Perfectionism is a trait that, when kept in check, can foster goal-setting and achievement. However, it can easily spiral to unhealthy levels and become a drive to avoid failure instead of a drive to succeed.1 If you often feel stressed and anxious about not measuring up, it may be impacting your mental and physical health.
Perfectionism can be a deeply ingrained trait. It’s more than a bad habit. It’s a set of beliefs, feelings, and actions that is insidious, affecting you at your core. Therefore, there are no quick fixes for perfectionism. Instead, overcoming perfectionism is a gradual process that can be incredibly freeing, allowing you to live more fully and with greater health in both mind and body.
Before we dive into the 12 tips, here’s a bonus tip for you: Don’t approach these tips like, well, a perfectionist. Rather than forming unhealthy and unrealistic expectations for instant results and micromanaging and judging your progress, consider these steps a journey to freedom and self-discovery. Start with the tip that is most appealing to you or feels most doable, and gradually add others as you go.
Here are 12 tips for overcoming perfectionism:
1. Separate Yourself From Your Inner Critic
Perfectionism is a loud inner critic telling you you’re not good enough no matter what you do or how hard you work.15 It’s very difficult to like who you are and feel competent and confident when negative self-talk is constantly screeching over the top of other thoughts and emotions. Therefore, an important first step in overcoming perfectionism is distancing yourself from your inner critic.
Our thoughts seem real and accurate. However, the truth about thoughts is that they are highly unreliable and not a clear, reliable reflection of our real, outer world.19 Recognize that your thoughts about yourself, including the belief that your worth is dependent on your performance and results, are only that—unreliable ideas that, while loud and incessant, do not represent reality.
Separating yourself from your inner critic, then, is helpful in breaking free from perfectionism. In acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), this distancing is called defusion (because you are de-fusing yourself from your problems, including negative thoughts fueling perfectionism).20
One simple way to begin distancing yourself from perfectionism is to notice your thoughts and beliefs and remind yourself, “I’m having the thought that I’m not good enough (or whatever lie your critic is feeding you at the moment). It’s a thought and isn’t necessarily true.” Doing this over and over again begins to turn the tables on your self-doubt. You’re gently taking a few steps back and making room for different thoughts to begin to replace perfectionistic ones, including thoughts of self-compassion.
2. Foster Self-Compassion
Building and embracing self-compassion is key in overcoming perfectionism because the two concepts are closely linked.16 In fact, self-compassion is one of the greatest protections against perfectionism and its unhealthy effects; self-criticism and perfectionism are factors in many mental health disorders, and self-compassion is a buffer.3
Numerous studies have shown that fostering self-compassion is highly effective in reducing perfectionism, stress, anxiety, depression, and more.21 Two studies, one looking at the perfectionism-reducing effectiveness of self-compassion in adults and the other in adolescents, demonstrated that boosting self-compassion did indeed reduce depression in both adults and teens who were self-reported perfectionists.22
Fortunately, self-compassion can be learned and nurtured. To foster self-love and replace self-criticism and the drive to avoid failure and other imagined negative consequences, begin adding these strategies to your life:16,22
- Notice how you talk to yourself, and after distancing yourself from your inner critic, begin to replace harsh belittling with realistic and encouraging words
- Consciously begin to treat yourself with kindness, forgiveness, and understanding
- Connect to a sense of shared humanity, looking at others’ mistakes and granting yourself permission to make your own
Be patient with yourself as you begin to nurture self-compassion. To change a deeply ingrained belief takes time. Know that your words and actions are powerful, and you can change the way you think about yourself. Even if you don’t feel that you deserve it and tend to deny your new, more compassionate thoughts, act and think with self-compassion anyway. The actions and self-talk come first. Your beliefs will follow.
