big shoes to fill. And so what does a child in that situation learn? How does the brain adapt to that situation? What the brain learns is to avoid the pain of falling short. Hey, y'all, I want to talk for a second about HG coaching. A lot of people wonder, why do I need to sign up for coaching? Can't I just DIY it? Can't I watch another YouTube video? And you're right. You're right. You're right. you can absolutely do those things, which is why we offer those resources. But one thing that I found is that people who try to do things by themselves take a really long time to do it. And my

experience has been that the earlier that you get your life together, the better your life will be. So coaching is designed to not help people treat mental illness, but discover things like what you want out of life, what's holding you back, how to conquer procrastination, and how to find motivation. And I have worked with each and every one of our coaches. I work with them for eight weeks to make sure they're of the highest quality and they really represent what we offer at HG. So if y'all are interested, check out the link in the description below. If we look at the brain, there are actually two kinds of perfectionism. There's personal standard perfectionism, which is sort of the standard that you set for yourself and always wanting to be better. And then

there's also something called external concern perfectionism. So this is perfectionism that is rooted in the opinions of others. Everyone around you expects you to be perfect, Or you want to be perfect for their sake and in order to make them happy. And it's this ECP, this external concern perfectionism, that is usually damaging and sabotaging. And in order to understand how, we have to sort of come back to the roots of perfectionism. So if you're highly perfectionistic, chances are you grew up in a situation where there were unrealistic standards. So this can look like harsh, narcissistic, or tiger parents who expected you to be perfect. And no matter how hard you try, they were all.

always disappointed. Or if you did perfect, that's the norm. So if you were at the top of your class, that's just what they expect. That's the baseline. And so if you sort of think about perfectionism, you can either do normal or you can disappoint. There's no way to make your parents proud if they're expecting you to be at the top of the class all the time. Sometimes this also happens in a case of like golden boy or golden girl where you have an older brother or sister who did awesome, right? So really harsh parents, really high expectations, and your sibling knocked it out of the part, which means now you're expected to do it too because your parents have unrealistic expectations, but they were able to pull it off, so now you should be able to pull it off. The end result,

though, is that you grow up in a situation where you can't win. The best you can do is break even or lose. And what does that do to the brain? It turns out that personal standard perfectionism and external concern perfectionism, actually live in different parts of the brain. External concern perfectionism comes from this part of our brain called the medial frontal gyrus. You don't need to worry about where the neuroanatomy is.

The important thing is what the medial frontal gyrus is for in what it actually does. So this is a part of our brain that redirects attention. It actually shifts attention away from what we're doing right now to something else. Now this may sound kind of weird,

but this is where, thankfully we've got good scientific experiments that explain how this works. So a group of researchers took a group of people who were high in personal standard perfectionism or PSP versus people who had high ECP. And then they gave them a task in which you make mistakes. And then they measured the brain activity for both of these groups of people when they were making mistakes. And here's what they discovered. So when someone who is external concern perfectionism is high, right? You've had these crippling parents who are always trying you to be perfect and you could never do good enough. What these people end up doing is anytime they make a mistake, the medial frontal gyrus

activates and stops thinking about the mistake that you made. Because remember, when you were growing up, nothing you can do is ever good enough. So anytime you fall short, what did your mind do? And you may have noticed this in your own life, that any time you had to tell your parents that you've got to be, you just retreated mentally from the conversation. You like knew ahead of time that you were screwed no matter what. So you just started distracting yourself. You told them, hey, here's the report card.

Or if you're like me, you actually walked out to the mailbox and took the report card out of the mailbox so that your parents wouldn't see it. And your parents are like, hey, where's the report card? And you're like, I don't know. Maybe they made a mistake. You just avoided the situation entirely. And even when they found out, you mentally checked out. You became numb and it didn't really hurt because it hurt. too much. Instead of focusing on our mistakes, this part of our brain activates and shifts our

attention away from our mistakes in order to protect us. In doing so, it f***s us because now we don't actually repair our mistakes. And this is the curse of perfectionism, which is that you want to do a great job, you want to do a great job, you want to do a great job, but anytime you screw up, You don't have the resilience to actually fix the problem. You just end up beating yourself up. You end up numbing yourself out. You end up feeling like there's nothing you can do to win this game. And the reason you feel that way is because literally the part of your brain that learns from mistakes is handicapped by the MFG medial frontal gyrus.

And the medial frontal gyrus starts thinking about other things. Why does it do that? Because when you were growing up, that's all it could do. because you had parents who could never be made happy. So if you think about it, if you have parents who are never going to be happy, the only adaptation your brain has is to numb itself out because there's no way you can make them happy.

So solving the problem doesn't work. And so literally your brain stops solving the problem. Now let's look at personal standard perfectionism. So these are people who have a high standard for themselves. So in personal standard perfectionism, a completely different part of the brain activates and a completely different thing happens. So the anterior cingulate cortex or the medial cingulate,

cortex, some different part of the brain, activates. And what these people do when they make a mistake is they slow down their thinking and they actually pay attention to the problem. Literally their cognition slow down. So what we see when we give these two people tasks in which they're supposed to make mistakes is that the person with PSP makes a mistake once, slows down their thinking, and then improves with the task over time, makes fewer mistakes. Whereas the person with the external concern perfectionism, avoids whatever the task is as soon as they figure out they've made a mistake and starts thinking about other things. So they actually don't improve over time. The problem when we struggle with perfectionism is that the advice that we get sucks. Because people out there will tell

you, oh, just do less good, or just stop caring what other people think, or just learn how to set boundaries. cut out these toxic people from your life. But if you are perfectionistic, you know that you carry that perfectionism with you from one relationship to the next to the next. And the whole point is that when you are perfectionistic, your brain is like different from somebody else's brain. You've been wired to care about what other people think.

