The Wellness Scoop - The Flaws of Perfectionism

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

We so often see perfectionism as a positive flaw but could it be having a detrimental impact on our mental health? We speak to LSE professor Dr Thomas Curran about the rise in perfectionism, the conflict of who we really are versus an idealistic view of ourselves, our increasing focus on meeting unrealistic expectations, the correlation to anxiety, how social media comes into it and how focusing on our self-esteem and purpose can counteract the concerning trends that we’re seeing.    Thomas’ Ted Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_curran_our_dangerous_obsession_with_perfectionism_is_getting_worse?language=en  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Samsung Galaxy. Ever captured a great night video only for it to be ruined by that one noisy talker? With Audio Erase on the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can reduce or remove unwanted noise and relive your favorite moments without the distractions. And that's not all. New Galaxy AI features like NowBrief will give you personalized insights based on your day schedule so that you're prepared no matter what. Buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra now at samsung.com. Hi everyone and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Ella Mills. So some exciting news before we

get into today's episode. We've had loads of requests actually to get a gift card up on our webshop on deliciouslyella.com so you can gift things to friends and family. So that is up now and we've got some amazing new additions in skincare and lifestyle to the brands we love, supporting amazing small brands and brilliant founders. So that's all gone live now just on www.deliciousiella.com if you want to have a look. And today we have got one of, at least for me, I think the most interesting topics we've covered so far. And I'm sure we can all agree that, you know, this kind of desire to have a sort of perfect life, you know, the perfect career, the perfect relationship, the perfect children, the perfect Instagram ready life in general is sort of feeling like an increasingly big part of the world we live in today. And yet, when we stop and think

about it, there's something fundamentally wrong with it, because no one is flawless. And no matter how we present ourselves, being perfect is also a completely subjective concept and so it is in fact impossible. And really interestingly there are increasing levels of research into this topic which are showing that perfection isn't just actually impossible but that it can also be really really bad for our well-being especially for our mental health. So that's what we're going to be diving into today and today we're joined Dr. Thomas Curran, a psychologist and professor at the LSE in London. And he specializes in this concept of perfectionism, how it develops, how it impacts on our mental health and the kind of different strands of perfectionism and what they're studying and looking at today.

So thank you so, so much for joining us. Welcome, Thomas. It's an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me on. So you did this absolutely brilliant ted talk which is how i discovered your work and it feels like a kind of increasingly important topic to talk about and i guess just to point out the obvious of the fact that perfection doesn't exist but you talk about the fact that there are three strands of perfectionism and i wondered if we could start with what those three are and kind of what sits at the root of them and how they manifest. Sure. So perfectionism actually has a really long, long history of study.

We've kind of arrived at three core components of perfectionism and what we think are the three main components of perfectionism anyway, from many, many years of clinical observation and research study and talking to people about what perfectionism is and how it impacts them and where it comes from and through that process what we discovered is that there are multiple dimensions multiple origins and multiple directions in which perfectionism can impact on people's lives the first is I guess what resonates with us all when we think about perfectionism that's something called self-oriented perfectionism that's kind of the perfection that kind of boils up from within it's set high and excessive self-set goals and harsh self-criticism

when we haven't met those high standards but there's a social element to perfectionism too so it's not just about what comes from within the perfections are directed from within us but it's also the perception that others expect us to be perfect and that there's excessive and lofty expectations in the social environment. And that doesn't just have to be those who are close to us. It could be just the generalized environment and the culture that we live in. We perceive it to be excessive, the standards in the environment excessive. People expect a lot of us and they're very punitive, I guess, and judgmental. And we haven't met those standards and then the third and final one is other oriented perfectionism and that's the

strand of perfectionism that's projected onto others so that I expect you to be perfect I expect you to hold and live up to excessively high standards and when you haven't I'm punitive and critical and so those are the three main dimensions of perfectionism. They all have different, various different origins and consequences, but together they make up what we understand as the perfectionism personality trait. And you said that the socially prescribed perfectionism, that kind of sense that everyone expects you to be perfect, your data showed to be the most damaging. And I wondered if you could explain a bit more about that. Yes socially prescribed perfectionism is a really pernicious form of perfectionism as I suggested it's this idea that there's a generalized sense that others and the environment around us expects us to be perfect and that's irrespective of what's actually going on in the