3. Tune In to Yourself & Keep Track of Your Thoughts
In order to distance yourself from your inner critic and foster self-compassion, it’s important to become more actively aware of your perfectionistic thoughts and beliefs. Often, we bully ourselves automatically and relentlessly, and it becomes so automatic that we’re not always consciously aware of how damaging our self-talk and core beliefs are. Begin to listen to yourself so you can catch your bully in the act and bring it into your full awareness so you can actively deal with it.16
Consider keeping a daily journal to recognize, track, and reflect on your thoughts. You can set aside time for a journaling practice, or you can jot down thoughts on-the-go, using your phone or notebook that you always have handy to record your self-talk as it occurs. Catch your thoughts in a way that works for you (there isn’t a right or wrong—or perfect—way to do it). Instead, what matters is that you begin to notice your thoughts, feelings, and self-talk and look at them objectively rather than just accepting them as true. This way, you can then take steps to change them and overcome perfectionistic beliefs.11
4. Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a way of being with yourself and your world that involves pulling yourself out of your thoughts and into the present moment.23 Use your senses to ground yourself in the moment (for example, focus on an object, someone you’re with, or your surroundings and notice visual details, textures, smells, and sounds, giving them your full attention). This helps shift your focus from negative thoughts and self-criticisms and lets you just be present in what you’re doing without judging yourself or your work. Mindfulness helps prevent people from overidentifying with their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, and as such is an important element in self-compassion.16,21
You can practice mindfulness without formal training, but programs do exist to help you learn about the depths of the practice and gain techniques for living mindfully. One such training that can be quite helpful in learning mindfulness to overcome perfectionism is mindful self-compassion (MSC) training.21 It’s a structured, 8-week program that teaches participants mindfulness and meditations, including lovingkindness meditation, as well as provides tools as practices to boost self-compassion. In a 2013 randomized controlled study, participants who received MSC training increased their compassion for themselves and others, boosted life satisfaction, and decreased perfectionism, stress, anxiety, depression, and emotional avoidance.
5. Cultivate Acceptance
Acceptance is a component of mindfulness and self-compassion that involves becoming aware of your perfectionistic thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and behaviors without judging them. Instead of denying difficulties, which only makes them grow stronger beneath the surface, acceptance allows you to face them and deal with them.21 It also means accepting yourself fully for who you are, approaching yourself with understanding and forgiveness rather than criticism.
Psychotherapist and author Tara Brach offers the RAIN method to foster acceptance for yourself and the challenges you face, an approach she adapted from Buddhist teacher Michele McDonald:24
- Recognize your thoughts (tuning into your inner critic lets you do this)
- Allow yourself to feel the way you do, accepting yourself and your experiences fully rather than criticizing or judging yourself hardly for them
- Investigate your thoughts and feelings, in this case as they relate to perfectionism, exploring whether they’re completely true
- Natural awareness, fostering this awareness and acceptance as a way to let go of harsh beliefs like perfectionism
6. Focus on Your Strengths
Often, trying to tell a perfectionist that they’re good enough or that they’re human, imperfect like everyone else, doesn’t work.18 Instead, identify your strengths and what you do well in all aspects of your life, and use them as concrete evidence of your abilities. Knowing and embracing your strengths is a powerful way to build self-confidence and self-efficacy because they’re an inherent part of who you are.25
Your character strengths aren’t conditional. They aren’t dependent upon achievement, and they don’t have to be earned or proven. Focusing on your strengths allows you to embrace the positive aspects of you. It’s a realistic way of reducing perfectionism that goes beyond the hollow statement that “you’re human.”
7. Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
As you embrace your strengths, focus on yourself and what you do well rather than on whether you measure up to others. One of the biggest traps of perfectionism that continually fuels the fire is social comparison, scrutinizing what others are doing and deciding that you fall short.11,26 Breaking the habit of comparing yourself to others involves mindfulness, using kind, compassionate self-talk to replace self-criticism about how you’re inadequate compared to everyone else, and challenging negative self-judgments.1
8. Find Your Own Meaning & Purpose
Perfectionism is a trap of narrow, negative, all-or-nothing thinking that causes people to place selective attention on striving to meet unattainable goals.4 It can make it difficult for people to feel accomplished and enjoy feelings of satisfaction that come with success.5 People trapped in perfectionism tend to hyperfocus on the process and become mired in self-criticism, making it difficult to see the big picture, the reason why they are doing what they do. Perfectionism can thus become a dark pit of purposelessness.
