‘Harvard Thinking’: The perils of perfectionism

Jennifer Breheny Wallace: I shudder when I hear people bragging about perfectionism or saying perfectionism can be good; healthy striving, striving for excellence is good. Perfectionism? I just don’t see any good that comes of it.

Samantha Laine Perfas: Many people hold themselves to extremely high standards, but when the scales tip to the pursuit of perfection, it can result in anxiety, depression, and other serious mental health issues.

So how do we know when we’ve gone too far in trying to do our best?

Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life.

Today I’m joined by:

Michaela Kerrissey: I’m Michaela Kerrissey. I’m an associate professor of management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Laine Perfas: She studies how organizations and teams innovate and improve, and is also an alum of the Harvard Business School. Then:

Ellen Hendriksen: Ellen Hendriksen. I’m a clinical assistant professor at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders.

Laine Perfas: She did post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School and is the author of “How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists.” And finally:

Wallace: Jennifer Wallace. I’m a journalist and author of two books: The first one was “Never Enough,” and the forthcoming, “Mattering: The Secret to Building a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose.”

Laine Perfas: She graduated from Harvard College in 1994.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for The Harvard Gazette. Today we’ll talk about perfectionism and the benefits of accepting when we’re less than perfect.

Ellen, in your book you argue perfectionism itself is an imperfect word or kind of a misnomer. Could you explain?

Hendriksen: Perfectionism is often thought of as a desire to be perfect, a striving to have no mistakes, no flaws. But in my clinical work, I’ve really found the opposite to be true. No one ever comes in and identifies as a perfectionist. Instead, people come in and say, “I feel like a failure. I feel like I’m falling behind. I feel like I am letting everybody down.” So the way it manifests in my experience is that it does come across as never feeling good enough.

“No one ever comes in and identifies as a perfectionist. Instead, people come in and say, ‘I feel like a failure.’”

Wallace: So the way I think about perfectionism is the belief that my self-worth is tied to being perfect, so that I only feel good about myself when I’m perfect. And when I fail or experience setbacks, then I feel like those failures are an indictment of my worth.

Kerrissey: What I really appreciate about both of these definitions is that they get this idea that in many ways, perfectionism is this mindset that we bring to the work that we’re doing and to how we feel about the work that we’re doing. I like that — as part of how we think about it — because it means that we also have a choice and that there’s some discretion that we can have. And that, I think, is freeing.

Laine Perfas: Perfectionism manifests in different ways for different people. What does it look like in reality, and why is it so prevalent?

Wallace: When we’re thinking about perfectionism, researchers who study it have looked at three kinds of perfectionism. So there’s the self-oriented perfectionism, which is requiring perfection of oneself. Then there’s other-oriented perfectionism, which is needing others to be perfect. And then there’s something called socially prescribed perfectionism. And that is believing that others require us to be perfect. And what Tom Curran, a researcher in the UK, has found is that over the last few decades, there has been a 33 percent rise in socially prescribed perfectionism. That is the idea that society is demanding of me to be perfect. And one of the things that I often say to young people when I talk to them, and I think it’s a useful exercise for all of us, is that the next time you feel like you’re not enough, whether it’s on your phone or watching something on Netflix or whatever it is, think for a second — who out there is profiting off of making me feel like I’m not enough? Whenever I say that to young people, they love the idea of the peek behind the capitalist curtain. There are people who are making a lot of money off of trying to convince us that we need to be perfect in order to be worthy.

“There are people who are making a lot of money off of trying to convince us that we need to be perfect in order to be worthy.”

Hendriksen: Yeah, perfectionism is one of those strange occurrences where it comes from within. There is definitely genetic research showing that perfectionism can be passed down. It can come from the way we were raised. We can come out of any family perfectionistic, but it’s been found that there are four sort of types of families: those are the snowplow helicopter parents; families where love is contingent upon performance; parents who are perfectionistic themselves; and then also sort of a chaotic, dramatic, erratic type of family where kids might double down on perfectionism as a sense of control. However, to Jennifer’s point, perfectionism not only comes from within; it can also come from all around us, from this capitalist environment that makes us feel like we have to perform and achieve and consume to ever higher levels, just to be sufficient as a person.