environment that's just a world view that we carry around with us. I guess it's a way of being in the world, a way of existing in the world that we feel on a daily basis that there is excessive amounts of expectations that are weighing on us and that people's judgment, their validation, their approval are dependent upon us meeting those excessively high standards. And when we haven't, we feel like we've let people down. We feel a lot of humiliation, feel a lot of embarrassment, feel a lot of shame. Shame is a very pervasive characteristic among the socially prescribed perfectionists. And that's one of

the reasons why it's particularly damaging. Because even if we do live up to those excessively high standards that we feel are placed upon us, we don't really feel satisfaction. We feel that the better we do, the better we're expected to do and you can imagine on a day-to-day basis that the internal dialogue moving around the world on a day-to-day basis is really really really draining when we feel like those pressures and expectations are weighing on us and so there is a lot of negative emotionality that is attached to it. The key part I guess of the damage is the fact that it's a never-ending cycle you're sort of on a hamster wheel forever because it's impossible

to constantly meet the kind of highest standards every second of every day. For sure and this is where the dimensions of affection start to bleed into one another so if you feel that your whole self-worth is bound up in the sense that you need to achieve high standards to receive other people's approval and to meet other people's expectations then you're going to set yourself excessive standards because that's the only way you can guarantee yourself you're going to meet those pressures and those expectations so you set those high goals but unfortunately the goals are too high in the first place so you fail more often not to meet them so you feel a lot of shame you feel a lot of embarrassment humiliation and just general sense

of anxiety that that essentially we feel worthless we don't we haven't met those standards we feel like we're not good enough to feel that there's something wrong or defective about us so in order to compensate for that we then set even higher goals and of course because they're too high we fail to meet them again and so that kind of negative cycle of self-defeat starts to set in and that's actually one of the biggest reasons a why perfection is so damaging that sort of negative cycle of self-defeat but but also it's one of the reasons why we think in particular the rising levels of perfectionism we've observed should really be forewarning and cause for concern yeah so i wanted to pick up on that i guess on and in a way it sounds like a silly question but

but why is it damaging what what are you kind of seeing first of all it'd be brilliant to understand a bit more of the stats around the rise in perfectionism and then why that is having such a negative impact so what we've seen and this this was a big big study that we conducted about a year ago now looking at essentially what's happening with levels of perfectionism because i mean we've all kind of seen what's happening in modern culture we feel like there's something in the water and this is something that I was certainly seeing among the young people that I interacted with you could really a palpable sense of pressure and expectation is weighing on their mental health and so it was really interesting to me to find out

what's happening and whether young people are indeed reporting high levels of perfectionistic expectation for themselves a sense that others expect perfection of them and whether they expected the perfection of other people. And so across around the 27 year period, we collected as much data as we could on levels of perfectionism. And we kind of mapped them out across time to see whether these characteristics are changing. And what we're seeing is a sharp rise in all three. But what's probably most worrying is that the one characteristic of perfectionism that's the most damaging, perhaps the one we really didn't want to see increasing was socially prescribed perfectionism. And that's undertaken the largest increase across time.

And just to put that increase in perspective, around about 9% of young people in 1989 reported levels of socially prescribed perfectionism that might arouse clinical concern. That doubled to 18% in 2017. And if we project those numbers forward, almost one in three young people by 2050 will report clinically relevant levels of socially prescribed perfectionism. So you can begin to see the sharp rise that's occurring in those perceptions. And given the negative ramifications, that should worry us those perceptions and given the negative ramifications that that should that should worry us and what are those negative ramifications as i talked about there's a lot of anxiety there's a lot of negative emotionality particularly shame and shame can spill over into more pathological forms of mental health so things like depression and clinical

anxiety shame shame in shame in particular is as i suggest this signature of the socially prescribed perfectionist and shame is kind of a sense that i'm worthless so something that i've done wrong i haven't achieved a certain standard i haven't got as many likes as i wanted i haven't got as many followers i haven't performed in this in this presentation whatever it might be that we've we've perceived we've failed at, isn't just a failure of the task or the activity, but is an actual failure of the self. It's revealed to other people that we're in some way defective or flawed. And that's a major and significant hit to our sense of self-esteem. And if you string those experiences out on a day-to-day basis over months and years,

