Kıymet SAĞLIK EROZ
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.Leonard Cohen
Waiting for everything to be perfect to take action, being afraid of making mistakes, giving up even when one instance of plans has gone wrong, the fear of failure or the success, self-doubt, setting or trying to achieve unrealistic performance targets and also sharp self-criticism… all of these are the modes caused by perfectionism, which results in psychological stress.
Most of us think that perfectionism is a positive thing. However, researches point out the inherent danger and health problems of this attitude.
Perfectionism is an attitude which prevents an individual to take action making him/her hold-back. Furthermore, it may cause a number of important problems such as depression, anxiety, obsession, nutrition disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, sleep withdrawal, chronic headache, dyspepsia, early death and suicide. Making mistakes and learning from these mistakes is a natural attribute of an adult life contributing an individual in being more successful in his/her career and relationships, in general. However, if you are a perfectionist, then you will yourself make difficult to achieve your goals since you avoid making mistakes. Perfectionists, generally, overpersonalize a “flawed” result and see it as a measure of their very own values: And concludes “I am not good as much as I must be”. A research showed that the silver medalists have a happiness level of 4.8 on a scale of 10 even tough they are the best second in their fields in the world.
Families are generally success-oriented. They set stringent performance standards for their children and go on harsh criticisms when they fail to achieve expected result. In this setting, kids think that they would be loved had they were successful. In the perception of a kid, his/her value depends on him/her being perfect. This causes perfectionism to develop during early ages.
Experts assert that it would be more correct to define perfectionism as a healthy one or unhealthy one. Accepted as ‘healthy’ due to the characteristics such as having high standards, motivation and discipline, this attitude may turn into a unhealthy one when an individual never sees himself/herself as good enough, as a result holding him/her back to achieve his/her goals, making it impracticable. One should distinguish between a healthy desire for perfectionism, and a stressful, anxious, ever-sought need to reach perfectionism. To this end, one must closely investigate and scrutinize to see what extent perfectionism have permeated ones life.
Today, perfectionism has become an ever-growing problem which negatively affects ones life.
Studies of Thomas Curran and Andrew Hills across UK, USA and Canada show that the perfectionism trend among university students from 1989 to 2016 has been ever growing at an increasing rate. According to Katie Rasmussen of West Virginia University, “Two of every five children and adolescents are perfectionist. This has been becoming a plague and a matter of public health.”
Researching the perfectionism for 30 years and developed a rating scale, Gordon Flett says that individuals with this disposition are under “constant stress”. Moreover, despite they make up a “workaholic” defense, they cannot spare time to relax, depriving brain and body of a healthy functioning.
If such individual has an unrealistic perfectionism standard and has already embraced it fully, he/she begins to be overdoubtful of himself/herself and develop harsh self-criticisms. And this leads to an error-aversion behavior for short episodes. This attitude may sometimes become a permanent and long standing one. For this reason, an individual being feared of failure, making mistakes denies an evaluation of his/her performance, making the delay a habit. As a result, behaviors such as avoiding long-term tasks and lack of last-minute fights arise. All these demonstrate that perfectionismstress relation is governed and steered by the habit of delay.
Then, What Are The Ways Of Overcoming Perfectionism?
Overcoming perfectionism is very critical for one to relieve of its negative effects. To this end, these steps may be followed:
- Recognize and be aware of your perfectionist behaviors, accept that you are a perfectionist and make self-awareness studies. In this process, make an analysis of profit-loss generated by your perfectionism and evaluate the results. With this profit-loss analysis, you may derive motivation necessary for change. Focus on your successes to raise your self-awareness. Write down what have you succeeded in until now.
- Always focus on big picture and be aware of your thoughts. Perfectionists get drowned with the details. Therefore, neither they can manage their times, nor they have proper concentration on the matters at hand. Ask yourself what and to what extent you can delegate works that you cannot make a progress and have issues, and involve in these works only during the control process. Write down on paper which thoughts create barriers against you, and write new sentences that you can do and will activate you, which correspond to each barrier, and then apply them.
- See what meanings you give to which words and learn how to steer your feelings. Perfectionists are, generally, the harshest self-critics. Their inner voices incessantly judge and criticize themselves. Even slightest mistakes are judged as a big failure. The first step to take here is to recognize and embrace the idea that “a mistake is a mistake which cannot be judged as a failure”. If you change your perspective towards mistakes, then you will enhance your potential of progress and learning.
- Give up your habit of delaying and accordingly change your behaviors. Perfectionism goes hand in hand with laziness. We wait everything to be exactly complete to do a job or to take action. Pursuers of perfectionism never feel themselves ready for anything. There is always something missing. While waiting, they lose necessary motivation and energy and can never catch the right time to take action or start. The best learning method is to learn while practicing despite of mistakes. Therefore, it is important to take action without waiting for the perfect moment for that you will be ready, namely to make progress without delay.