Kerrissey: Also these sets of experiences that we all have early in life, even outside of our family — in the classroom, in our first jobs that we get, our first internships — where we learn really quickly about a set of expectations that a group has about what performance looks like, what value looks like, and what it looks like to be enough and to be good. And in the research that I do, which is mostly focused in workplaces, one of the things that always strikes me every time is just how quickly people pick up on what those expectations and norms are. Within a few minutes, people get a sense of what it’s like around here to make a mistake, ask a question that somebody thinks you ought to have known the answer to. Those environments, even outside of the broad capitalist society, just these environments that we set in, groups that we form, are really strong and have a really large impact on how people feel about the consequences or the benefits of saying what’s on their mind, admitting a mistake. And I think that’s really powerful and palpable every day in every meeting we have, and we carry that with us.

Laine Perfas: Perfectionism can also be really dangerous. Could you talk about the negative ways we see it showing up?

Kerrissey: One of the things that we see in work teams is that teams where people are striving for perfectionism and it becomes the culture of the team, that it leads to burnout a lot sooner, and that we see people will have to quit their jobs and walk away from positions that would otherwise be really beneficial to them and probably important for their income. The costs in that respect are also quite high for people.

Hendriksen: In terms of diagnosable disorders, perfectionism is really at the heart of diverse diagnoses like social anxiety, like eating disorders, like OCD; we see it a lot in depression. We see it in a lot of treatment-resistant anxiety. And what connects all of those is if we drill down there and find a foundation of perfectionism, it is often based on a flawed perception. There’s a felt sense of inadequacy that keeps us separated from others. There’s this idea that we have to work very hard to avoid finding ourselves in a situation that would reveal that inadequacy to others. That can be a challenging belief to carry around.

Wallace: In my interviews with families, one of the unfortunate threads that I heard was that the high-achieving child was presenting as perfect until it was too late, until they died by suicide. And that is because they could not reach out for help. Perfectionism can get in the way of our relationships; it can get in the way of our mental health; it can get in the way of our lives. It is very serious. And I shudder when I hear people bragging about perfectionism or saying perfectionism can be good; healthy striving, striving for excellence is good perfectionism, I just don’t see any good that comes of it.

Laine Perfas: Jennifer, in your book “Never Enough” — which I love by the way — you talk about achievement pressure, and I think it can maybe come from well-meaning parents and teachers, but it can create turmoil within young people. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Wallace: I’m not anti-pressure, just to put it out there first. I believe in high achievement. I get a lot of joy from achieving. I want my kids to experience that joy. Where achievement becomes toxic is when our sense of self is so wrapped up in our achievements that we only feel good about ourselves when we achieve; and when we don’t, we can spiral. What I found in the research when I was looking at these high-achieving kids and looking at the achievement pressure that they were under, I went in search of the kids who were doing well, despite the pressure, to see what they had in common, and what I found to be the antidote to perfectionism is this idea of mattering. Mattering is not my idea. It’s been studied since the 1980s, but it is this feeling that I am valued for who I am deep at my core, away from my achievements, and importantly, that I am depended on to add meaningful value back at home, at school, in the wider world. And so the kids I met who were in these high-achieving environments, a high level of mattering acted as a kind of protective shield. It didn’t mean these kids didn’t experience setbacks and disappointments, but they weren’t an indictment of their worth.

“The antidote to perfectionism is this idea of mattering … this feeling that I am valued for who I am deep at my core, away from my achievements.”