you can begin to see how socially prescribed perfection breeds a profound sense of helplessness and hopelessness and that's one of the reasons why it's so damaging to to our mental health and obviously I mean we've seen over the last few years or the last decade or so there's been a rise in concerns around mental health, especially in younger generations. Obviously, there's a lot of conversation as well around that. And in that being such a rise in our time online, but especially with idea that other people expect us to have this kind of perfect sense of everything? You know, do you feel like there is a correlation with the rise in mental health, as you said, with that link to depression and anxiety and hopelessness? And how do you feel that social media plays into that? I think social media is a big part of the puzzle as to why we're seeing these increasing perceptions

of others and the social environment more generally being excessively expectant and others expect me to be perfect. And there's many reasons for that. But one of the reasons that we can point to was actually proposed over half a century ago now by a master clinician called Karen Horney. And she taught really persuasively about how really perfectionism sort of boils up from an inner conflict. She called it a neurotic conflict, but an inner conflict between an actual and idealized self. And this conflict comes from broader culture,

and a culture that teaches us that there's an ideal life, lifestyle, but whilst at the same time makes us feel miserable for not quite being able to attain it. And it's that conflict that springs perfectionistic tendencies, a need and a desire to be perfect and project perfection onto other people. And I really think there's a lot to be said for that viewpoint in what's occurring today, because in the 1950s, consumerism was just taking off and these cultural frames were beginning to take hold. But really, I mean, we're in a completely new culture, a new era, and social media has put those neurotic conflicts on a completely different level. And they've elevated social comparison and this idea that essentially we have an idea or an ideal of

perfection that's predicted to us 24-7 through our socials as something that's normal, that's something that's obtainable and desirable. And it's only really amplifying, in my mind anyway, that conflict between the ideal and actual self, that really we have these images of perfection that we aspire to, but that we can't quite live up to and as a consequence we feel a lot of conflict and negative emotions and to cope with those and to try to tune them down we adopt perfectionistic tendencies because it goes back to that cycle of self-defeat if we're perfect or we project perfection then people will value us people will approve of us we'll get us we'll get likes we'll get followers whatever it might be within social media and therefore we'll feel

better about ourselves but that's the problem if we're using social media to to feel better about ourselves to service a a fracture in our self-esteem then it's really the wrong way or the wrong reason to use social media and I think this is perhaps one of the reasons why we're seeing more perfectionistic tendencies. How on earth do you change that? I mean, I guess that's, and it's a big question, but it's so tricky because it's become such a big part of the world today. And there was one other point I wanted to bring in, which I think was really interesting because I think we're very quick to look at things like social media and I don't disagree. I think the way you use it is so incredibly important but there was another point you brought in that you felt was playing a part in this which I thought was very interesting which was like the number of tests that children now go

through while they're at school and this need that we now have to like kind of constantly quantify merit and that was sort of publicly playing out this from such a young age. And you said that in big city high schools in the US, kids take 112 mandatory standardized tests between pre-kindergarten and the end of the 12th grade, which is just extraordinary. So we're kind of conditioning ourselves from such a young age to constantly compare ourselves to our peers, to be looking at things in pretty narrow, reductive terms in terms in terms of you know who got an A in maths and who got a C and I was very curious how that also plays into it because I guess that starts to affect children at a younger age before you're possibly getting into that kind of age of social media. Yeah it's definitely a contributive factor particularly in the early years standardized testing is a way of measuring

or ranking i suppose sifting sorting ranking young people into sets within schools which can then be used to adjudicate the college they are able to access or get into which then determines i suppose their future market price so everything in today's culture is measured. Everything is quantified. Sociologists have a bit of a wonky term called the quantified self to describe this phenomenon. But it's something that certainly exploded over recent years and social media has fed into it.

