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Perfectionism

To Conquer Perfectionism, You Only Have to Fail

New research suggests that failure can be the key to conquer perfectionism.

Key points

  • Research suggests the constant craving for flawlessness can lead to an undue amount of self-criticism and even functional impairment.
  • New research shows intentional, controlled failure can help perfectionists worry less about mistakes.
  • Learning to live with failure after forcing oneself to fail can help people move past self-doubts.

People who struggle with perfectionism can find it impossible to move forward if the prospect of failure looms ahead. Perhaps you’re working on a project and have a certain idea of how you’d like it to turn out. In your head, you know exactly how it should look and perform. However, as you sit down to tackle it, all you can see are the many ways it could deviate from this idealized image. This type of situation may not have serious implications other than being a bit frustrating, but what if this desire to be perfect hampers your ability to get things done in a work or other group setting? People can get fed up with you if you constantly insist on redoing everything they start.

Perfectionism’s Perils

According to Florida State University’s Sarah Redden and colleagues (2022), “Perfectionism is defined as refusing to accept” anything short of “being flawless,” (p. 1), a definition that certainly makes sense. And might even be seen as a positive attribute. Instead, rather than being a desirable quality, Redden et al. suggest that the constant craving for flawlessness can lead to an undue amount of self-criticism and even “functional impairment.”

Adding complexity to the equation, the FSU researchers note that perfectionism isn’t a single unitary concept. Its four facets include “excessive” concern about making mistakes, high internal standards, an undue emphasis on precision, and doubts about one’s own actions. Even so, Redden and her coauthors propose that the concern over making mistakes is at the heart of perfectionism. When you factor in the idea that perfectionists define themselves in terms of this need to avoid messing up, you can see why this personality trait can lead not to pride in one’s work, but to viewing everything you do through the lens of where it fails to meet one’s own unrealistically high standards.

The Idea of Forced Mistakes as Treatment for Perfectionists

If avoiding a mistake is so central to perfectionism, then wouldn’t it make sense to try to reduce this fear directly? In a typical cognitive behavioral intervention for people seeking treatment, the therapist might incorporate the opposite approach, using intentional mistakes to help the individual realize that mess-ups aren’t as disastrous as they believe. However, this might not be enough, Redden and her coauthors argue. If mistake-making is so much a part of perfectionism, then it would be more efficacious to give individuals a strong dose of it and make this therapy’s main focus.

To test this proposition, the authors recruited a sample of 76 undergraduate women which they divided through random assignment into a treatment group (ETP) and a waitlist control group (WTL). The participants had been identified as high in perfectionism through a screening procedure that began with a sample of 1956 students who completed a standard perfectionism questionnaire. Further screening of the 296 high scorers selected from this sample involved a more intensive assessment that included a clinical interview.

The treatment itself, called Exposure-Based Treatment for Perfectionism, was administered through an online set of three tasks lasting approximately seven minutes. One session of these three tasks was repeated every three days for a total of five sessions over a two-week period.

The participants knew what they were in for before beginning the treatment as part of the instructions read as follows: “We are asking you to practice making mistakes over and over again in order to get used to the feeling of not doing things perfectly. Over time, we expect that you will not be bothered as much by making mistakes” (p. 4).

The three tasks were deliberately devised to be hard and were previously tested on a pilot sample to ensure that they caused distress. See how you think you would feel while completing them:

  1. Shape ordering: You see a series of shapes for 1 second each and then have 20 seconds to recall the order in which they are shown.
  2. Intentional misspelling: You are supposed to copy a phrase or short sentence and be told to spell at least three words wrong. After each trial, you get a message telling you that you were incorrect. This is repeated 12 times per session.
  3. Simple math task: You perform a simple math task for which you are given 10 seconds. You choose the answer to the task from a set of choices but in some cases, there are no correct answers to choose from.

If imagining yourself in these situations makes you very anxious, then you can understand how the participants must have felt. But could continuing to engage in these tasks for two weeks help lower your distress? Might you be willing to abandon some of your perfectionistic ideals? As it turned out, the ETP intervention in fact did lower the levels of perfectionism overall as well as concern over making mistakes.

What the authors found to be particularly impressive about their intervention was the fact that it didn’t take that long to have its intended effects. Typical psychotherapeutic methods might take from 6 to 12 weeks and, of course, require working with a therapist. If it’s possible for individuals to access this online intervention alone, this would give ETP an edge over other methods. What’s more, intentional mistake-making also produced lower levels of depression, perhaps associated with lowered levels of rumination, as well as lower levels of social anxiety.

The ”wow” factor of what the authors consider a “transdiagnostic” approach must be countered against the limitations that they themselves acknowledge. Their sample was drawn from university students, all of whom identified as women. It’s also important to keep in mind that they had a waitlist control, and not a control involving another form of treatment. These limitations aside, the weight of evidence from this study supports the value of forcing perfectionists to make mistakes in helping them to become more accepting of failure.

Using the Results in Your Own Life

If you are that person who becomes stymied by your fear of doing something wrong, the FSU results should provide you with some ideas about how to get over these bumps in your productivity. Don’t just wait to get a new project underway and then grin and bear it when something goes wrong. Try forcing yourself to complete the equivalent of some of these mistake-making tasks in a few low-stakes situations. Send emails to yourself that are full of tpyos (oops, I mean typos!). Try a new word game that you know will push you beyond your cognitive capacity and time yourself while you’re doing it.

Taking this one step further, consider preparing a meal for a friend or for someone who lives with you and overcook one of the side dishes. Do they even notice this? If they do, does it make a difference? Even if someone comments or turns their nose up, chances are that this slight deviation from perfection won't change anyone's enjoyment of the experience.

In part, these steps involve some cognitive restructuring as you realize that mistakes aren’t that bad after all. However, even without putting a positive spin on the mistake, the FSU study suggests that simple repetition alone might be enough to take your perfectionism down a few notches.

To sum up, it’s fine to want to perform well. When this desire has the unintended effect of lowering your ability to get things done as well as your sense of self-worth, a paradoxical bit of mistake-making may be all you need to reach both greater self-acceptance and fulfillment.

References

Redden, S. A., Patel, T. A., & Cougle, J. R. (2022). Computerized treatment of perfectionism through mistake making: A preliminary study. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 77, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2022.101771

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