Kerrissey: This distinction, Jennifer, that you bring up in that it’s not about setting goals aside or letting performance go, and the idea that we want to strive to achieve great things in our lives, that we can actually still do that even without perfectionism. In our research, we look at this concept of psychological safety, which is this idea that we set climates in groups and in organizations and in our lives around whether or not you can step forward, try something out that you don’t know how to do, admit a mistake, and that you won’t be punished or penalized or have it held against you. And that’s this kind of climate that we can create that’s psychologically safe, where people can take risks and still matter. One of the ways that it most often gets misinterpreted is that it means that we should prioritize comfort, being nice, having climates where you might not say what’s on your mind because you’re trying to protect how everybody feels. But there’s a real distinction to be made about comfort and the safety to try something out and to not have to be perfect all the time. What we’re really trying to do is not expand comfort zones, but to help all of us to spend more time and be more comfortable in that discomfort zone.

Hendriksen: The notion of not being anti-pressure or anti-achievement is really important because, at least clinically, sometimes the advice for people with perfectionism, it comes across as you have to lower your standards, and that can be really hard to hear for somebody with perfectionism because good enough doesn’t resonate if it’s something from which we derive our value. We are not going to settle for subpar or mediocre performance if that means that we are subpar or mediocre.

I appreciate that we can try to tackle that by keeping high standards but also giving people some room and permission to make mistakes and ask questions, and to just deal with the inevitable blips and bloops of life that are going to come along.

Kerrissey: If a big part of this is not to lower our standards, when does it start to tip into that negative space? What are some things that you can look out for? I have found that perfectionism is often thought of as a personal problem, but it’s also an interpersonal problem, that it comes across as a sense that we have to earn love, community, and belonging by being good at things, by having a good performance. In the therapy room, I keep an eye out for this sense that we have to earn our way into friendships or other relationships. Think about why your friends are your friends: Are you friends with your friends because of their performance? Probably not. More likely you are friends with your friends because of how you feel when you’re with them. There’s a sense of being understood or belonging. And most importantly, I think, not having to perform at all. One of the telltale signs is avoidance, avoidance of something that you want to try, something that you want to put your hands up for, and you don’t do it because you’re afraid if you’re going to try it out and not be perfect, that will be a failure for you. I see that happen all the time in my classrooms. The point of being here, the point of going through our educational system is to learn what you need to learn to have the impact that you want to have in your life. If perfectionism is driving you to avoid that things that are a little hard that you might not be very good at, it’s holding you back from achieving the broader purpose in your life.

“One of the telltale signs is avoidance of something that you want to try … and you don’t do it because you’re afraid if you’re going to try it out and not be perfect, that will be a failure for you.”

Wallace: Other signs are negative self-talk. Procrastination is another big telltale sign of perfectionism. To pick up on what Michaela said, I got this great quote from a child psychologist, Lisa Damour, who said that a colleague of hers told her this once: The difference between a 91 and a 98 is a life. And so when you’re thinking about the focus of where you are putting your energy, often with perfectionism, it is about self-protection, and that is actually what is holding us back. What I see in the research was that, actually, it was the perfectionist who would hold themselves back because their sense of worth was so tangled up that they couldn’t risk a failure. They could not risk that.

Laine Perfas: I have a confession. I am someone who is struggling with perfectionism and I feel like it is just an ongoing practice to try to be aware of when I’m falling into those cycles. But given that and reflecting on it, I was trying to figure out: What job is perfectionism doing in my life? Why is it that I keep turning to it even though I can feel the anxiety, I can feel the stress? Why is it hard to let it go?

Wallace: To give yourself a break here, I think that we are all responding to the messages of our wider culture. There was this great theologian, Henri Nouwen, who talks about the three great lies of our culture. And those lies are: I am what I have; I am what I do; I am what people say or think about me. If you are constantly contending with the great lies in our culture, of course you’re going to want to protect with perfectionism. For me, the first step is contextualizing these tendencies and not personalizing them so much. Look at them. Look at the messages that you are receiving from the wider culture and give yourself some grace.