But certainly at school, young people are tested, assessed, and measured more than they ever have been before. And like you've suggested that that teaches young people they're only really worth something when they've achieved when they've succeeded and when they've scored a high grade and and then and then they come to define themselves in the sort of really restrictive terms of of those grades and how they've performed and what we're really teaching young people is what's what kyle rogers talked about in terms of his idea of contingencies of self-esteem what we're really

teaching young people is that their self-esteem is contingent you know their worth their value is contingent on these outcomes and how they perform and where they sit relative to others and the only really antidote to that is is is going back to karen horny she talked about finding a true and authentic self trying to rid ourselves of those contingencies that create anxieties conflicts and stresses and accepting ourselves for who we are imperfections and all is one of the greatest and most powerful ways to overcome some of those inner conflicts but the problem of course is that you're pushing against the tide because we live in a culture that pushes in completely the opposite direction. Yeah so I mean how how do you change that even you know obviously on a

global scale that's that's huge overhauls to the kind of entire way in which the world works. But on a personal level, for people who are struggling with, you know, that sense of expectation on themselves, perhaps on what other people expect of them, and feeling kind of pretty, as you said, hopeless and defeated by that. Have you kind of found any interesting techniques and ways of which you can kind of overcome it on a personal level in order to exist in the world in the way that it's currently set up absolutely and there's I mean whenever I talk about perfectionism I talk about the the the bleakness of the personality trait and and it is quite bleak some of the things that perfectionism contributes to a negative however

I think there's room for optimism I think the very fact of just understanding that we would we feel the way we do because of the way culture is takes a lot of weight off our stresses and our anxieties because it teaches us that they're not only a function or they're not really a function of us or anything that we've done wrong but actually that there's a broader context to those feelings and that we operate in a society that actively creates them and is and is structured to actively create them you look at the you know the beauty industry or any sort of industry really they're kind of selling selling us products that can improve our lives but the de facto assumption is that we need to improve our lives, that somehow we're incomplete in the first place. So understanding, first of all, that we live in a culture that teaches us to feel miserable, it can be really helpful in taking the weight off

the personal responsibility for the stresses and strains that we feel. I would also say, secondly, that there are things we can do to manage perfectionistic tendencies. The first, I think, is really to focus or hone in, not necessarily on the outcomes of our performances, but the process, the learning, the growth, how much development we make when we engage in new tasks. I think that's really, really crucial because if we focus on the concept of growth, development, the outcomes will naturally come because the learning process suggests that if we continue to develop, then performance will follow. But it does so without the self-worth contingency on the outcome itself, without the kind of existential threat that we feel if we don't achieve an A or whatever it might be. So I think that's really, really

important. And I would suggest the second thing is that I think is a really powerful antidote in this culture is self-compassion. I mean, it's really, really crucial for us to just go easy on ourselves sometimes when we slipped up, you know, and I'm just as guilty as anyone, you know, I make a mistake or I don't perform as well as I wanted to in a particular lecture or whatever it might be, you know, I'm immediately outside the theatre going, how could you be so stupid? What happened there? Why didn't you say that properly or whatever, whatever, you know, you can ruminate and brood over the minutiae of what occurred. I think it's really important that we recognise when those intrusive thoughts are starting to creep in. And instead of reacting with that kind of self-castigation actually rationalize

empathize you know how would you speak to a friend if they'd had the same experience you know you'd rationalize with them you'd you'd suggest to them that you know it was only one presentation or one exam it's not the end of the world you know if you get your head down keep learning keep developing you're going to be fine you don't apply those same rules to ourselves and I really think that self-compassion is is another way in which we can just start to silence that inner critic going easy on ourselves when things haven't gone well I think is crucial so so those are the things that I think we can do in our own lives contextualizing as you said is also really nice as well. And,

and almost just to feel that it's normal, you know, that whether we like it or not, it's actually become, as you said, increasingly common to feel these levels of expectation. And so again, we shouldn't be hard on ourselves for being hard on ourselves. But one of the other things you brought up, which I thought was really interesting, because it's something I have definitely found personally, is the idea of of purpose and that having something that feels greater and that you're more kind of passionate about than how we're performing or how we're appearing to others can be quite helpful as well of escaping the cycle yeah I think purpose and autonomy and finding a sense of our place in the world and and competence really

