November 11, 2015 • 47 mins
Perfectionism is assumed to be a female trait, but what does that mean, exactly? Cristen and Caroline explore how perfectionism isn't what you think it is and whether women actually are perfectionists in their appearance, career and relationships.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from House Top
Works Nott. Come hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And last time on Stuff I've
Never Told You, we talked all about anxiety. What a
delightful romp it was through all of mine and Caroline's
(00:24):
mental neurosis. Yeah, so welcome to part two of that perfectionism. Yeah. Um,
this was so fascinating to learn about Caroline, because, friends,
perfectionism is not what you think it is. Yeah, similar
to how we busted Smiths in our c D episode
(00:46):
where we were saying O c D is not just
keeping a clean closet. Perfectionism is not just the desire
to excel, to do really well, to have that clean
closet it is. It goes a little bit deeper than that. Yeah,
and it's very much linked to issues like O c D, anxiety, depression,
and other things that we're going to talk about. And
(01:09):
there's also this underlying assumption that women are perfectionists. Women
are likelier to try to be perfect in all things,
and we were trying to find whether that is actually
the case or whether that stereotype is just completely misunderstanding
what Perfectionism really is, because it's another one of those
(01:31):
terms that's used very casually to refer to things that
it is actually not. Well, yeah, and it's used whereas
anxiety is something like I have anxiety and I would
like to overcome it, whether that's generalized anxiety disorder or
like panic disorder, or whether it's just your feeling anxious
before a test. Perfectionism, on the other hand, is almost
(01:54):
sometimes used as like a humble brad, like, so, I've
just got to bank all the cupcakes for the p
t A meeting because I'm just a perfectionist. All right, Janice,
we know you have a lot of time, and you
you just you want to do this in your cupcakes
are so perfect. Or when Janice isn't a job interview
and you get that horrible job interview question of you know,
(02:16):
what's your biggest fault in life, Janice responds, well, I'm
a perfectionist. Well, we hope not now that we know
more about what perfectionism actually is and that it has
links to all sorts of terrible things and it's a
really really unhealthy pattern, because I mean, if you think
about it in pop culture, you have sort of both
(02:36):
ends of the spectrum where you have Natalie Portman as
Nina in Black Swan, where it's whoa that is super scary,
and then on the comedic end of the spectrum, you
have someone like Monica Geller in Friends. Although I don't
know why I needed to give her last name, everyone
knows her just as Monica on Friends, where you're a perfectionist,
(02:56):
Yes i am. I'm terrified I'm going to fail. I
don't mention Geller and everyone will hate me. Um. But
you know she has all these quirks where she has
to clean all the time and she's very intentional in
her cooking ha ha ha. And its attitudes about characters
like Monica Geller that lead people to feel like perfectionism
(03:20):
is totally socially acceptable. It's not a mental health condition
that you might need help with or that could signal
a deeper mental health condition like actual pathological anxiety or depression. Um,
it's just you being like super driven, right, You're just
a Tracy Flick. That's it exactly. So, first of play
out what we're actually talking about when we're talking about perfectionism, because,
(03:46):
like we've said, what it is not is just setting
high standards for yourself, just wanting to excel, being organized,
having some ambition in life. Yeah, so what it really
is is this drive to be perfect. I can't enough
italics and bold and underline on the word perfect, or
at least the drive to seem perfect to other people,
(04:08):
because inside you feel like an impost, like a failure,
like this ugly person inside and out that I need
to do anything I can to portray myself as this
shiny perfect person. And as the amazing Brine Brown, who
often writes for a magazine puts it, perfectionism is a
self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought.
(04:31):
If I look perfect, live perfectly, and do everything perfectly,
I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment,
and blame. And another way that it was put that
jumped out to me Caroline, was that perfectionism, while it
is so gold driven, it doesn't focus on success. It
(04:54):
only focuses on failure because you're ultimately driven by failure,
Because why do you need to be perfect because you're
terrified that you will fail? Right, which is so much
of the conversation when you get into imposter syndrome, which
we've done an episode on um in terms of being
driven by I'm such a fake, I'm so dumb and unaccomplished,
(05:17):
and I need to work so hard to show that
I can pull this off basically. And some researchers distinguished though,
between what they term normal or adaptive perfectionism and neurotic
or maladaptive perfectionism, and they say that the adaptive type
propels you forward. Maybe this is, you know, more of
(05:39):
a synonym to being very goal oriented, whereas maladaptive creates
that stress over failure. It's the stuff that Renee Brown
is talking about. Yeah, but today we're focusing in on
the type that is disruptive to functioning. Although, as we'll
get into a little bit later, a lot of people
would argue that there is no adaptive versus maladaptive, that
(06:02):
perfectionism is purely maladaptive, that there's nothing adaptive about wanting
to be perfect, because there's no such thing as perfect.
And when you think about what perfect really means in
this context, it has so many different layers. You have
concerns about making mistakes, You have your own personal standards,
(06:23):
you have doubts about your actions or abilities, organization, parental expectations, criticism,
things that people say rudely on social media. Well, I
mean those are the literal dimensions of this condition known
as perfectionism. Once you get beyond just like the colloquial
like oh, I spent all night on those cupcakes. I'm
(06:44):
such a perfectionist. Once you get past that to the
actual debilitating stuff and you're reading studies about it, things
like concerns over making mistakes are cited in terms of
linking perfectionism to O C D anxiety and depression and
even suicidal tendencies. And so yeah, like I'm concerned about
(07:04):
making mistakes. I don't want to like do something stupid
when I'm driving, or like put the wrong word in
the podcast notes FLPs, I just drove my car into
a wall. Has happens. Um, this concern, this perfectionist concern
over mistakes is something that is debilitating. That it is,
like Kristen said that being driven by failure idea, and
(07:29):
it also manifests in different types, not that they're mutually exclusive.
And this also was really illuminating for me to read about. Um,
you have socially prescribed perfectionism, which is the belief that
others will value you only if you're perfect, and psychologist
Gordon Flett says that these people feel, quote, the better
(07:51):
I do, the better I'm expected to do. So rather
than like you bring the great cupcakes and everybody congratulates
to you, it's like, oh God, well, now I've got
to make like a six tiered p t a cake
for the next meeting. And this is a little bit
of a side note, but this also reminds me of
what we were talking about a little bit. In our
anxiety episode of how UM. One researcher named Gene Twinge
(08:16):
sites our shift from intrinsic values to extrinsic values as
a reason why anxiety might be more on the rise,
and that whole socially prescribed perfectionism seems very much linked
to extrinsic values of how do I look to other
people right? How do I present myself absolutely well. Another
(08:37):
type is the self oriented perfectionism, and this is the
internally motivated desire to be perfect. And there is a
debate as Flett talks about the psychologist Gordon Flett talks
about over whether this is a risk factor for other
psychological disorders or a disorder in and of itself, and
that seems to be the big conversation around perfectionism and
(09:00):
general Is it a disorder? Yes, it's debilitating, but is
it debilitating and doesn't exist because you have something like
generalized anxiety disorder or depression. And there's also other oriented perfectionism,
which a very close friend of mine struggles with a lot.
It's the tendency to demand perfection from friends, family, coworkers,
and others. These are the people and I say this
(09:22):
because I repeat this mondra to myself all the time.
These are the people who need to be saying, not
my monkey, not my circus, Like, don't be so concerned
about what other people are doing or saying, or wearing
or whatever. Be more concerned with yourself. And as you
can imagine, this can be super damaging to relationships. And
when I said that I have a close friend with this,
I literally wasn't talking about myself. I do have a
(09:45):
friend who struggles mightily with this, is in therapy and
talks about it a lot, and it really has affected
her relationships other people. Because yeah, if you are super
driven and you expect a lot from yourself, it can
be so damaging. You need to learn to practice self
compassion and self forgiveness. But when it's directed outward at
(10:05):
other people, well that just means that nobody's going to
want to invite you to their party. And then what
will you do on a Friday night? And then what
are you gonna do with all those cupcakes? Janis this
lighting up? Janis is gonna stay in and eat them
while watching The Gilmore Girls on Netflix. But let's let's
stop talking about Janis. I'm starting to feel bad. Let's
(10:26):
let's talk about me instead. Okay, we should probably start
talking about some of the hallmarks of perfectionism, because we've
told you what it's not and what it is, but
we need to illustrate it with deeply, deeply personal stories
because perfectionism the hallmarks are really that fear of failure,
(10:46):
that fear of vulnerability, because no true perfectionist wants to
be openly vulnerable or fail openly because that would totally
shatter their fragile send of perfection that they're trying to
convey to the rest of the world. Yeah, I mean
I've I've personally struggled with those two things big time
(11:07):
in my life. The whole If you're a failure, Um,
you've mentioned that this is reminiscent for you of really
being a grade A plus driven when you were in school,
and it reminds me of when I was homeschooled as
a kid. I hated it if my mom graded my
paper because she was my teacher and my principle. Um.
(11:31):
I hated if she hated it if she graded my
tests or papers with a red pen, because it was
like pointing out my failures even bigger and bolder, and
I would freak out about it. It makes it so
easy to see on the page though. Yeah I read
red pen as you are dumb. Well, that's become sort
(11:52):
of an issue in schools nowadays, right, Like I've heard
about teachers who have to stop using red pens because
it hurts kids feelings. Yeah. See, Thankfully my mom was
smart about it, and she was like, Kristen, we need
to have a talk because I don't this doesn't seem
like a healthy pattern. You need to accept a red
pin because if you can't accept a red pen, then
(12:12):
life's going to be a little bit tough. Although I
think that she started using like purple and orange, she
would switch up the color. I think sometimes just like
I don't know, so it didn't look like the page
was bleeding, the page is having a period menstruating pages. Um. Yeah,
I also am super guilty of like skipping out on
(12:33):
what could potentially be a fun, enriching or rewarding experience
because I'm worried about failing or looking stupid, or being
vulnerable or being mediocre. Um. And Similarly, I am super
guilty of one of the giant hallmarks of perfectionism, which
is procrastination. And again that's not a humble brag. It
(12:55):
really drives me insane about myself that I'm a huge
procrastinator because if this is especially true if it's like
a creative endeavor, whether it's in work or outside of work,
Because the thing is when you're just like, uh, you know,
if I'm just editing an article for the House to
Works website, like it's hard for me to fail at that.
I'm an editor. I'm good with words like how I
(13:16):
do is very quantifiable. It's easy to quantify um when
it is something that's more creative that requires me to
use um a different skill set than something that's just
very cut and dry. All of a sudden, well, I
could be vulnerable. Someone could judge me for this and
tell me that I'm stupid, and so that leads to
this tendency to like either put it off or just
(13:38):
assume I'm going to do terribly, so I just won't
try it. There's also the whole thing about being plagued
by what ifs and should that is so paralyzing, and
that leads to this regimented nous of the should, like
this should happen in my therapist is always going why
should it? Why do you have should there? Well, I
don't know, therapist, I'm just a perfectionist. And then you
(13:59):
realize your therapist is Janice. No. But quickly going back
to the procrastination thing, that was something I did not
expect to read about at all, because we would assume
that perfectionists have no problem with procrastination because they're getting
their work done there, going over and above all the time.
But it makes so much sense that they are very
(14:21):
much linked. And I totally experienced that if there's like
some big creative project that I want to do, my
perfectionism will cause me to procrastinate because it's like, well,
what but what if I can't make this wonderful idea
come to fruition? Well, yeah, I mean you're so worried
about getting judged and failing, and that can breed a
(14:42):
lot of judgmental stuff about other people and other things.
I mean, dude, roommate, Hi, you don't listen to this
episode or this podcast. I means it's okay if I
talk about you. You know, dude roommate was super judgmental.
And I really think it's stemmed from a place in
him of being so hard on himself, so critical of
(15:03):
himself that when you're just trying to take that pressure off,
you can tend to focus it outward. So where does
it come from? Then? Can I Can we just blame
our parents yea, for raising to be perfectionistic. I actually
don't blame my parents for that. My parents were always
like really encouraging and empowering of like if you can read,
(15:24):
you can do anything. Um. And I don't feel like
it came from them. I felt like it was very
much like internally driven in me. But parents can absolutely
pass it on to their kids, and not surprisingly, this
is something that researchers have looked into. Well. Yeah, and
in terms of the passing it down to your kids,
I mean, this can be like you are Janice and
(15:45):
you're super like cupcake perfection driven, and your kids pick
up on that and it's like, oh, well I need
to I need to perform too. But it can be
like the research that we were reading, it can be
as small and as simple as a cocked eyebrow when
you bring home a B instead of an A. And
that's not to say that your parents are terrible people.
(16:06):
If that happened to you, that could seriously be just like,
I just want to encourage you to do better and
live your best life as Oprah if Oprah is your
mom would have you do um. But to a child
who's already absorbing everything around herself like that can be
really damaging, like, oh my god, I earned the eyebrow?
What did I do right? Because kids, when we're kids,
(16:29):
we take these small things and we don't have that
many tools in our brains and our experiences to put
context in nuance to that cocked eyebrow. So we then associate, oh,
the B with a cocked eyebrow. That correlation becomes a
causation and a pattern ensues. Yeah, And so it's no
(16:50):
surprise then that perfectionistic tendencies often start in childhood, whether
it is because of the expectations of your parents or
your teachers. Parental criticism and even the perception by kids
that their parents and teachers have high expectations for them
to be perfect is enough to send someone on a
perfectionist expiral. And I was talking to Christian about this
(17:11):
when we were researching, because I was like, well, you know,
I have a tendency to blame my parents for this.
But my parents were very um in psychology terms, um indulgent, permissive.
They expected a lot of me, They expected me to
do very well. But they were also like super encouraging,
do your best, be who you are, reach for the stars,
(17:32):
all that good stuff. But I went to a very
very strict, very challenging private school growing up all through school,
and you do have those super high expectations from teachers
to the point where like getting the lower grade, the
slightly lower grade even is enough to be like, I've
let everyone down. I am so dumb. And so parenting styles,
(17:55):
I mean, we're talking about teachers, but parenting styles are
obviously so important. And this is coming from a paper
by David Hibbert and Gail Walton from they found that
when you combine demands and lack of warmth with expectations
that helps create and foster perfectionisms, and that idea of
(18:16):
things interacting to create perfectionism or perfectionism interacting with something
else to create things like anxiety and depression. That's also
a huge key to this topic because it's often not
occurring on its own well. So Hibbert and Walton were
saying that the parents who might have like my parents,
high demands on their kids to do well in school,
(18:37):
but who also have high warmth foster that adaptive version
of perfectionism that possibly they create self motivation in their kids,
which is great, But it's those parents who have high
demands on their kids but no warmth who might be
the problem causers because they say, this whole high demand,
(19:00):
lack of warmth thing signals to your kid that they
might not be loved if they screw up, and this,
they argue, is what tends to foster that maladaptive perfectionism,
the kind that can disrupt your life well, and it
can also backfire because these kids might not even try
to take on challenges, they might just be more anxious
(19:20):
or overwhelmed by them instead. And that link was found
to be more pronounced in boys, which is notable um.
And then finally you have neglectful parents that also foster
that maladaptive perfectionism because it's the whole thing of, well,
maybe if I can just really overachieve, I'll win some
attention or love or control my environment in some kind
(19:41):
of way. But when we're talking about adaptive versus maladaptive,
as you mentioned earlier, Caroline, some argue that there is
no adaptive about this, that this kind of cycle is
not motivating us to actually do better. And this is
something that Dr Flett is adamant about, and he was
(20:01):
quoted in an article in the American Psychological Association's Monitor
magazine and he said, I don't think needing to be
perfect isn't any way adaptive. People make that claim and
they'll just ignore the fairly large literature that says it's
a vulnerability factor for unipolar depression, anorexia, and suicide. And
I was like, whoa, Dr Flat, what's going on here?
(20:24):
And that's the thing. Perfectionism is very closely intertwined with
other mental health issues because researchers have found links to anxiety, depression,
suicidal tendency o c D, and eating disorders. Oh suddenly, perfectionism.
Ain't so perfect. It ain't so perfect. And we'll talk
(20:45):
more about janison or cupcakes when we come right back
from a quick break. So Kristen has mentioned a lot
of links between perfectionism and several mental health conditions. For instance,
(21:09):
socially prescribed perfectionism that's the time where you're so worried
about what other people think of you, you want to
look perfect to other people. UM has been associated with
depression and other problems, including, like Kristen said, suicide and
Dr Flett said, I think the reason for that is
that socially prescribed perfectionism has an element of pressure combined
(21:29):
with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, because if you're
a perfectionist by definition, you never feel perfect. You never
feel like you get there, like you accomplish what you
set out to accomplish, like you always need to be
working at it, making it better, whatever it is, whether
it's yourself, your appearance, or your job or your relationships.
(21:50):
And also those attitudes that are wrapped up in perfectionism,
of guilt, shame, and the whole never enough thing can
lead to depression. Research has also shown the perfectionism is
a big mediator between the comorbid conditions of bipolar spectrum
disorders and anxiety and depressive symptoms. So basically, these folks
(22:11):
already tend to view the world from a more negative
perspective and christin you know how we mentioned those dimensions
of perfectionism earlier in the podcast, the things like concern
over mistakes and abilities, things like that. What's interesting about
perfectionism is that all of those concerns and worries and
frets that define what perfectionism is aren't consistent across people,
(22:36):
which makes sense, everybody's different, but they're also not consistent
across people who have the comorbid things like anxiety or
depression or o c D. So this study, for instance
and Behavior Research and Therapy from June two thousand eight
found that the dimension of concern over mistakes was elevated
in each of their patient groups that they studied. They
(22:57):
looked at depression, anxiety disorders, and eating disorder ers. While
pure personal standards, so like I've got to be perfect,
everything has to be perfect, was elevated only in the
eating disorder sample. The dimension of doubts about actions, so
like can I actually accomplish this? Maybe these people are
procrastinators like I, I don't know if I can actually
do this as perfectly as I need to. That was
(23:20):
found to be elevated in both patients with O c
D and eating disorders, but not in the depressed patients.
And so it's interesting, you know, I mentioned that the
whole concern over mistakes dimension was elevated in all three
patient groups. Their analysis indicated that concern over mistakes accounted
for most of the variants in the relationship of perfectionism
(23:43):
to these forms of psycho pathology. So it's really this
concern over messing up basically that your average person, sure
you have that like if I'm going to give a speech,
I don't want to screw it up. But your average
person is going to deal with the anxiety, cope with
the anxiety, not feel like their entire life will come
crashing down around them. People though, who have depression, anxiety,
(24:09):
and struggle with eating disorders, all of this is likely
to be so much worse to the point of pathology.
And if we take a look, for instance, at the
anxiety piece, those high standards might actually be holding you
back by breeding the fear of failure and making mistakes,
and a piece in New York Magazine about this noted
(24:30):
how perfectionism very much reflects what they called an inner
self mired and anxiety, and it quoted psychologist Thomas Greenspan,
who described perfectionistic people as believing that they can never
be good enough, that their mistakes reflect personal flaws, and
that the only route to acceptability as a person, the
(24:51):
only way to prove their worthiness is through perfection. And
guess what, folks, that's impossible to do and how mired
are we taught? Talking fourteen study looking at people with
elevated perfectionism and generalized anxiety disorder found the specific perfectionism
dimension concern over mistakes. We've heard that before. Personal standards
(25:14):
and doubts about actions were significantly correlated with clinical worry.
So to put that in la terms, clinical perfectionism is
very much linked and predictive of pathological worries. So yeah,
you're basically you're going to be sitting there just like
heavy breathing, fretting all the time. And this feeds into
(25:34):
O c D tendencies as well. And I'm talking like
actual O c D tendencies, not color coding your bookshelf,
although that does make for a very visually pleasing display.
It sure does. I also like apartment therapy dot com um.
And of course we've mentioned anxiety disorders. Perfectionism has been
found to be elevated and people with anorexi obilienia and
(25:56):
eating disorders not otherwise specified compared to control groups, and
I mean just anecdotally common sense wise, this makes a
lot of sense because people with eating disorders are often
found to be attempting to exert control over something, and
that something is calorie counting, its body shape, it's weight.
(26:17):
And there's evidence that researchers have found that treating perfectionism
also helps alleviate anxiety and disordered eating. And part of
that is the idea of perfectionism being this quote trans
diagnostic process, essentially meaning that there are a lot of
overlapping dimensions that exist in eating disorders. So it's important
(26:40):
to look at the whole behavioral and psychological picture. So
perfectionism doesn't exist in a vacuum. Eating disorders don't exist
in a vacuum. These things bring in elements of a
whole lot of mental health issues. Yeah, and and the
hallmarks of perfectionism are really clear when you look at
(27:00):
eating disordered behavior like shape or weight over evaluation goals,
setting that all are none thinking UM. That typically goes
into things like intorexia and bulimia. And then if we
look though at suicide attempts. I mean this is not
to say that these other mental health issues are not
do not severely diminish our quality of life, but suicide
(27:24):
is also so tragically linked to perfectionism as well. And
this was something that that New York Magazine article really
focused on because it was citing some research, including a
two thousand nine report which found a very close relationship
between perfectionism and suicide attempts or completed suicide UM. For instance,
(27:46):
it found uh, this two thousand seven study found that
more than half of family members of people who had
killed themselves described their loved one unprompted as a perfectionist.
It also found a British study which found eleven of
twenty students who had killed themselves were described as being
afraid a failure. And then finally Archives of Suicide research
(28:09):
study found sev of this group of thirty three boys
who'd killed themselves were described by their parents as placing
quote exceedingly high demands and expectations on themselves. Yeah, and
that New York magazine article quoted this woman whose husband
had died from suicide as saying he was very deliberate.
(28:32):
He was a perfectionist. I've been learning that perfectionism plus
depression is a loaded gun, and that's so tragic to
think of, especially when you think of how perfectionism is
so rewarded in our culture. It's such like a like
a Protestant work ethic thing of like you're going to
stay up all night and you're gonna work on that
(28:53):
project for work, or you're going to you know, perfect
your appearance until you're unhealthy. You know, make those cupcakes Jannis,
Jannis is going to make those interest perfect. And so
it does it It gives that like it really drives
home the dangerous and tragic aspect of perfectionism that it's
not just color coding your bookcase or your folders or whatever,
(29:16):
that it is something that absolutely interferes with living your life. Yeah,
we've we've touched a couple of times on the idea
that perfectionism in and of itself might not be a disorder,
but it might be the interaction of a lot of
things that's causing distress. For instance, there were some British
psychologists that found that it was the interaction between perfectionism
(29:39):
and avoidance coping, which is dealing with problems by not
dealing with problems that predicted college students hopelessness and psychological distress,
not the perfectionism by itself or the avoidance coping by itself. Meanwhile,
there was another study in the Journal of Counseling Psychology
that found the perfectionists who had positive coping mechanisms weren't
(30:02):
any more depressed than the average person, which sort of
goes against some of the stuff we've been saying. But
they say that this supports the idea that perfectionism interacts
with other mental health traits as well as life events
to produce that psycho pathology. So what does that have
to do then, with women and girls? Is that psychopathology
(30:26):
more prevalent among us ladies, among the Janicis of the world,
if you will, um, because it comes up just colloquially
in a lot of the ways that we talk about
women and especially ambitious women of oh, she's just a perfectionist.
Girls always want to be perfect or the reason why
women aren't leaning in and getting ahead is because we
(30:47):
try to be perfect before we ask for raises or
promotions or go for new jobs. And all those things
are true statistically, yes, But is that perfectionism at work
because that perfect word, the P word, came up a
lot in research that we've done on the imposter syndrome UM.
(31:09):
For instance, Caddy k and Claire ship Men have written
a whole book about this. I think they call it
the Confidence Gap. And in the excerpt of that, which
was published in The Atlantic magazine, in they talk about
how women feel confident only when they're perfect or practically perfect,
and they go on to say that striving to be
(31:30):
perfect actually keeps us from getting much of anything done,
and they say it is such a given. Yeah. Well,
I think they actually say in that excerpt that, oh, well,
you know, we all know that women are more likely
to be perfectionist and to strive for perfection. And it's
and it's not that it's not true. It's obviously true
(31:54):
women some women are perfectionists and some perfectionists or women.
But I cannot find definitive study that said, yes, more
women are perfectionists more often than men are. There's a
lot of stuff out there that we see in other
mental health discussions in terms of it manifesting differently in
men and women. Men are more likely to kill themselves
(32:16):
or to self medicate with drugs and alcohol. Women are
more likely to go the anxiety and eating disorder root. Um.
But yeah, I I I understand the concept of like
oh more. Women clearly want to be perfect, especially when
you take it in terms of the imposter syndrome conversation,
because Shipment and k argue that girls get a lot
(32:39):
of praise for being perfect, which breeds approval seeking, and
their confidence takes a hit when they enter the real world.
That doesn't reward them for their perfect spelling in, their
perfect manners and the perfect lacy socks and their Mary
Jane shoes. But I don't think that that's an issue
of actual perfectionism so much as girls trying to out
achieve institutional sexism. Yeah, the and and certainly those ideas
(33:02):
are related, the idea of I have to work so
much harder to prove myself. Yes, the perfectionist is driven
by the fear or even the internal knowledge of failure. Um.
And that's kind of the same thing for impostor syndrome
of I feel like a fake. I have to work
so much harder to prove myself. But they're not one
and the same. Imposter syndrome is not necessarily nobody's having
(33:24):
a debate over whether imposter syndrome is in and of
itself a mental health disorder, right, And not surprisingly, one
group of people that's been looked at and studied in
terms of perfectionism is athletes. There was a two thousand
to study in Psychology of Sport and Exercise that found
a strong link between here we have that idea again,
(33:46):
negative perfectionism and social social physique anxiety for both men
and women. Uh. They found that there's a small link
between positive perfection and disordered eating in men. However, when
it comes to women, that negative perfectionism and the social
physique anxiety interacted to lead to disordered eating. So, like
(34:08):
how many times have I said interacted in this episode,
it tends to be all of these different things combining
to drive pathology. Well, so you know, like I said,
I couldn't find many definitive studies or books or papers
saying that yes, women experience perfectionism more than men do.
But I did find some interesting, some interesting research that's
(34:32):
been done on women and sex. And this is coming
from the book by Cindy Meston and David Buss called
Why Women Have Sex, and they talk about a survey
that Messton did that found that individual differences in perfectionism
were related to relationship fidelity and sexual variety seeking, which
is fascinating and scary if you're dating a perfectionist. Yeah,
(34:55):
in a nutshell. They found that women who were high
in perfectionism essentially to that perfectionism into the bedroom. They
said unrealistically high standards for themselves and others, and they
also had sex with more people compared to women low imperfectionism,
and they were more likely to have been unfaithful in
(35:16):
a sexual relationship. So perfectionists are likelier to be cheaters.
Interesting and bust and Messin think that the reason why
is because they appear to hold these unrealistic demands not
just from the people themselves, but from their sexual prowess
(35:37):
and performance, which causes them to be continually disappointed in
the bedroom, and so they look elsewhere, whether that means
stepping outside of the balance of a monogamous relationship or not.
So it seems like these people in this study might
be pretty likely to quickly flee a relationship rather than
(35:59):
working through problem rather than being like, hey, relationships take work.
Like I've been guilt. I have never cheated. I'm going
on record, um, but the I have been guilty of
in the past dating people and being like, you know what,
it's not It's not perfect anymore. But was this more
about relationships or was it just about sex? Well, this
particular thing was just about sex. So can we extrapolate
(36:21):
that sex to how they would function in a relationship
because the two are distinct. They are distinct. You're so
right and playing the sexual devil's advocate. I don't know
if I want I'm advocating for, but I just think
that I think sometimes that conflating the two leads us. Yeah,
that complicates things. Yeah, sex always complicated and it makes
(36:43):
you a woman. We but what do we do about this?
How do we treat perfectionism? How do we cope with it?
Because obviously there is that psychopathology. These are some of
us are wired in this perfectionistic kind of way. And
for people who don't deal with this ps telling your
(37:05):
perfectionist friend or loved one to just relax and kinna
do it. In staid, it's really focusing in on the
need to accept yourself and be cared for and take
care of that perfectionistic drive. Find the root of it. Essentially, well, yeah,
because it is those super high drives to be accepted
(37:27):
that drives perfectionism. So if you good with therapists and
you're like, why do I need to feel accepted and
loved by everyone around me? That will get to the
root of like, you don't have to be perfect. People
are gonna love you for being the imperfect person that
you are, and people are gonna dislike you. Yeah, oh yeah,
that's that's a that's a great thing to acknowledge and
totally embrace. Not everyone's gonna like you and everyone's gonna
(37:50):
think you're funny or pretty or cute or worth listening
to if you host a podcast, I don't understand why not, um,
but yeah, like you said, it's it's practicing compassion for yourself,
which is so hard considering that you guys out there
who are perfectionists. You have such high demands on everyone,
including yourself, And as my therapist says, forgiveness is our
(38:13):
most healing power, and that includes for yourself, not just
for the person who cut you off in traffic, And
so a good way to cope if you have perfectionism
or perfectionistic tendencies is to aim your focus at other people,
to volunteer, to get the focus off yourself and go
help others. And it's also helpful to develop some ways
(38:35):
to counter all of those what ifs and shoulds. So
one source we were reading said that it's great if
you name your fear, name your what if so, Like
what if, Okay, let's say Kristen and I are giving
a speech, Like what if I fail at this speech, Well,
then Blane will die immediately? What will happen? And it
will be written on our toolstone we failed the speech,
(38:57):
the room will explode. But then keep asking yourself, well,
then what so if I failed the speech, Um, I'm
probably gonna be embarrassed and somebody might write something bad
in the college paper about me. Well then what well,
It'll just blow over and then I'll go home and
I'll eat this print is dead. Prince is dead, so
no one will read it. So it's fine. And there's
also the idea of and this kind of ties into
(39:18):
cognitive behavioral therapy, which is also recommended for perfectionists, but
redirecting your what if so instead of being like, what
if I really f this up? Start asking what if
I succeed? What if I win? What if I s
this up? You know? What does S stand for? Okay?
I was like, I don't understand how the S word
(39:39):
works in this situation, Christen. But also the idea of
telling yourself that good enough is good enough because no
perfection perfectionists believes that, and I struggle with that mightily.
I don't even believe it's sitting here. But if you
keep repeating it to yourself as a mantra, that good
enough is good enough because no one is perfect and
(40:00):
literally perfection doesn't exist, it's not a thing. Setting realistic
expectations is also crucial. I have a challenge with this
where I see what I want and I don't break
it down into the tiny steps, because you have to
eat the old elephant one step at a time, one
bite at a time, not one step at a time.
Talking about eating an elephant, not walking over it. You
(40:21):
have to climb over the elephant one step at a time.
Both of these are ways to deal with procrastination. Well yeah, well,
I mean first you have the real realistic expectation setting. Yeah,
and then by doing that it will help with that
issue of procrastination that I also personally deal with, because
(40:42):
I mean, when everything just looks so huge, of course
you're not going to want to do it. And these
are also patterns that if you have kids, that you
can model to them, because oh gosh, I tell you,
I don't even have kids, but my terror is just
asking them up and that's for screwing succeeding. Well, yeah,
(41:03):
I mean, it's important to help kids understand that reaching
their potential and succeeding doesn't mean reaching perfection, that those
two things aren't the same, and the inner achievement, thinking skills, creativity, imagination,
risk taking, that these are all so valuable that they're
even more valuable than getting straight a's. Although I'm sure
there are people out there who would disagree with me,
(41:24):
and so they're a therapists out there who encourage parents
and aunts and uncles whoever you are, um to share
the stories of your own screw ups with kids, how
whether you overcame them or not, to show kids like, hey,
I'm still alive and successful and can and can human.
You can human too if you miss up. And you know,
this actually made me think about this woman that I'm
(41:46):
in a fitness class with who was just telling me
about how her son came home crying because his homework
was to color, and he was so nervous about coloring
outside the lines that he literally couldn't do it. He
c i'd and just would not do it, even though
she's like, your daddy and I love your pictures, We
want you to color outside the lines. You just do
(42:07):
your best, and that's all you can do. But he
was so petrified because at school they do great. Apparently,
in whatever preschool or kindergarten class he is, they do
get their gold stars for coloring within the lines, even
though mommy and daddy love it when he colors outside
the lines and does whatever he wants, and so it
sounds like someone he's out a talk with teacher. She
was telling me this, and I'm like, oh, this sounds
(42:29):
like well, first it sounds like me, but then it
sounds like perfectionism is starting to take root. And so
anything you can do to encourage yourself or your kids
to really just be creative and take those risks, I
think that's super mentally healthy. And perhaps another mentally healthy
thing that you can do is share your stories with us.
(42:50):
With some podcasters. I mean, we're curious to hear from
listeners if this resonates with you or with someone you
know or love. Mom Stubb at house stuffwork dot com
is our email address. You can also tweet us at
mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook. And we've got
a couple of messages to share with you right now. Well,
(43:15):
I have a letter here from Leaf in response to
our Significant Other episode. Leaf writes, I especially enjoyed the
little segment on gender neutral terms. As a non binary
transgender person with a long term sis gender girlfriend, this
is an issue that has permeated both my personal relationship
with her and also the way that we as a
couple are seeing to those around us. To most people,
(43:36):
we look like a fairly average lesbian couple. Even if
someone were to know that one of us is transgender,
the guests would more like more than likely be my girlfriend,
who is much more androgynous Lee presenting than myself. To
offset that, my girlfriend has taken to calling me her partner,
although that term in itself has cost just as much
confusion as anything else. You were absolutely right when you
mentioned that using partner either signifies a man's coworker, are
(44:00):
a sneaky lesbian term of endearment? Can we have that
movie Sneaky Lesbian terms of endearment? Anyway, back to the letter,
Leaf continues whenever my girlfriend refers to me as her partner,
whoever she's speaking to is always quick to correct her
and to get her to say I'm her girlfriend. We
have yet to find a way around this problem, as
(44:21):
even more gender gender neutral terms tend to sound childish
in an adult setting, and even if they didn't, the
common person probably would not be able to instantly queue
in on the meaning. It's just one of the many
problems non binary trans people have in social situations but
yet to be figured out well. So thanks for writing
to us about it, Leaf. I'm gonna let her hear
from Kayleie about our Native American Princess episode from a
(44:43):
while back, and she writes, I was listening to your
Native American Princess stereotyping episode and the commentary on how
these harmful stereotypes often harm young children's perspectives of their
native culture. My siblings and I are bi racial. Our
father's family belongs to be a Jibwa boys work band
in Northern Minnesota, and my mother is a strong Polish woman. Anyway,
(45:05):
when my parents were out, a family friend had to
swatch peter Pan for the first time, and while little
kids have a hard time understanding the totally racially charged
lyrics of the song what makes a Red Man Read,
my younger brother was terrified. He refused to go to bed,
and when my parents came home, my five year old
brother seriously confessed to my parents that he did not
want to be Native American anymore because in peter Pan
(45:27):
they were scary and tried to kill everyone. My parents
were mortified, to say the least, and that night we
all had a good talking to about American history, racism,
and how stereotypes of Native American people have suffered. So
after this very long, very emotional conversation and my parents
had with us, they asked my other younger brother what
he thought now, and he replied, now we must kill
(45:47):
the white man. Equally horrified, parental shrieks followed with no,
you're white too. While cute, it's always been a sad
story for us kids because it's the first time we
became aware the racism and struggle with identity that many
Native and biracial people feel. These scenes have not only
affected my siblings perspective on our culture, but also the
(46:09):
children around us in high school and middle school. When
our very white school found out that us kids were Native,
bullying and chance of Ali Ali Gum Gum followed me
for a while, and people called my younger sister Tiger
Lily and brother Running Bear behind their backs, and it
was far more common than I obviously would have liked.
For a while, it felt like being Native was humiliating,
(46:30):
and the fact that my family's tormentors used Disney references
to do it makes me sick to my stomach. So
that's why I hate Peter Pan. So thanks for your letter, Kaylee,
and thanks to everybody who's written into us. Mom. Stuff
at how stuff works dot com is our email address
and for links to all of our social media as
(46:51):
well as all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts with
this one including our sources. So you can learn more
about perfectionism. Head on over to stuff Mom Never Told
You dot com for moralness and thousands of other topics.
Does it have stuff work So
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from House Top
Works Nott. Come hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And last time on Stuff I've
Never Told You, we talked all about anxiety. What a
delightful romp it was through all of mine and Caroline's
(00:24):
mental neurosis. Yeah, so welcome to part two of that perfectionism. Yeah. Um,
this was so fascinating to learn about Caroline, because, friends,
perfectionism is not what you think it is. Yeah, similar
to how we busted Smiths in our c D episode
(00:46):
where we were saying O c D is not just
keeping a clean closet. Perfectionism is not just the desire
to excel, to do really well, to have that clean
closet it is. It goes a little bit deeper than that. Yeah,
and it's very much linked to issues like O c D, anxiety, depression,
and other things that we're going to talk about. And
(01:09):
there's also this underlying assumption that women are perfectionists. Women
are likelier to try to be perfect in all things,
and we were trying to find whether that is actually
the case or whether that stereotype is just completely misunderstanding
what Perfectionism really is, because it's another one of those
(01:31):
terms that's used very casually to refer to things that
it is actually not. Well, yeah, and it's used whereas
anxiety is something like I have anxiety and I would
like to overcome it, whether that's generalized anxiety disorder or
like panic disorder, or whether it's just your feeling anxious
before a test. Perfectionism, on the other hand, is almost
(01:54):
sometimes used as like a humble brad, like, so, I've
just got to bank all the cupcakes for the p
t A meeting because I'm just a perfectionist. All right, Janice,
we know you have a lot of time, and you
you just you want to do this in your cupcakes
are so perfect. Or when Janice isn't a job interview
and you get that horrible job interview question of you know,
(02:16):
what's your biggest fault in life, Janice responds, well, I'm
a perfectionist. Well, we hope not now that we know
more about what perfectionism actually is and that it has
links to all sorts of terrible things and it's a
really really unhealthy pattern, because I mean, if you think
about it in pop culture, you have sort of both
(02:36):
ends of the spectrum where you have Natalie Portman as
Nina in Black Swan, where it's whoa that is super scary,
and then on the comedic end of the spectrum, you
have someone like Monica Geller in Friends. Although I don't
know why I needed to give her last name, everyone
knows her just as Monica on Friends, where you're a perfectionist,
(02:56):
Yes i am. I'm terrified I'm going to fail. I
don't mention Geller and everyone will hate me. Um. But
you know she has all these quirks where she has
to clean all the time and she's very intentional in
her cooking ha ha ha. And its attitudes about characters
like Monica Geller that lead people to feel like perfectionism
(03:20):
is totally socially acceptable. It's not a mental health condition
that you might need help with or that could signal
a deeper mental health condition like actual pathological anxiety or depression. Um,
it's just you being like super driven, right, You're just
a Tracy Flick. That's it exactly. So, first of play
out what we're actually talking about when we're talking about perfectionism, because,
(03:46):
like we've said, what it is not is just setting
high standards for yourself, just wanting to excel, being organized,
having some ambition in life. Yeah, so what it really
is is this drive to be perfect. I can't enough
italics and bold and underline on the word perfect, or
at least the drive to seem perfect to other people,
(04:08):
because inside you feel like an impost, like a failure,
like this ugly person inside and out that I need
to do anything I can to portray myself as this
shiny perfect person. And as the amazing Brine Brown, who
often writes for a magazine puts it, perfectionism is a
self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought.
(04:31):
If I look perfect, live perfectly, and do everything perfectly,
I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment,
and blame. And another way that it was put that
jumped out to me Caroline, was that perfectionism, while it
is so gold driven, it doesn't focus on success. It
(04:54):
only focuses on failure because you're ultimately driven by failure,
Because why do you need to be perfect because you're
terrified that you will fail? Right, which is so much
of the conversation when you get into imposter syndrome, which
we've done an episode on um in terms of being
driven by I'm such a fake, I'm so dumb and unaccomplished,
(05:17):
and I need to work so hard to show that
I can pull this off basically. And some researchers distinguished though,
between what they term normal or adaptive perfectionism and neurotic
or maladaptive perfectionism, and they say that the adaptive type
propels you forward. Maybe this is, you know, more of
(05:39):
a synonym to being very goal oriented, whereas maladaptive creates
that stress over failure. It's the stuff that Renee Brown
is talking about. Yeah, but today we're focusing in on
the type that is disruptive to functioning. Although, as we'll
get into a little bit later, a lot of people
would argue that there is no adaptive versus maladaptive, that
(06:02):
perfectionism is purely maladaptive, that there's nothing adaptive about wanting
to be perfect, because there's no such thing as perfect.
And when you think about what perfect really means in
this context, it has so many different layers. You have
concerns about making mistakes, You have your own personal standards,
(06:23):
you have doubts about your actions or abilities, organization, parental expectations, criticism,
things that people say rudely on social media. Well, I
mean those are the literal dimensions of this condition known
as perfectionism. Once you get beyond just like the colloquial
like oh, I spent all night on those cupcakes. I'm
(06:44):
such a perfectionist. Once you get past that to the
actual debilitating stuff and you're reading studies about it, things
like concerns over making mistakes are cited in terms of
linking perfectionism to O C D anxiety and depression and
even suicidal tendencies. And so yeah, like I'm concerned about
(07:04):
making mistakes. I don't want to like do something stupid
when I'm driving, or like put the wrong word in
the podcast notes FLPs, I just drove my car into
a wall. Has happens. Um, this concern, this perfectionist concern
over mistakes is something that is debilitating. That it is,
like Kristen said that being driven by failure idea, and
(07:29):
it also manifests in different types, not that they're mutually exclusive.
And this also was really illuminating for me to read about. Um,
you have socially prescribed perfectionism, which is the belief that
others will value you only if you're perfect, and psychologist
Gordon Flett says that these people feel, quote, the better
(07:51):
I do, the better I'm expected to do. So rather
than like you bring the great cupcakes and everybody congratulates
to you, it's like, oh God, well, now I've got
to make like a six tiered p t a cake
for the next meeting. And this is a little bit
of a side note, but this also reminds me of
what we were talking about a little bit. In our
anxiety episode of how UM. One researcher named Gene Twinge
(08:16):
sites our shift from intrinsic values to extrinsic values as
a reason why anxiety might be more on the rise,
and that whole socially prescribed perfectionism seems very much linked
to extrinsic values of how do I look to other
people right? How do I present myself absolutely well. Another
(08:37):
type is the self oriented perfectionism, and this is the
internally motivated desire to be perfect. And there is a
debate as Flett talks about the psychologist Gordon Flett talks
about over whether this is a risk factor for other
psychological disorders or a disorder in and of itself, and
that seems to be the big conversation around perfectionism and
(09:00):
general Is it a disorder? Yes, it's debilitating, but is
it debilitating and doesn't exist because you have something like
generalized anxiety disorder or depression. And there's also other oriented perfectionism,
which a very close friend of mine struggles with a lot.
It's the tendency to demand perfection from friends, family, coworkers,
and others. These are the people and I say this
(09:22):
because I repeat this mondra to myself all the time.
These are the people who need to be saying, not
my monkey, not my circus, Like, don't be so concerned
about what other people are doing or saying, or wearing
or whatever. Be more concerned with yourself. And as you
can imagine, this can be super damaging to relationships. And
when I said that I have a close friend with this,
I literally wasn't talking about myself. I do have a
(09:45):
friend who struggles mightily with this, is in therapy and
talks about it a lot, and it really has affected
her relationships other people. Because yeah, if you are super
driven and you expect a lot from yourself, it can
be so damaging. You need to learn to practice self
compassion and self forgiveness. But when it's directed outward at
(10:05):
other people, well that just means that nobody's going to
want to invite you to their party. And then what
will you do on a Friday night? And then what
are you gonna do with all those cupcakes? Janis this
lighting up? Janis is gonna stay in and eat them
while watching The Gilmore Girls on Netflix. But let's let's
stop talking about Janis. I'm starting to feel bad. Let's
(10:26):
let's talk about me instead. Okay, we should probably start
talking about some of the hallmarks of perfectionism, because we've
told you what it's not and what it is, but
we need to illustrate it with deeply, deeply personal stories
because perfectionism the hallmarks are really that fear of failure,
(10:46):
that fear of vulnerability, because no true perfectionist wants to
be openly vulnerable or fail openly because that would totally
shatter their fragile send of perfection that they're trying to
convey to the rest of the world. Yeah, I mean
I've I've personally struggled with those two things big time
(11:07):
in my life. The whole If you're a failure, Um,
you've mentioned that this is reminiscent for you of really
being a grade A plus driven when you were in school,
and it reminds me of when I was homeschooled as
a kid. I hated it if my mom graded my
paper because she was my teacher and my principle. Um.
(11:31):
I hated if she hated it if she graded my
tests or papers with a red pen, because it was
like pointing out my failures even bigger and bolder, and
I would freak out about it. It makes it so
easy to see on the page though. Yeah I read
red pen as you are dumb. Well, that's become sort
(11:52):
of an issue in schools nowadays, right, Like I've heard
about teachers who have to stop using red pens because
it hurts kids feelings. Yeah. See, Thankfully my mom was
smart about it, and she was like, Kristen, we need
to have a talk because I don't this doesn't seem
like a healthy pattern. You need to accept a red
pin because if you can't accept a red pen, then
(12:12):
life's going to be a little bit tough. Although I
think that she started using like purple and orange, she
would switch up the color. I think sometimes just like
I don't know, so it didn't look like the page
was bleeding, the page is having a period menstruating pages. Um. Yeah,
I also am super guilty of like skipping out on
(12:33):
what could potentially be a fun, enriching or rewarding experience
because I'm worried about failing or looking stupid, or being
vulnerable or being mediocre. Um. And Similarly, I am super
guilty of one of the giant hallmarks of perfectionism, which
is procrastination. And again that's not a humble brag. It
(12:55):
really drives me insane about myself that I'm a huge
procrastinator because if this is especially true if it's like
a creative endeavor, whether it's in work or outside of work,
Because the thing is when you're just like, uh, you know,
if I'm just editing an article for the House to
Works website, like it's hard for me to fail at that.
I'm an editor. I'm good with words like how I
(13:16):
do is very quantifiable. It's easy to quantify um when
it is something that's more creative that requires me to
use um a different skill set than something that's just
very cut and dry. All of a sudden, well, I
could be vulnerable. Someone could judge me for this and
tell me that I'm stupid, and so that leads to
this tendency to like either put it off or just
(13:38):
assume I'm going to do terribly, so I just won't
try it. There's also the whole thing about being plagued
by what ifs and should that is so paralyzing, and
that leads to this regimented nous of the should, like
this should happen in my therapist is always going why
should it? Why do you have should there? Well, I
don't know, therapist, I'm just a perfectionist. And then you
(13:59):
realize your therapist is Janice. No. But quickly going back
to the procrastination thing, that was something I did not
expect to read about at all, because we would assume
that perfectionists have no problem with procrastination because they're getting
their work done there, going over and above all the time.
But it makes so much sense that they are very
(14:21):
much linked. And I totally experienced that if there's like
some big creative project that I want to do, my
perfectionism will cause me to procrastinate because it's like, well,
what but what if I can't make this wonderful idea
come to fruition? Well, yeah, I mean you're so worried
about getting judged and failing, and that can breed a
(14:42):
lot of judgmental stuff about other people and other things.
I mean, dude, roommate, Hi, you don't listen to this
episode or this podcast. I means it's okay if I
talk about you. You know, dude roommate was super judgmental.
And I really think it's stemmed from a place in
him of being so hard on himself, so critical of
(15:03):
himself that when you're just trying to take that pressure off,
you can tend to focus it outward. So where does
it come from? Then? Can I Can we just blame
our parents yea, for raising to be perfectionistic. I actually
don't blame my parents for that. My parents were always
like really encouraging and empowering of like if you can read,
(15:24):
you can do anything. Um. And I don't feel like
it came from them. I felt like it was very
much like internally driven in me. But parents can absolutely
pass it on to their kids, and not surprisingly, this
is something that researchers have looked into. Well. Yeah, and
in terms of the passing it down to your kids,
I mean, this can be like you are Janice and
(15:45):
you're super like cupcake perfection driven, and your kids pick
up on that and it's like, oh, well I need
to I need to perform too. But it can be
like the research that we were reading, it can be
as small and as simple as a cocked eyebrow when
you bring home a B instead of an A. And
that's not to say that your parents are terrible people.
(16:06):
If that happened to you, that could seriously be just like,
I just want to encourage you to do better and
live your best life as Oprah if Oprah is your
mom would have you do um. But to a child
who's already absorbing everything around herself like that can be
really damaging, like, oh my god, I earned the eyebrow?
What did I do right? Because kids, when we're kids,
(16:29):
we take these small things and we don't have that
many tools in our brains and our experiences to put
context in nuance to that cocked eyebrow. So we then associate, oh,
the B with a cocked eyebrow. That correlation becomes a
causation and a pattern ensues. Yeah, And so it's no
(16:50):
surprise then that perfectionistic tendencies often start in childhood, whether
it is because of the expectations of your parents or
your teachers. Parental criticism and even the perception by kids
that their parents and teachers have high expectations for them
to be perfect is enough to send someone on a
perfectionist expiral. And I was talking to Christian about this
(17:11):
when we were researching, because I was like, well, you know,
I have a tendency to blame my parents for this.
But my parents were very um in psychology terms, um indulgent, permissive.
They expected a lot of me, They expected me to
do very well. But they were also like super encouraging,
do your best, be who you are, reach for the stars,
(17:32):
all that good stuff. But I went to a very
very strict, very challenging private school growing up all through school,
and you do have those super high expectations from teachers
to the point where like getting the lower grade, the
slightly lower grade even is enough to be like, I've
let everyone down. I am so dumb. And so parenting styles,
(17:55):
I mean, we're talking about teachers, but parenting styles are
obviously so important. And this is coming from a paper
by David Hibbert and Gail Walton from they found that
when you combine demands and lack of warmth with expectations
that helps create and foster perfectionisms, and that idea of
(18:16):
things interacting to create perfectionism or perfectionism interacting with something
else to create things like anxiety and depression. That's also
a huge key to this topic because it's often not
occurring on its own well. So Hibbert and Walton were
saying that the parents who might have like my parents,
high demands on their kids to do well in school,
(18:37):
but who also have high warmth foster that adaptive version
of perfectionism that possibly they create self motivation in their kids,
which is great, But it's those parents who have high
demands on their kids but no warmth who might be
the problem causers because they say, this whole high demand,
(19:00):
lack of warmth thing signals to your kid that they
might not be loved if they screw up, and this,
they argue, is what tends to foster that maladaptive perfectionism,
the kind that can disrupt your life well, and it
can also backfire because these kids might not even try
to take on challenges, they might just be more anxious
(19:20):
or overwhelmed by them instead. And that link was found
to be more pronounced in boys, which is notable um.
And then finally you have neglectful parents that also foster
that maladaptive perfectionism because it's the whole thing of, well,
maybe if I can just really overachieve, I'll win some
attention or love or control my environment in some kind
(19:41):
of way. But when we're talking about adaptive versus maladaptive,
as you mentioned earlier, Caroline, some argue that there is
no adaptive about this, that this kind of cycle is
not motivating us to actually do better. And this is
something that Dr Flett is adamant about, and he was
(20:01):
quoted in an article in the American Psychological Association's Monitor
magazine and he said, I don't think needing to be
perfect isn't any way adaptive. People make that claim and
they'll just ignore the fairly large literature that says it's
a vulnerability factor for unipolar depression, anorexia, and suicide. And
I was like, whoa, Dr Flat, what's going on here?
(20:24):
And that's the thing. Perfectionism is very closely intertwined with
other mental health issues because researchers have found links to anxiety, depression,
suicidal tendency o c D, and eating disorders. Oh suddenly, perfectionism.
Ain't so perfect. It ain't so perfect. And we'll talk
(20:45):
more about janison or cupcakes when we come right back
from a quick break. So Kristen has mentioned a lot
of links between perfectionism and several mental health conditions. For instance,
(21:09):
socially prescribed perfectionism that's the time where you're so worried
about what other people think of you, you want to
look perfect to other people. UM has been associated with
depression and other problems, including, like Kristen said, suicide and
Dr Flett said, I think the reason for that is
that socially prescribed perfectionism has an element of pressure combined
(21:29):
with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, because if you're
a perfectionist by definition, you never feel perfect. You never
feel like you get there, like you accomplish what you
set out to accomplish, like you always need to be
working at it, making it better, whatever it is, whether
it's yourself, your appearance, or your job or your relationships.
(21:50):
And also those attitudes that are wrapped up in perfectionism,
of guilt, shame, and the whole never enough thing can
lead to depression. Research has also shown the perfectionism is
a big mediator between the comorbid conditions of bipolar spectrum
disorders and anxiety and depressive symptoms. So basically, these folks
(22:11):
already tend to view the world from a more negative
perspective and christin you know how we mentioned those dimensions
of perfectionism earlier in the podcast, the things like concern
over mistakes and abilities, things like that. What's interesting about
perfectionism is that all of those concerns and worries and
frets that define what perfectionism is aren't consistent across people,
(22:36):
which makes sense, everybody's different, but they're also not consistent
across people who have the comorbid things like anxiety or
depression or o c D. So this study, for instance
and Behavior Research and Therapy from June two thousand eight
found that the dimension of concern over mistakes was elevated
in each of their patient groups that they studied. They
(22:57):
looked at depression, anxiety disorders, and eating disorder ers. While
pure personal standards, so like I've got to be perfect,
everything has to be perfect, was elevated only in the
eating disorder sample. The dimension of doubts about actions, so
like can I actually accomplish this? Maybe these people are
procrastinators like I, I don't know if I can actually
do this as perfectly as I need to. That was
(23:20):
found to be elevated in both patients with O c
D and eating disorders, but not in the depressed patients.
And so it's interesting, you know, I mentioned that the
whole concern over mistakes dimension was elevated in all three
patient groups. Their analysis indicated that concern over mistakes accounted
for most of the variants in the relationship of perfectionism
(23:43):
to these forms of psycho pathology. So it's really this
concern over messing up basically that your average person, sure
you have that like if I'm going to give a speech,
I don't want to screw it up. But your average
person is going to deal with the anxiety, cope with
the anxiety, not feel like their entire life will come
crashing down around them. People though, who have depression, anxiety,
(24:09):
and struggle with eating disorders, all of this is likely
to be so much worse to the point of pathology.
And if we take a look, for instance, at the
anxiety piece, those high standards might actually be holding you
back by breeding the fear of failure and making mistakes,
and a piece in New York Magazine about this noted
(24:30):
how perfectionism very much reflects what they called an inner
self mired and anxiety, and it quoted psychologist Thomas Greenspan,
who described perfectionistic people as believing that they can never
be good enough, that their mistakes reflect personal flaws, and
that the only route to acceptability as a person, the
(24:51):
only way to prove their worthiness is through perfection. And
guess what, folks, that's impossible to do and how mired
are we taught? Talking fourteen study looking at people with
elevated perfectionism and generalized anxiety disorder found the specific perfectionism
dimension concern over mistakes. We've heard that before. Personal standards
(25:14):
and doubts about actions were significantly correlated with clinical worry.
So to put that in la terms, clinical perfectionism is
very much linked and predictive of pathological worries. So yeah,
you're basically you're going to be sitting there just like
heavy breathing, fretting all the time. And this feeds into
(25:34):
O c D tendencies as well. And I'm talking like
actual O c D tendencies, not color coding your bookshelf,
although that does make for a very visually pleasing display.
It sure does. I also like apartment therapy dot com um.
And of course we've mentioned anxiety disorders. Perfectionism has been
found to be elevated and people with anorexi obilienia and
(25:56):
eating disorders not otherwise specified compared to control groups, and
I mean just anecdotally common sense wise, this makes a
lot of sense because people with eating disorders are often
found to be attempting to exert control over something, and
that something is calorie counting, its body shape, it's weight.
(26:17):
And there's evidence that researchers have found that treating perfectionism
also helps alleviate anxiety and disordered eating. And part of
that is the idea of perfectionism being this quote trans
diagnostic process, essentially meaning that there are a lot of
overlapping dimensions that exist in eating disorders. So it's important
(26:40):
to look at the whole behavioral and psychological picture. So
perfectionism doesn't exist in a vacuum. Eating disorders don't exist
in a vacuum. These things bring in elements of a
whole lot of mental health issues. Yeah, and and the
hallmarks of perfectionism are really clear when you look at
(27:00):
eating disordered behavior like shape or weight over evaluation goals,
setting that all are none thinking UM. That typically goes
into things like intorexia and bulimia. And then if we
look though at suicide attempts. I mean this is not
to say that these other mental health issues are not
do not severely diminish our quality of life, but suicide
(27:24):
is also so tragically linked to perfectionism as well. And
this was something that that New York Magazine article really
focused on because it was citing some research, including a
two thousand nine report which found a very close relationship
between perfectionism and suicide attempts or completed suicide UM. For instance,
(27:46):
it found uh, this two thousand seven study found that
more than half of family members of people who had
killed themselves described their loved one unprompted as a perfectionist.
It also found a British study which found eleven of
twenty students who had killed themselves were described as being
afraid a failure. And then finally Archives of Suicide research
(28:09):
study found sev of this group of thirty three boys
who'd killed themselves were described by their parents as placing
quote exceedingly high demands and expectations on themselves. Yeah, and
that New York magazine article quoted this woman whose husband
had died from suicide as saying he was very deliberate.
(28:32):
He was a perfectionist. I've been learning that perfectionism plus
depression is a loaded gun, and that's so tragic to
think of, especially when you think of how perfectionism is
so rewarded in our culture. It's such like a like
a Protestant work ethic thing of like you're going to
stay up all night and you're gonna work on that
(28:53):
project for work, or you're going to you know, perfect
your appearance until you're unhealthy. You know, make those cupcakes Jannis,
Jannis is going to make those interest perfect. And so
it does it It gives that like it really drives
home the dangerous and tragic aspect of perfectionism that it's
not just color coding your bookcase or your folders or whatever,
(29:16):
that it is something that absolutely interferes with living your life. Yeah,
we've we've touched a couple of times on the idea
that perfectionism in and of itself might not be a disorder,
but it might be the interaction of a lot of
things that's causing distress. For instance, there were some British
psychologists that found that it was the interaction between perfectionism
(29:39):
and avoidance coping, which is dealing with problems by not
dealing with problems that predicted college students hopelessness and psychological distress,
not the perfectionism by itself or the avoidance coping by itself. Meanwhile,
there was another study in the Journal of Counseling Psychology
that found the perfectionists who had positive coping mechanisms weren't
(30:02):
any more depressed than the average person, which sort of
goes against some of the stuff we've been saying. But
they say that this supports the idea that perfectionism interacts
with other mental health traits as well as life events
to produce that psycho pathology. So what does that have
to do then, with women and girls? Is that psychopathology
(30:26):
more prevalent among us ladies, among the Janicis of the world,
if you will, um, because it comes up just colloquially
in a lot of the ways that we talk about
women and especially ambitious women of oh, she's just a perfectionist.
Girls always want to be perfect or the reason why
women aren't leaning in and getting ahead is because we
(30:47):
try to be perfect before we ask for raises or
promotions or go for new jobs. And all those things
are true statistically, yes, But is that perfectionism at work
because that perfect word, the P word, came up a
lot in research that we've done on the imposter syndrome UM.
(31:09):
For instance, Caddy k and Claire ship Men have written
a whole book about this. I think they call it
the Confidence Gap. And in the excerpt of that, which
was published in The Atlantic magazine, in they talk about
how women feel confident only when they're perfect or practically perfect,
and they go on to say that striving to be
(31:30):
perfect actually keeps us from getting much of anything done,
and they say it is such a given. Yeah. Well,
I think they actually say in that excerpt that, oh, well,
you know, we all know that women are more likely
to be perfectionist and to strive for perfection. And it's
and it's not that it's not true. It's obviously true
(31:54):
women some women are perfectionists and some perfectionists or women.
But I cannot find definitive study that said, yes, more
women are perfectionists more often than men are. There's a
lot of stuff out there that we see in other
mental health discussions in terms of it manifesting differently in
men and women. Men are more likely to kill themselves
(32:16):
or to self medicate with drugs and alcohol. Women are
more likely to go the anxiety and eating disorder root. Um.
But yeah, I I I understand the concept of like
oh more. Women clearly want to be perfect, especially when
you take it in terms of the imposter syndrome conversation,
because Shipment and k argue that girls get a lot
(32:39):
of praise for being perfect, which breeds approval seeking, and
their confidence takes a hit when they enter the real world.
That doesn't reward them for their perfect spelling in, their
perfect manners and the perfect lacy socks and their Mary
Jane shoes. But I don't think that that's an issue
of actual perfectionism so much as girls trying to out
achieve institutional sexism. Yeah, the and and certainly those ideas
(33:02):
are related, the idea of I have to work so
much harder to prove myself. Yes, the perfectionist is driven
by the fear or even the internal knowledge of failure. Um.
And that's kind of the same thing for impostor syndrome
of I feel like a fake. I have to work
so much harder to prove myself. But they're not one
and the same. Imposter syndrome is not necessarily nobody's having
(33:24):
a debate over whether imposter syndrome is in and of
itself a mental health disorder, right, And not surprisingly, one
group of people that's been looked at and studied in
terms of perfectionism is athletes. There was a two thousand
to study in Psychology of Sport and Exercise that found
a strong link between here we have that idea again,
(33:46):
negative perfectionism and social social physique anxiety for both men
and women. Uh. They found that there's a small link
between positive perfection and disordered eating in men. However, when
it comes to women, that negative perfectionism and the social
physique anxiety interacted to lead to disordered eating. So, like
(34:08):
how many times have I said interacted in this episode,
it tends to be all of these different things combining
to drive pathology. Well, so you know, like I said,
I couldn't find many definitive studies or books or papers
saying that yes, women experience perfectionism more than men do.
But I did find some interesting, some interesting research that's
(34:32):
been done on women and sex. And this is coming
from the book by Cindy Meston and David Buss called
Why Women Have Sex, and they talk about a survey
that Messton did that found that individual differences in perfectionism
were related to relationship fidelity and sexual variety seeking, which
is fascinating and scary if you're dating a perfectionist. Yeah,
(34:55):
in a nutshell. They found that women who were high
in perfectionism essentially to that perfectionism into the bedroom. They
said unrealistically high standards for themselves and others, and they
also had sex with more people compared to women low imperfectionism,
and they were more likely to have been unfaithful in
(35:16):
a sexual relationship. So perfectionists are likelier to be cheaters.
Interesting and bust and Messin think that the reason why
is because they appear to hold these unrealistic demands not
just from the people themselves, but from their sexual prowess
(35:37):
and performance, which causes them to be continually disappointed in
the bedroom, and so they look elsewhere, whether that means
stepping outside of the balance of a monogamous relationship or not.
So it seems like these people in this study might
be pretty likely to quickly flee a relationship rather than
(35:59):
working through problem rather than being like, hey, relationships take work.
Like I've been guilt. I have never cheated. I'm going
on record, um, but the I have been guilty of
in the past dating people and being like, you know what,
it's not It's not perfect anymore. But was this more
about relationships or was it just about sex? Well, this
particular thing was just about sex. So can we extrapolate
(36:21):
that sex to how they would function in a relationship
because the two are distinct. They are distinct. You're so
right and playing the sexual devil's advocate. I don't know
if I want I'm advocating for, but I just think
that I think sometimes that conflating the two leads us. Yeah,
that complicates things. Yeah, sex always complicated and it makes
(36:43):
you a woman. We but what do we do about this?
How do we treat perfectionism? How do we cope with it?
Because obviously there is that psychopathology. These are some of
us are wired in this perfectionistic kind of way. And
for people who don't deal with this ps telling your
(37:05):
perfectionist friend or loved one to just relax and kinna
do it. In staid, it's really focusing in on the
need to accept yourself and be cared for and take
care of that perfectionistic drive. Find the root of it. Essentially, well, yeah,
because it is those super high drives to be accepted
(37:27):
that drives perfectionism. So if you good with therapists and
you're like, why do I need to feel accepted and
loved by everyone around me? That will get to the
root of like, you don't have to be perfect. People
are gonna love you for being the imperfect person that
you are, and people are gonna dislike you. Yeah, oh yeah,
that's that's a that's a great thing to acknowledge and
totally embrace. Not everyone's gonna like you and everyone's gonna
(37:50):
think you're funny or pretty or cute or worth listening
to if you host a podcast, I don't understand why not, um,
but yeah, like you said, it's it's practicing compassion for yourself,
which is so hard considering that you guys out there
who are perfectionists. You have such high demands on everyone,
including yourself, And as my therapist says, forgiveness is our
(38:13):
most healing power, and that includes for yourself, not just
for the person who cut you off in traffic, And
so a good way to cope if you have perfectionism
or perfectionistic tendencies is to aim your focus at other people,
to volunteer, to get the focus off yourself and go
help others. And it's also helpful to develop some ways
(38:35):
to counter all of those what ifs and shoulds. So
one source we were reading said that it's great if
you name your fear, name your what if so, Like
what if, Okay, let's say Kristen and I are giving
a speech, Like what if I fail at this speech, Well,
then Blane will die immediately? What will happen? And it
will be written on our toolstone we failed the speech,
(38:57):
the room will explode. But then keep asking yourself, well,
then what so if I failed the speech, Um, I'm
probably gonna be embarrassed and somebody might write something bad
in the college paper about me. Well then what well,
It'll just blow over and then I'll go home and
I'll eat this print is dead. Prince is dead, so
no one will read it. So it's fine. And there's
also the idea of and this kind of ties into
(39:18):
cognitive behavioral therapy, which is also recommended for perfectionists, but
redirecting your what if so instead of being like, what
if I really f this up? Start asking what if
I succeed? What if I win? What if I s
this up? You know? What does S stand for? Okay?
I was like, I don't understand how the S word
(39:39):
works in this situation, Christen. But also the idea of
telling yourself that good enough is good enough because no
perfection perfectionists believes that, and I struggle with that mightily.
I don't even believe it's sitting here. But if you
keep repeating it to yourself as a mantra, that good
enough is good enough because no one is perfect and
(40:00):
literally perfection doesn't exist, it's not a thing. Setting realistic
expectations is also crucial. I have a challenge with this
where I see what I want and I don't break
it down into the tiny steps, because you have to
eat the old elephant one step at a time, one
bite at a time, not one step at a time.
Talking about eating an elephant, not walking over it. You
(40:21):
have to climb over the elephant one step at a time.
Both of these are ways to deal with procrastination. Well yeah, well,
I mean first you have the real realistic expectation setting. Yeah,
and then by doing that it will help with that
issue of procrastination that I also personally deal with, because
(40:42):
I mean, when everything just looks so huge, of course
you're not going to want to do it. And these
are also patterns that if you have kids, that you
can model to them, because oh gosh, I tell you,
I don't even have kids, but my terror is just
asking them up and that's for screwing succeeding. Well, yeah,
(41:03):
I mean, it's important to help kids understand that reaching
their potential and succeeding doesn't mean reaching perfection, that those
two things aren't the same, and the inner achievement, thinking skills, creativity, imagination,
risk taking, that these are all so valuable that they're
even more valuable than getting straight a's. Although I'm sure
there are people out there who would disagree with me,
(41:24):
and so they're a therapists out there who encourage parents
and aunts and uncles whoever you are, um to share
the stories of your own screw ups with kids, how
whether you overcame them or not, to show kids like, hey,
I'm still alive and successful and can and can human.
You can human too if you miss up. And you know,
this actually made me think about this woman that I'm
(41:46):
in a fitness class with who was just telling me
about how her son came home crying because his homework
was to color, and he was so nervous about coloring
outside the lines that he literally couldn't do it. He
c i'd and just would not do it, even though
she's like, your daddy and I love your pictures, We
want you to color outside the lines. You just do
(42:07):
your best, and that's all you can do. But he
was so petrified because at school they do great. Apparently,
in whatever preschool or kindergarten class he is, they do
get their gold stars for coloring within the lines, even
though mommy and daddy love it when he colors outside
the lines and does whatever he wants, and so it
sounds like someone he's out a talk with teacher. She
was telling me this, and I'm like, oh, this sounds
(42:29):
like well, first it sounds like me, but then it
sounds like perfectionism is starting to take root. And so
anything you can do to encourage yourself or your kids
to really just be creative and take those risks, I
think that's super mentally healthy. And perhaps another mentally healthy
thing that you can do is share your stories with us.
(42:50):
With some podcasters. I mean, we're curious to hear from
listeners if this resonates with you or with someone you
know or love. Mom Stubb at house stuffwork dot com
is our email address. You can also tweet us at
mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook. And we've got
a couple of messages to share with you right now. Well,
(43:15):
I have a letter here from Leaf in response to
our Significant Other episode. Leaf writes, I especially enjoyed the
little segment on gender neutral terms. As a non binary
transgender person with a long term sis gender girlfriend, this
is an issue that has permeated both my personal relationship
with her and also the way that we as a
couple are seeing to those around us. To most people,
(43:36):
we look like a fairly average lesbian couple. Even if
someone were to know that one of us is transgender,
the guests would more like more than likely be my girlfriend,
who is much more androgynous Lee presenting than myself. To
offset that, my girlfriend has taken to calling me her partner,
although that term in itself has cost just as much
confusion as anything else. You were absolutely right when you
mentioned that using partner either signifies a man's coworker, are
(44:00):
a sneaky lesbian term of endearment? Can we have that
movie Sneaky Lesbian terms of endearment? Anyway, back to the letter,
Leaf continues whenever my girlfriend refers to me as her partner,
whoever she's speaking to is always quick to correct her
and to get her to say I'm her girlfriend. We
have yet to find a way around this problem, as
(44:21):
even more gender gender neutral terms tend to sound childish
in an adult setting, and even if they didn't, the
common person probably would not be able to instantly queue
in on the meaning. It's just one of the many
problems non binary trans people have in social situations but
yet to be figured out well. So thanks for writing
to us about it, Leaf. I'm gonna let her hear
from Kayleie about our Native American Princess episode from a
(44:43):
while back, and she writes, I was listening to your
Native American Princess stereotyping episode and the commentary on how
these harmful stereotypes often harm young children's perspectives of their
native culture. My siblings and I are bi racial. Our
father's family belongs to be a Jibwa boys work band
in Northern Minnesota, and my mother is a strong Polish woman. Anyway,
(45:05):
when my parents were out, a family friend had to
swatch peter Pan for the first time, and while little
kids have a hard time understanding the totally racially charged
lyrics of the song what makes a Red Man Read,
my younger brother was terrified. He refused to go to bed,
and when my parents came home, my five year old
brother seriously confessed to my parents that he did not
want to be Native American anymore because in peter Pan
(45:27):
they were scary and tried to kill everyone. My parents
were mortified, to say the least, and that night we
all had a good talking to about American history, racism,
and how stereotypes of Native American people have suffered. So
after this very long, very emotional conversation and my parents
had with us, they asked my other younger brother what
he thought now, and he replied, now we must kill
(45:47):
the white man. Equally horrified, parental shrieks followed with no,
you're white too. While cute, it's always been a sad
story for us kids because it's the first time we
became aware the racism and struggle with identity that many
Native and biracial people feel. These scenes have not only
affected my siblings perspective on our culture, but also the
(46:09):
children around us in high school and middle school. When
our very white school found out that us kids were Native,
bullying and chance of Ali Ali Gum Gum followed me
for a while, and people called my younger sister Tiger
Lily and brother Running Bear behind their backs, and it
was far more common than I obviously would have liked.
For a while, it felt like being Native was humiliating,
(46:30):
and the fact that my family's tormentors used Disney references
to do it makes me sick to my stomach. So
that's why I hate Peter Pan. So thanks for your letter, Kaylee,
and thanks to everybody who's written into us. Mom. Stuff
at how stuff works dot com is our email address
and for links to all of our social media as
(46:51):
well as all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts with
this one including our sources. So you can learn more
about perfectionism. Head on over to stuff Mom Never Told
You dot com for moralness and thousands of other topics.
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