One way to overcome perfectionism is to regain a sense of your big purpose, your “why.” Having a sense of meaning in the roles you have can help you step back and gain perspective. Logotherapy is an approach to wellbeing that is centered upon living with meaning and purpose; according to logotherapy, a sense of meaning is what empowers us to overcome any obstacle.27 Rather than getting caught up in small details and worrying about mistakes or inadequacies, approaching yourself and your life with a strong sense of meaning can help you loosen yourself from perfectionism’s tight, confining trap.
9. Rekindle Your Sense of Pleasure & Gratitude
Instead of waiting until you’ve fully overcome perfectionism before you can enjoy your life, take steps now to allow yourself to experience pleasure now, moment by moment.16 As you live mindfully, focus your attention on the small things in your life that you enjoy. Use your strengths to spark joy. If one of your strengths is love of learning, for example, allow yourself to explore topics of interest just for fun rather than for an end goal. Hone a sense of gratitude for what is good in yourself and in your life, reminding yourself that there is already good in your life—you don’t constantly have to strive for perfection in yourself or in your work in order to notice and enjoy the good.
10. Think About Your Life at 100
This therapy exercise helps people overcome obstacles like perfectionism by gaining perspective on habits and mindsets that are holding them back. Picture yourself on your 100th birthday, looking back on your life. What were you like? Did you live in a way that you valued, embracing what was important to you? How do you feel both mentally and physically?
Then, reflect on this. Does perfectionism fit into the life you want to look back on? What adjustments can you start making to create your quality life undaunted by perfectionism?
11. Enlist the Help of a Therapist
Perfectionism can be connected to anxiety, depression, shame, and a host of other negative, life-challenging experiences. It can be hard to overcome this on your own. If you’re finding it difficult to let go of some of your beliefs underlying your sense of perfectionism, working with a mental health professional can be extremely beneficial.15,28 One type of therapy that can be especially useful in helping you change automatic negative thought patterns is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).11 This approach can help you reduce all-or-nothing thinking and lift the rules and “shoulds” that you have imposed on yourself.
12. Let Yourself Experiment
Anxiety and fear, with their “what-ifs” and worst-case-scenarios, are a hallmark of perfectionism. Recall that perfectionism is more about avoiding failure than it is about gaining success, and this mindset can prevent people from taking steps to overcome perfectionism. If you’ve found yourself instantly coming up with reasons why these tips won’t work for you, developing an experimental mind-set might be helpful. This involves meeting your “what-ifs” where they are and turning them around.
Conduct some small experiments to test what might happen if you replace a perfectionist behavior, such as overworking, with something healthy, such as taking breaks.3 You just might learn that your imagined consequences don’t happen. Even better, you might find that you start to feel a little bit lighter and more joyful.
What Is Perfectionism?
A healthy sense of perfectionism involves motivation to strive for excellence and success with realistic expectations, whereas maladaptive perfectionism is driven by fear of failure, unrealistic expectations, harsh self-criticism, and a pervasive sense of inadequacy.2,3 Here, we’re examining unhealthy perfectionism. This type has a negative orientation (the goal is more to avoid failure and criticism than to achieve success), and it can be incredibly toxic.
Knowing that perfectionism involves the imposition, from yourself or others, of excessively high standards and a pressure to avoid failure can be helpful in understanding this toxic trait. Let’s look a little more closely at the nuances of perfectionism.
Traits & Signs of Perfectionism
If you’re wondering whether you might be a perfectionist, consider the following traits and signs of perfectionism. You don’t have to have all of them in order to consider yourself a perfectionist. Reflecting on them to see how many apply to you might help you determine the degree to which perfectionism may be interfering in your life and wellbeing.