a sense of self-esteem is what we're talking about is so so important to growth and well-being and finding something that you're passionate about really really important but don't let that passion overcome or you know encompass your the whole of your identity. Don't make it all about who you are because that leads to a very rigid, inflexible, and as I talked about earlier, a highly contingent form of engagement that ultimately leads to more unhappiness than happiness. Keep it harmonious, keep our activities and purpose in balance with other important areas of our lives, such as like our friendships our health our well-being sleep physical activity etc having a purpose and having a passion is really really important but

keeping it in balance is also i would suggest equally important one of the reasons why you would assume perfectionism would create higher performance outcomes but actually when we study perfectionism we find it doesn't one of the reasons for that is because they compromise areas of their life which would otherwise lead to greater performance things like rest sleep diet etc so purpose meaning really really important finding something you're passionate about hugely important to your well-being and keeping that passion in check keeping that passion in balance with other important areas of your life is really really important and have you also found that that actually embracing failure is incredibly important because I think it is something that I at least am noticing people talking about more and people kind of being more open about challenges and things that haven't gone

well but I guess learning that failure isn't a weakness yeah we I think we're doing a really good job I think the young the younger generations are actually I shouldn't say we I'm not young anymore unfortunately but the younger generations that I'm seeing coming through my classroom are really encouraging signs in terms of their willingness to open up and show the authentic self and not be afraid to seek out help and be vulnerable. I think Brene Brown talks about this really persuasively about the power of vulnerability and the courage and strength of vulnerability. Actually, it takes real strength to accept we were wrong, to accept we made a mistake or screwed up. And it takes real strength to push ourselves out there to make those mistakes in the first place.

You know, it's actually the weakness is not trying, I guess. Weakness is not accepting or being able to realize perhaps that we've screwed up or that we were wrong. You see that a lot amongst politicians, actually, they do things wrong and they can't accept that they're wrong. That's not strength, that's weakness. What strength is acknowledging our flaws, acknowledging where we can improve and just opening ourselves up and being vulnerable. Vulnerability is strength. And I think, again, I see really encouraging signs actually among the younger generations that they're embracing that they're seeing that and you know the body positivity movement and just feeling safe and able to show our imperfections and embrace them

and celebrate them and that's how you fight that's how you fight this culture you take it on by celebrating ourselves for who we are imperfections and all and is that something you think needs to kind of continue to play out I guess on things like social media and platforms like that to continue to normalize it so that it does start to take that pressure off absolutely I think we've got a long way to go I'm not an average user of social media but every time I flick through Instagram you tend to find that there are still a lot of images of sort of idealized lives and lifestyles that aren't realistic. And in many cases, actually, are manufactured, calibrated to maximize likes and followers and all the rest of it. And so I think there is a long way to go, but I think we are also at the same time,

we're moving in the right direction slowly. And there's a lot of room for optimism, I think, in terms of people being able to use social media. Because I guess I sound quite down on social media. I'm really not. I think social media is a fantastic tool. It's a wonderful way to bring

people together particularly people who have interests that are quite niche or communities where they might not be able to find those individuals in the local area it's a wonderful wonderful tool for social engagement and bringing people together but but there are underlying vulnerabilities that would make people perhaps vulnerable to social media one of them is perfectionism and so the more that the people who have a perfectionistic tendency are able to see you know images of of reality images of people slipping up or or perhaps just feeling comfortable enough to show their true selves, their authentic selves, the more you can begin to break down the harmfulness of that particular platform for those who have underlying vulnerabilities. I think we're moving in the direction. I think

there's a long way to go, but I think we should be optimistic. I like that. One of the questions I had as well, and it's relevant for me, but I think for a lot of our listeners as well who have small children or are thinking of being parents I mean I think at least I find the idea of raising a child in the kind of world today quite intimidating at times almost one of the things sometimes it's best not to think about it because it does feel like there is this kind of unbelievable pressure that as we talked about with grades and things does start from actually a really really really early age and then obviously thinking about how they start to interact with the world and with the internet and things like that as a parent I guess it feels

