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Key points
- Perfectionism is based on a faulty risk-reward assessment that the reward of overanalyzing outweighs the risk of not making the perfect decision.
- In reality, overanalysis itself comes at a cost that is not worth it in terms of stress, anxiety, and wasted time.
- Allowing for imperfections gradually teaches your brain that imperfection is not dangerous, which reduces anxiety in the long term.
I see many clients who are what I call "life optimizers": folks who are very perfectionistic about making their life go the best way that it could possibly go. The problem, of course, is that there is always a lot of uncertainty about how exactly to accomplish that, and with uncertainty tends to come anxiety.
Perfectionists get very analytical.
They analyze decisions both big and small, they analyze how well past decisions have worked for them, and they analyze how they are feeling to see if it matches how they believe they should be feeling.
They are constantly going back and forth in their heads about what the right move is and what choices they should make. Over time, this becomes more exhausting and stressful, and anxiety grows.
Perfectionists usually recognize very easily that they are perfectionists and that this is causing anxiety. They then tend to get perfectionistic about what they should do about the anxiety itself. It's a hard cycle to break out of. If you're reading this post, perhaps this resonates for you.
The problem with perfectionism is that you use a faulty risk-reward equation.
Let's take an example of deciding where to go for a vacation:
The way the perfectionist sees such a decision is, "There are all these possible choices for where I could go on vacation, but only one of them is the best one, the vacation where I will have the most fun and get the most bang for my buck. I must research and consider all the possible information about all possible vacation destinations. If I do this, the reward will be that I will have the best possible vacation. If I don't do this, the risk is that I will have a bad experience on vacation, and I will miss out on something better. Therefore, I must do whatever it takes to figure out the best vacation destination."
The big thing this line of logic is missing is that there are also huge risks in putting that much research and analysis into finding the best possible vacation. Those risks are:
- Decision-making is stressful, and trying to optimize life requires a lot of time spent in decision-making mode. It, therefore, guarantees stress and anxiety in the short term.
- Avoiding anxiety triggers in the short-term leads to more anxiety in the long term. It may seem like spending less time analyzing the vacation decision would be avoiding that decision, but really the trigger here is uncertainty about whether the right vacation will be chosen, and all the analysis time serves to attempt to avoid that uncertainty, which is what perpetuates the anxiety about such decisions in the long run. Therefore, doing the perfectionistic behavior of overanalyzing the decision will actually create more anxiety about similar decisions in the future. So you also get more anxiety in the long run.
- You waste time that you could have spent on more enjoyable things.
The above analysis also ignores the likelihood of the risk versus the likelihood of the reward. Past a certain minimal point of analysis, it is unlikely that further analysis will actually lead to a better decision. But it is practically guaranteed that more analysis will lead to stress and anxiety.
A more accurate and healthy risk-reward assessment would look like this: "If I choose to devote all this time to analyzing what would be the best possible vacation, the reward would be that there is a small chance that I will slightly increase my odds of picking a great vacation. However, there will be an enormous cost of stress, anxiety, and wasted time. That risk heavily outweighs that reward and is not worth it. Plus, the risk is much more likely to happen than the reward. Therefore, I will only give a little bit of time to figuring out where I should go on vacation; then I will just take my best guess, even though I'm not sure, and I will then spend the time that I would have spent analyzing on more fun activities."
The big takeaway here is that the antidote to anxiety created by perfectionism is to allow for imperfections in your life even though it is uncomfortable to do so.
I often give my perfectionistic clients the motto, "Let things be wrong."
By not letting things be wrong and trying to make everything go perfectly, you are making something rather major go horribly wrong: your mental health. It's not worth it.
Letting things be wrong saves you stress, anxiety, and time. It also gradually teaches your brain that the risk of imperfection is not actually dangerous. This is the principle of the most effective treatment for anxiety, exposure therapy.
Your brain will get used to this risk over time and allowing imperfection will get easier and easier. You will then be able to live more loosely and freely without feeling so stuck on trying to make life perfect.
