Somewhere along the way, perfectionism got itself a rather good publicist.
It’s the only so-called flaw people are actively encouraged to bring up in job interviews. “What’s your biggest weakness?” someone asks, and half the room reaches, almost gratefully, for the same answer: “I suppose I’m a bit of a perfectionist.” Said with a small, self-deprecating smile, as though confessing to owning too many scented candles.
It’s a peculiar kind of flaw, the sort you’re allowed to be quietly proud of. Which is odd, because in the room with me, perfectionism rarely looks proud of itself. It looks exhausted.
The Standards Were Never Really the Point
Here’s the assumption I want to gently dismantle, because it underpins almost everything perfectionism gets wrongly credited for: that perfectionism is fundamentally about wanting things to be excellent.
It isn’t, not really. High standards are a by-product. What’s actually running the show, in my experience, is something considerably less flattering and considerably more interesting, a deep, often unconscious belief that mistakes are dangerous. Not embarrassing. Not inconvenient. Dangerous, in the old, nervous-system sense of the word, as though getting something wrong might genuinely cost you something you can’t afford to lose.
Ask a genuine high-achiever how they feel about a task well done, and you’ll usually get some version of satisfaction. Ask a perfectionist the same question and you’ll often get relief. That’s the tell. Satisfaction and relief are not the same emotional weather system, and only one of them is sustainable long-term.
What Perfectionism Is Actually Doing For You
I’ve come to think of perfectionism less as a personality trait and more as a rather elaborate security system, one installed a long time ago, for reasons that made complete sense at the time, and never quite decommissioned since.
Somewhere in a person’s history, being flawless, or at least appearing to be. became linked to safety. Sometimes that’s safety from criticism. Sometimes it’s safety from a parent’s disappointment, which, in a child’s world, can feel indistinguishable from losing their love altogether. Sometimes it’s safety from simply being noticed at all, in a household where the quiet, competent child got left alone, and the messy, needy one got the shouting.
None of this requires a dramatic backstory. A teacher’s off-hand comment, repeated enough times, will do it. So will growing up the eldest of several siblings, quietly absorbing that being “the sensible one” was the role on offer and the applause was conditional on playing it well.
Whatever the specific origin, the logic that gets laid down is roughly this: if I don’t get it wrong, nobody can be disappointed in me. If nobody can be disappointed in me, I’m safe. It’s an entirely sensible strategy for a small person with limited power over their circumstances. It becomes rather less sensible around age thirty-four, when you’re still proofreading a WhatsApp message four times before sending it to a friend you’ve known since university.
The Difference Between Trying Hard and Never Trusting It’s Enough
I sometimes ask clients a fairly simple question: when was the last time you finished something and just let it be finished?
The answer is usually a long pause, followed by something like, “I don’t think I do that.”
This is the part that separates conscientiousness from perfectionism rather neatly. A conscientious person does good work, feels satisfied, and moves on. A perfectionist does good work, feels a flicker of something that might have been satisfaction if it had been allowed to stay, and then immediately starts hunting for the flaw that will justify the anxiety they were already feeling before they’d even opened the email.
It’s exhausting, obviously. But it’s also, in a strange way, familiar, which is precisely why it persists. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between “this feels bad” and “this feels dangerous” nearly as cleanly as we’d like. If perfectionism has kept you feeling safe, or at least in control, for the past three decades, your system isn’t going to relinquish it just because you’ve read an article about self-compassion on your lunch break. Sorry. I wish it were that easy. It would put me out of a job, but I’d cope.
Perfectionism and the Fear of Being Ordinary
There’s a quieter thread running underneath a lot of perfectionism that rarely gets named, so I’ll name it here: the fear of being ordinary.
Not bad. Not incompetent. Just ordinary, a person who sometimes does average work, has an average day, sends an average email with a typo in it, and remains, despite all this, entirely lovable. For many perfectionists, that idea is genuinely more threatening than the idea of failing spectacularly. At least spectacular failure has some drama to it. Ordinariness offers nothing to hide behind.
“If I’m not the reliable one, the capable one, the one who never drops the ball,” one client said to me, with the particular bluntness that tends to arrive in later sessions, “then who even am I?”
That’s rarely a rhetorical question. It’s usually the actual question sitting underneath the spreadsheet colour-coding and the three-times-redrafted email.
Why “Just Lower Your Standards” Never Works
I imagine you’ve been told this before, possibly by someone well-meaning at a dinner party who has never once redone the same paragraph nine times at midnight. “You just need to let things go a bit.” Thank you. Genuinely. I’ll add it to the pile of advice that is technically true and completely useless.
It doesn’t work because the standards were never the actual mechanism. Telling a perfectionist to lower their standards is a bit like telling someone with a fear of flying to simply enjoy the turbulence. You’re addressing the symptom while the underlying alarm system remains fully operational, sensors twitching, utterly unconvinced by your reassurance.
What tends to help far more is getting curious about what the perfectionism is protecting against, specifically, for you. Not perfectionism in general, yours. What does a mistake actually threaten to expose or provoke? Whose voice tends to arrive first when something goes slightly wrong? What would happen, really, if you let a piece of work be simply good enough and stopped there?
Often, when we trace it back, the fear underneath isn’t really about the task at all. It’s about what the task has come to represent, worth, safety, belonging, being allowed to exist without constantly earning your place.
Learning to Tolerate “Good Enough”
This is where the work tends to get genuinely uncomfortable, in the useful sense of the word. Because “good enough” isn’t a lower bar dressed up in kinder language. For a perfectionist, it can feel almost transgressive, like walking out of the house without checking you’ve locked the door, when checking has been your entire relationship with safety for as long as you can remember.
Learning to tolerate good enough usually happens in small, unglamorous increments. Sending the email after one read-through instead of four. Leaving a small, deliberate imperfection in something and noticing that the world, somehow, fails to end. Letting someone see a slightly rougher version of your work, or your thinking, or you, and discovering that connection often deepens rather than evaporates when it does.
None of this happens because someone tells you to relax. It happens gradually, through actually testing the old belief against present-day reality, ideally with someone alongside you who isn’t going to flinch, judge, or secretly agree that you really should have caught that typo.
Reaching Out for Support
If perfectionism has been quietly running your life, showing up as exhaustion, self-criticism, or a nagging sense that you’re never quite doing enough, it might be worth exploring what it’s actually protecting you from, rather than simply trying to manage it better.
At Serenity of Mind Therapy, I offer psychodynamic therapy both online and in-person at my therapy rooms in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, and Crowborough, East Sussex. Together we can get curious about where your perfectionism began, what it’s still trying to keep you safe from, and what it might feel like to put some of that weight down.
If any of this feels familiar, you’re very welcome to contact me here.