like you've probably got quite a big role on a on a kind of individual basis to play in trying to encourage children to to think differently and to not compare themselves to their peers or to other people that they don't know. And I wondered if you'd come across anything interesting there or if there's anything that you'd learn about the role of family and of, you know, I guess caregivers like teachers and things as well in in terms of kind of supporting children growing up in in what is undoubtedly now a kind of increasingly pressurized environment. Yeah sure I'm not a parent so it's very difficult for me to give I guess an informed opinion here but I guess it would go back to what I was suggesting earlier about just understanding

that those pressures are natural, that everyone feels them, and that they're not necessarily a reflection of anything that you've done wrong, but they're a reflection of how society has made us feel. And that's the same for our parenting as it is for our friendship groups or our relationships in work, etc, etc. But I think the thing that I would like to point out with parenting that's really interesting is also, and it's linked to that, that it's difficult now. It is really difficult because like you suggested, there's social media that has these kind of expectations

for how we should parent. But there's also societal expectations and economic pressures that are unprecedented and that are new and that other parents from other generations haven't really felt. And if you look at the US in particular, but it's happening here in the UK, we're now finding that families, according to the OECD anyway, are net downwardly mobile. That's to say that it isn't clear that children will have a better material life than their parents moving into the future. Of course, that's terrifying for parents to see that actually without pushing and high expectations and, you know, emphasis on work ethic and doing well in school and all the rest of it, that actually their kids might fall behind. And actually there is a very good chance that they

will do when they take a look around them and see what's happening. So there's not just social media pressures, there's also economic pressures in the wider social environment that are really pushing on parents to engage in behaviours that perhaps they don't necessarily want to but they feel like they have to. And so I would just agree it's a really difficult time to bring up kids there's no right or wrong answer to this and really I would suggest that taking the pressure off and not falling into the trap of trying to live up to expectations of what you feel is a sort of idealized parent is really

important and parenting in the way that you're most comfortable with that you know aligns with your values i think is is crucial but just to say it's really it's really not easy at the moment it's it's definitely something i find absolutely fascinating i mean we're so new into into our experience there are a lot of ones, about one now. So very, very early into it. And obviously haven't even got to the idea of school yet. But it's something I'm really aware of. And I feel like there's already so many different responsibilities and, you know, mum guilt and all the rest of it to deal with them. So throwing that into the mix as well is quite interesting. I just wondered whether, for example, you see

any differences in the genders when it comes to these traits? What's really interesting is we don't. The levels of perfectionism, and this is a massive study that we did around 40, 41, 42,000 young people in our sample, and there is no real difference across any of the any of the strands of perfectionism on on gender which suggests interestingly that that males and females report comparable levels and so this is something that we would say is quite invariant across across gender and i don't know whether we were surprised by that but it was certainly something that we we might have expected to see some differences but didn't yeah I think that is interesting I don't know what I expected you to say but it's possibly one of those things that the girls and women are maybe sometimes more

vocal about and so I wondered if it affected them more but it's interesting to hear that that they don't and the other thing I wondered is is it nurture is it nature when it comes to these sorts of traits like are you born with a predisposition to these kind of perfectionist traits or is it something that you tend to acquire possibly from the environment around you so the answer is it's a bit of both what we know about perfectionism is around well just under half of the variability that's to say the individual differences in levels of perfectionism is around well just under half of the variability that's to say the individual differences in levels of perfectionism between people is inherited that's to say it's genetic um which which leaves more than half of the individual differences differences between

people to be explained by social factors so it's likely that this is a little bit of the two and brenny brown has a really nice nice quote which I think sums up where I am on this too. Perfectionism and genetics load the gun, but culture and society pulls a trigger. And so if you have an underlying disposition towards perfectionistic tendencies, and you're raised in a culture that amplifies and emphasizes those tendencies, then really, it's going to be very problematic for you to escape those pressures because of that genetic predisposition and so I would suggest it's a bit above but we are all vulnerable at some level or another and we all sit somewhere along the spectrum of perfectionism even if most of us aren't at the clinical end at the moment anyway

our data suggests that a lot of us are trending higher it's just fascinating to see kind of how pervasive this isn't it's as well you talked about it as well as that we often like see it as our greatest flaw you know there's that interview question where it's like what's your biggest weakness oh i'm a perfectionist and it's kind of like a good flaw to have and actually you know actually when you get under the skin of it it's not a good flaw to have at all and I guess I wanted just to wrap up and just to kind of clarify it a bit which is that because I think it is really it's a really important thing because I think sometimes and I know I say it myself when I kind of feel those tendencies to like

push yourself beyond what sort of reasonable of yourself is, is you feel like you'll be more successful. And that isn't true. You don't see a strong correlation. In fact, it's the opposite between the perfectionist tendencies and success. Yeah. I think what's really interesting is we know from studies that perfectionists put in so much effort so much effort because it's really important for them to succeed for their sense of self-esteem when your self-esteem's on the line you will put everything in to try to achieve it and when you think about the amount of effort that perfectionists expend, it's really baffling that when you look at the data, there's no relationship between perfectionism and performance. Or if there is a relationship, it's really small. Now we think there are two

reasons for this. The first reason is that, goes back to what I was saying earlier. Perfections work so hard that they sort of go above and beyond. So they go to the threshold of peak effort expenditure and then further. So essentially what they're into here is a zone of depreciating and then inverse returns to any additional effort because they're compromising areas of their life that are really important. Sleep, physical activity, interactions with important others that are close to them. That's the first thing we think is going on. The second is something that seems paradoxical, but when you actually break it down, actually makes a lot of sense.

If you put perfectionists in challenging situations, let's say you tell them, here's a goal, and we think you should be able to meet this goal based on your abilities and then you get them to engage in a task to reach that goal and then you tell them at the end that they failed you basically no matter how well they did you said you failed you didn't meet the goal now what's really interesting is on the first attempt that perfectionists run they will put everything forward to try and meet that goal. They will give their all and then they don't reach it. If you tell them to do it again, what we see is that their effort completely drops off a cliff. They don't try on the second attempt.

Now, why is that? Well, the reason is, of course, is they put everything forward in the first attempt. They failed and that is so embarrassing. The shame that they feel from that failure, putting everything forward and still failing, means that they'll do everything they can to avoid feeling those feelings the next time they attempt. And so what they do is to try and save face, they withdraw effort, because you can't fail at something that you didn't try. And so the paradox of perfectionism is, particularly in challenging situations, we tend to see perfectionists withhold their effort as a kind of defense mechanism to any shame and guilt and embarrassment that they might feel if they

happen to fail at it. And so what you can see among perfectionists, of course, is that breeds, particularly in a 21st century economy, where there's a creativity risk, pushing ourselves into uncomfortable situations is really important for innovation. Well, if you put a perfectionist in that particular scenario, they're going to really struggle because there's so many unknowns. There's so many opportunities to fail and slip up. And so they tend to withhold effort to try to save face so that's one of the reasons why profession is such a paradox on the one hand it's got all this effort that's expended towards goals but then on the other we tend to find that they withhold that effort in challenging situations and particularly things don't go well

yeah i think that the point about trying is very i think is fascinating that the fear of trying in case you mess up um yeah it feels incredibly relevant actually and um such an important thing to to point out and as i said it's just such an interesting topic because i think it you know touches us all at different points in our lives as you said even if it's not on the clinical scale, it's still incredibly relevant, really, for everyone. And I think there's a lot to think about here in terms of ensuring that your self-esteem, you know, is defined not from your achievements and so on and so forth. And the idea of embracing vulnerability in the failure, you know, because failure is so natural. No, you know, no one's good at everything. It's impossible to be good at everything.

But I think so often we seem to somehow completely forget that we think that everyone is better at everything than we are. So really, really appreciate you sharing your time today. As I said, Thomas's TED talk on this is so interesting. So I'll pop the link in the show notes below. If anyone wants to listen about failure, the How to Fail podcast is really brilliant as well. Getting people who you possibly admire or who've done interesting things and have had interesting careers and they're talking about all the things they've messed up, which we've all done so many times. So it's a really good lesson if you're trying to embrace the reality of failure.

And otherwise, Thomas, thank you so much for your time today. It's absolutely brilliant and really, really appreciate you shedding some light on this for us. No worries. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. And we'll be back again next Tuesday. Have a lovely week, everyone. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com.