Kerrissey: I love that idea of grace because even for myself, as I do self-describe as a recovering perfectionist, I can get into these odd spirals that are very ironic, where in trying to address my perfectionism, I get weirdly perfectionist about it and that I observe my own behavior and I’m like, “Ugh. Oh, there I go. I’m being a perfectionist again.” And then I further do the negative self-talk, and that is not what the answer is here, clearly. One of the reframes that I’ve found helpful in my own life and also in being a mom around this — I have a little daughter, and working with her has been quite helpful to me on it, in that I’ve been focusing on this reframe from perfectionism to mastery. Where we don’t have to be ashamed of the drive to learn something really deeply, to try our hardest to contribute value. That drive, when I see it in her, I see there’s a real beauty in it and something that I appreciate and applaud and celebrate, and I don’t want to tell her to not have that or to feel bad about having that. I want to tell her to keep that focus on mastering something that is hard and will give you satisfaction and gives you the sense – Jennifer used, you used the word “mattering.” I think that’s a beautiful word for it. To channel all of that energy into the wonderful, productive thing that it can be in our lives, to make a life of meaning. Sam, for you, when I see you tell that story, I think part of the reason you’re not letting it go also is that you know there is something good in that drive, and can we capture that?

Hendriksen: What I’ve noticed is that I, and many people who struggle with perfectionism, do this thing called perfectionistic self-presentation, where we show what’s going well and we tend to hide what’s not going well. We put our best foot forward, but we hide the mess. But one place where that can backfire is that then we come across as superhuman or unrelatable or intimidating, and that keeps us isolated and disconnected. And so one thing that we can do to try to reconnect or to try to show some of the mess if we want to think about it in a productive way, then we can — I know vulnerability has become sort of a buzzword, but if we think about it as a willingness to reveal thoughts, actions, and emotions that might result in criticism or rejection, but take a leap of faith that they won’t, we can think of vulnerability, literally vulnerable, as being at risk. Then by letting people deliberately see some of the mess, it does two things. It signals, I trust you. And it also signals, we are the same. And trust and equality are the foundations of any healthy relationship.

Wallace: I love that. There is research called the Beautiful Mess Effect, and it is the idea that we think we need our lives to be perfect before we reach out to people, and what the research finds is that it is in the messiness of our lives that we are able to make that connection. You also brought up, Michaela, about having a daughter, and wanting to model good behavior. I have a daughter. My daughter’s now 18 years old, but when she was young, I was noticing perfectionistic tendencies and so I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, and of course I found out that it was my modeling that was leading her to these perfectionistic tendencies. And so I worked really hard on myself, but also living my life out loud so that she could hear my self-talk. If I’m working hard on an article, on a deadline, I will close my laptop in front of her and I will say, “OK, Jenny, that’s enough for the day, you’ve done your work. That’s enough for the day.” So, really modeling this compassionate self-talk when I make a mistake, when I need to give myself grace and a break. I love that you are modeling change out loud for her. That is a powerful way to get into our self-criticism or negative self-talk and try to push back on it a little bit.

Hendriksen: Something that I also like to do is to try to pull the lever of acceptance. In addition to changing my self-critical talk is to try to change my relationship to my self-critical thought, because it is often impossible to get rid of it, per se. Self-criticism is the heart of human self-regulation. We criticize ourselves in order to check ourselves, to make sure our behavior stays in line, make sure we stay part of the group. I just realized that my brain, and the brains of a lot of the people I work with, are just wired to be a little bit more self-critical. And so when inevitably that starts going, then just chalk that up to, oh, this is what happens. This is how I’m wired. That gives me permission to treat it sort of like the music at a coffee shop. It’s there, it’s in the background, but I don’t have to dance along.

Kerrissey: I met someone once who had this great trick that they used where they basically had created a character. It was a little gnome, and they had a little beard and a funny little hat. And every time they would hear that self-critical thought in their own brain, they would just picture that little gnome sitting on their shoulder saying it. And in so doing, while they didn’t get rid of that voice, they sort of were able to put it in its place by seeing it, visualizing it, giving it a hat, and then letting it go.

Hendriksen: Not to get too academic about it, this has a name and it’s called cognitive diffusion. And it can do a couple of things for us. One is that it just lessens the power of the self-criticism, but it also gives us some power back. If we are just passively responding to all the thoughts our brain makes, that puts us in a very low power position. If we can have some influence over our thought, to sort of play with it, to have some fun with it, to maybe make it a little irreverent or humorous, that puts us in a much higher power position over our thoughts and gives us some more agency.

Wallace: One of the things that makes perfectionism so brittle, is the idea that reaching out for help is an admission that you are not perfect. And what we know from decades’ worth of resilience research is that our resilience rests fundamentally on the depth and support of our relationships. If you are holding back from asking for help because you don’t want a peek behind your perfect facade, that is where we can get into a lot of trouble. And one of the things that has helped is the idea that when I don’t reach out for help, not only do I deny myself the support I need and deserve, I also deny my friend the chance of being a helper, of sending her or him the signal that I trust them, that I trust their kindness and their wisdom, they matter to me. So if we could think of asking for help less as a weakness or an inconvenience, and more as an act of generosity, of telling someone in our life that they matter so much to us that we are asking them for help.

Laine Perfas: I want to bring up an idea that has been floated, which is the part of perfectionism that can also make it difficult to be at peace when you fail to do something or you don’t do it to the level that you would like. How do we accept not just that obviously we are going to fail sometimes, but that failure could also benefit us in some ways?

Kerrissey: I think that is great framing, Sam, for this because not only is it that we can have more acceptance of failure, there is probably ample room for us to celebrate failure much more than we do. And that often if we don’t know how to do something, you’ve never done it before or it’s really complex, it’s really hard, and we try it and we fail, it’s something to be celebrated because we’ve learned. When we study groups and teams and we see them at work, teams that set aside time to celebrate their failures in the long term perform better, and the research on that is clear. And the reason is that they learn so much faster than the groups that don’t try it out, don’t fail, and don’t celebrate those failures.

Kerrissey: I think you hit on the point, that with our failures it is the social support that gets us through. So when you fail in a team, it is the people reminding you that you matter no matter what.

Hendriksen: Just to echo the social component, I think failure can give us the chance to discover that our belonging is not contingent upon performance. So for example, I was working with a professional musician who lost an audition, and his knee-jerk reaction was to assume that his colleagues just wouldn’t respect him anymore, that his performance was what tied him to them and he was able to discover that not only did his colleagues indeed still like and respect him, but that the sense of community and the liking came not from what happened on one worst day, but what he did every day in that community. Perfectionism tends to be really all or nothing. And so something that I’ve found useful is to try to take my thinking from either/or to both/and. We can be a good mom who occasionally loses our temper. We can be a smart person who doesn’t always know the answer. We can be a capable person who sometimes screws things up. We can retain that overall sense of our own competency and adequacy and create some room for the inevitable exceptions that life is going to throw at us.

Wallace: To go even further on the social buffering of perfectionism, if you will. Since learning about this idea of mattering — and mattering matters throughout the lifespan — I just co-authored a working paper with the Harvard Center on the Developing Child about early childhood and the development of mattering. And it matters up until we take our last breath. But what I will say is, as a culture, we are not feeding this need to matter. This is a fundamental human need to feel valued and to have an opportunity to add value. And when we don’t meet this need, one of the side effects is this perfectionism, that maybe if I’m perfect, I will matter. So what I would love to offer to anybody listening, which is an exercise I try to do in my own life, very imperfectly, to be honest, is I try to imagine everyone I meet, including strangers on the street, wearing a sign around their neck saying, “Tell me, do I matter?” We can all answer that question with kindness, with compassion, and to me, if we could, instead of feeling like we are pit against each other in this hyper-individualistic culture that we find ourselves in, if we could go back and recenter our relationships around mattering, I think that is a way of buffering against the socially prescribed perfectionism that has been on the rise.

There is a solution, there is an antidote, and it is mattering.

Laine Perfas: Thank you all for joining me for this really great conversation today.

Wallace: Thank you for having us.

Kerrissey: Thank you.

Hendriksen: Thank you so much. This was fun.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. To see a transcript of this episode and to find our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas, with editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi and additional editing by Ryan Mulcahy, Paul Makishima, and Max Larkin. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University. Copyright 2025.