Whereas these people with personal standard perfectionism, they're actually okay ignoring the rest of the world. But the reason they're okay with that, The reason they give you that advice is because their upbringing was different, where they could afford to not care. So now this is where things get really interesting because how do we solve this problem? And this is where we're going to actually show y'all. Okay, so let's take a quick look. So over here, we have personal standard perfectionism or PSP.

Over here, we have external concern perfectionism or ECP. And now what we know is that you can have high or low of each of these quantities. Okay? So if I have high external concern and low personal standard, okay? So this is where you are, chances are. If you're perfectionistic, this is where you are. Which means that you want to be perfect for other people, but you don't expect a whole lot from yourself.

Now, here's the problem. If we listen to all these fuckers out there who are like, just care less about what other people think, what will actually do is move into this column. So not only do you not give a shit about what other people think, but you don't give what you think to begin with. So now you're over here,

and you give no f***es, right? So there's like zero concern. And this leads to the worst outcomes. These people do the worst in life. They don't care about themselves. They don't care about anyone else. Maybe you're down here, and if you're down there, my heart goes out to you.

Now, here's the really interesting thing. People may think that being in this column is the best. High personal standard, I care about what I think and I don't care about anyone else. I'm going to live my life according to my rules and other people's disrespect or disappointment in me. I don't really care about that. It doesn't bother me. I'm happy and that's what's important. These people do better than these people. So these people do the worst. These people, which is probably all, do bad. these people do okay. But here's the cool thing. These people do the best.

And so the wild thing here is we don't want to move you from here to here because it's really hard to change that wiring. It's really hard to stop caring about what other people think when you grew up in an environment where your survival and happiness depended on what other people think. What's actually way easier is for you to move this way. So instead of stopping to care about other people, And the cool thing there is that in the same way that the personal standard perfectionism people,

it's hard for them to start caring about what other people think. If you can make this shift into setting a standard for yourself, in addition to caring what other people think, because we can't change that, you will actually outperform the person who doesn't give a shit about anyone else. And it's actually hard for them to start caring about what other people think. It's hard to move on the ECP axis. It's easier to move on the PSP axis, okay? I know that's kind of confusing, but the TLDR is that we don't want to change the way that you think around other people. That's not how we're going to harness perfectionism. We're going to leave that

there because you've tried to fix it. It hasn't really worked so far. And what's actually easier is harnessing the personal standard perfectionism. And what that literally means is learning to set a standard for yourself. So there are two things that you can do to boost your PSP. The first is when you make a mistake, slow down. Remember that what we learn from kind of of these studies on mistakes in the ECP and PSP is that when someone makes a mistake and they have high ECP, their medial frontal gyrus activates. They distract themselves, whereas the PSP person slows down. So instead, what I want y'all to do the next time you make a mistake, catch yourself. There's going to be a part of your mind that feels very squirrely. It's like, it's going to try to

move over here and it's going to try to move over there. It's going to try to do anything but sit with the feeling or the thoughts or whatever you have in that moment. So what you need to do is don't distract, just slow down. The good news is you don't have to fix anything, right? That's where the perfectionist fall into this trap, which is like, how do I fix it? How do I fix it? You don't have to fix it. All you have to do is pay attention to the problem. That'll disable the medial frontal gyris and then thankfully the rest of your brain will start to act. So just slow it down anytime you make a mistake. Tip number one. Second thing that you need to do is develop a standard for yourself. So if you have a high level of ECP and you're very perfectionistic. Anytime you approach a task, you don't think about

you. You never ask yourself the question, what would I be happy with? Why? Because it's a dumb question. Who cares what I would be happy with? It matters what other people think. And why do you think that way? It's because you used to have an opinion when you were a kid and your parents didn't give a shit. So you stopped giving a shit about your opinion. That needs to change. So anytime you're faced with a task, Notice that your instinctive response is to think about how to make other people happy. How do I succeed? How do I be perfect? And instead, ask yourself, what would I be happy with?

Pretend the rest of the world did not exist. Would a B be okay for me? Do I need to get an A or an A plus? Do I need to be at the top of my class? What would make me happy? And then, hopefully what you're able to do is as you perform, you can hold both of those things at the same time. Other people may have been disappointed in you,

but at least you can take some pride in your performance. And the beautiful thing is that if you do this, if you literally just slow down anytime you make a mistake, you don't have to fix it, you don't have to make anyone happy, you don't have to make yourself happy, literally just slow down. And you start to develop personal standards for yourself,

you will actually shift into the high PSP and high ECP column. And if you're able to shift, into that column, you will actually outperform all of the people who are just doing whatever they want to in life and just hold themselves to their personal standards. You will actually be able to outperform all those hyper-independent people that you wish you could be like. All these people that are giving you this crappy advice of just stop caring about other people. If you really look at things like median income and performance in life, what you'll discover is that high ECP can be a blessing if you can inject some of your personal standard.

Perfectionism feels like a curse because no matter how hard we try, we seem to always disappoint people. And the good news is that that degree of striving for perfection can actually allow you to achieve the best things in life. All you need to do is add some of that personal resilience in there, add some self-respect and add some expectations for yourself, for your benefit. And it's not so much about fixing the perfectionism

or wiping it away or becoming someone else because that's hard. What it's really about is adding this additional component which will allow you to outperform everybody else. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence?

Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget. From luxury to family rides. CarMax has options for almost every price range, including over 25,000 cars under $25,000. Want to get started? Head to carmax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax.