How does Perfectionism affect your mental health?

Perfectionism

Lets talk about perfectionism.

Perfectionism is something that I have greatly struggled with for a long time, and being constantly impacted by imposter syndrome. Thinking that my skills, experiences and knowledge isn’t good enough for others to listen to. I challenge the way that I think I should go about doing something and I challenge my ambitions and what I want to be in life.

I have continuously not handed in work to receive feedback, not wanted to go to basketball training because I wasn’t good enough at it, not wanted to post my writing or put myself out their because of backlash and negative comments people could say because it wasn’t perfect. 

Over the years I had a reality check and realised that perfect is the same as 100% and the amount of times I’ve gotten 100% on a test, or piece of writing, or scored 100 to 0 in a sports match is very, very low. Slowly changing the way I think about perfectionism and still challenging it everyday has been a crucial improvement to my day to day. Reflecting on my thoughts and questioning them is something that I have slowly developed as I have grown up, but is muscle I continue to train each day. 

The truth is, its hard, its really difficult to sit through struggles and people telling you it will be okay and to just give it a go, or people telling you that you are good enough, but it isn’t enough. No one can tell you that you are enough except for yourself and over five months or five years or forever, you can start to believe the narrative you write for yourself. Change doesn’t happen over night and no piece of text like this one or an influencer’s top ten tips won’t help you in the way you can help yourself. 

Understand that there will be dark days and some better ones, and pick your battles on the journey, realising that perfectionism isn’t the worse thing that can happen to you, and only being 99% of your best is better than most people. 

Some other pieces of advice I have come across when challenging my own thoughts on perfectionisms are as follows:

Dealing with perfectionism can be dealt with like any mental block, by recognising it and actively challenging the way we think. Its just like a muscle that needs to be stretched or a dough that needs to be kneaded, over time it will become easier, and even then it won’t be perfect, because nothing is. 

Wabi Sabi, a Japanese philosophy presents perfectionism beautifully and is left for interpretation. My understanding is that in broken, organic and untouched parts of life, physical or mental, there is beauty, and that nothing is perfect and learn to accept the imperfect and the incomplete. I think Wabi Sabi is a beautiful summary of what is will always be and that’s okay.  

Placing yourself into stressful and fear inducing environments can accelerate how you challenge perfectionism, and will push you to receive criticism. Deliberately creating anxiety is probably one of the hardest strategies to enact, but one of the most effective in my experience. Most ambitions and goals in life are like trying to push a big boulder down a mountain, the hardest thing to do is start, and its the same in perfectionism. However, once the rock is far enough over the edge and starts rolling its a lot easier to keep the momentum, although there will be obstacles along the way, self induced or otherwise. Creating imperfect things in our lives is beneficial in challenging perfectionism, and slowly becoming okay with criticism and push back, but finding resilience in the these times and understanding; what’s the worse thing that could actually happen?

Acknowledging that failure is not humiliating its humanising, thank you Thomas Curran. We are taught to learn from our failures and that when we fail we must do better the next time, why can’t we just fail because we failed? Failures or loses are not something horrific, but I also believe that we don’t have to look at them as if they are always beneficial, its more important to be comfortable with failing and giving it another go rather than always trying to be better the next time. If you do learn from failure, great! but even if you don’t that’s also just as good. 

I do also think that striving for some type of perfectionism isn’t always a bad thing, wanting to be your best and do your best is a good thing, but like all things in life its about finding balance in the adventure and having things in moderation.

And I just thought I’d let you know; you are enough.