Perfectionism incorporates thoughts, feelings, and behaviors such as:1,4,5,7,10,11
- Never feeling satisfied with your accomplishments (either believing they’re not good enough or, if they are, you now have a new bar to always reach)
- Fear of failure that can be paralyzing
- Distorted thoughts, sometimes called automatic negative thoughts, such as
- Black-and-white (all-or-nothing) thinking (anything other than perfection is failure)
- “Shoulds” (rules imposed on yourself for how you should be doing)
- Discounting or minimizing your accomplishments or positive qualities
- Overgeneralizing “failure” (anything less than perfect on one project or in one area of your life means that you’re a complete failure)
- Ruminating over what you could have done better in any given situation
- Harsh self-criticism and seeing yourself as flawed or even worthless if you’re not perfect
- Procrastination, including creating a set of criteria that must be met before you can start something or putting off completing something because you need to make changes and improvements
- Tying your sense of self-worth to your performance and achievement
- Difficulty enjoying your work or roles because of pressure to achieve, focusing almost exclusively on results rather than the process
- An inability or refusal to acknowledge a need for rest and breaks
- Tendencies of workaholism
- Having an unhealthy sense of responsibility for other people or outcomes that aren’t directly in your control
- Feeling as though you must constantly be “on”
- Defensiveness and difficulty accepting even constructive criticism given kindly
- Low self-esteem or self-efficacy (the belief that you have what it takes to accomplish something)
The various traits of perfectionism can be present in just one area of your life, such as your work or school, or they can invade everything you do and all the roles you have. The more pervasive perfectionism is and the more characteristics you have, the more likely it is that perfectionism is interfering in your well-being.
It’s important to be aware of maladaptive perfectionism because it’s a problem that is steadily rising. In a study analysis reported in 2019 in the journal Psychological Bulletin, researchers analyzed 164 studies involving 41,641 college students in America, Canada, and Great Britain between 1989 and 2016 and discovered that perfectionism has been steadily increasing over time.5 Given the strong link between unhealthy perfectionism and mental and physical health problems, this trend is disturbing.
The Link Between Perfectionism & Other Mental Concerns
The risks and consequences of perfectionism can be dire. It can negatively impact people on all levels, causing negative thinking patterns and emotions; creating feelings of shame, inadequacy, self-doubt, and low self-esteem; leading to actions like avoidance or procrastination; disrupting relationships; interfering in mental and physical health, and generally preventing one from experiencing inner peace and wellbeing. It can lead to exhaustion and a sense of emotional and physical depletion—including burn-out—and make it difficult to fully enjoy the positive aspects of life.8
Perfectionism is associated with a host of negative experiences, among them:3,4,8,11,12,13
- Ongoing frustration
- Anger (especially in the case of socially prescribed perfectionism when perceived expectations from others is unrealistic)
- Fear
- Self-doubt
- Need to please (and avoid displeasing) others
- The belief that love and approval from others must be earned through impeccable, spotless performance
- A sense of shame for being unable to reach unrealistic standards and be acceptable
- Self-blame
- Insomnia
- Stress and ongoing pressure
- Self-harm
- Suicidal ideation and attempts
While perfectionism itself isn’t a mental illness, it is connected to numerous mental health disorders. Perfectionism is one trait among many, and mental illnesses are complex experiences with both contributing factors and effects. Perfectionism can contribute to the development of certain conditions like anxiety, depression, or eating disorders, and it can be a trait that is present in existing mental health disorders.
Numerous studies have shown that it is associated with many different types of mental disorders, including:1,4,11,12,14,15,16,17
- Depression
- Anxiety (especially generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder)
- Agoraphobia
- Bipolar disorder
- Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and binge-eating disorders
- Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Hoarding disorder
- Avoidant personality disorder
- Dependent personality disorder
- Passive-aggressive personality disorder
- Schizoid personality disorder
- Borderline personality disorder
- Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (although one study found that perfectionism was not strongly associated with OCPD)4
Researchers have also linked perfectionism to physical health conditions and experiences of feeling unwell and has shown a correlation between perfectionism and illnesses or negative health experiences such as:2,3,15,16,18
- High blood pressure
- Cardiovascular disease
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Chronic pain, including fibromyalgia
- Chronic fatigue syndrome or general exhaustion
- Increased difficulty recovering from illness
- Shorter lifespan/early mortality
Medical News Today captures the perils of perfectionism well. “Perfectionism is bad for you. Not just ‘not ideal’ or ‘harmful when excessive,’ but actively bad. Like cigarettes or obesity.”16
Reducing your sense of perfectionism doesn’t mean that you will achieve less; in fact unhealthy perfectionism has ironically been found to lessen the amount of work people do and reduce the quality of their work.2 What it does mean is that you’ll let go of unhealthy, limiting beliefs and behaviors so you can pursue your dreams with a sense of ease and peace.
Additional Resources for Overcoming Perfectionism
For more information about how to overcome perfectionism, visit the following organizations:
