Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear

You’ve read the report four times and you’re still not sure it’s good enough. You wrote the message, deleted it and wrote it again — three times. And before sleep you replay the afternoon’s conversation in your head, hunting for the sentence you should have said better. If you recognise yourself, you probably already sense that there is a connection between your perfectionism and your overthinking. And you’re right: they are two sides of the same fear.

Perfectionism enjoys an oddly good reputation in our culture. In job interviews we cite it as a “weakness” that is really a compliment; we confuse it with diligence, ambition, high standards. But the research paints a different picture: perfectionism is not excellence, it is one of the most reliable predictors of anxiety, burnout, procrastination — and endless circling thought.

In this piece I show you what perfectionism really is (and what it isn’t), why there is more and more of it among us, how exactly it drives overthinking, and what the courageous alternative — “good enough” — actually means.

Perfectionism isn’t excellence — it’s fear in formal dress

First let’s separate two things that can look identical from the outside. Healthy striving means setting yourself high but attainable goals because the work gives you pleasure and the result gives it meaning. A mistake, in that frame, is information: it tells you where you are and points you onward. And your worth as a person has little to do with any single piece of work.

Perfectionism works differently. The standard isn’t high but unreachable — and, crucially, your worth is tied to the result. A mistake is not information but evidence: evidence that you are not enough. So the perfectionist works not out of joy but out of fear of that evidence. Back in 1990, the researcher Randy Frost and colleagues showed that the core of perfectionism is not high standards themselves — healthily ambitious people have those too — but excessive concern over mistakes and chronic doubt about one’s own actions. High standards inspire; fear of mistakes paralyses.

I notice this difference in my work with people too: after a job well done, a perfectionist feels no satisfaction, at most a brief relief — “I got away with it this time”. The bar wasn’t cleared, the fall was only postponed. And because relief is not a reward but merely the absence of punishment, motivation exhausts itself over time. If you’re interested in how this mechanism connects to burnout, I’ve written more about it in the piece on the signs of burnout.

Three directions of perfectionism — and which one hurts most

In 1991 the Canadian psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett proposed a model that remains the foundation of perfectionism research today. They found that perfectionism is not one thing but three — differing in who demands perfection of whom:

• Self-oriented perfectionism: you set unreachable standards for yourself. “I am not allowed to make mistakes.” This form is double-edged — in the short term it can drive achievement, but under stress or failure it turns into merciless self-criticism.
• Other-oriented perfectionism: you demand perfection of others — your partner, your children, your colleagues. This form burdens relationships most: the people close to you live with the feeling that they are never enough.
• Socially prescribed perfectionism: the belief that other people expect perfection of you — and that they will accept you only if you achieve it. “If I’m not flawless, they’ll reject me.”

Research consistently shows that the third form is the most damaging. Of all three, socially prescribed perfectionism is most strongly linked with anxiety, depression, shame and even hopelessness — which is logical when you think about it: the standard is not only unreachable, it isn’t even yours. You are measuring yourself against a yardstick held by others (or, more precisely: one you attribute to others), so you can never really know whether you have met it. A large meta-analysis (Limburg and colleagues, 2017) confirmed that perfectionistic concerns — fear of mistakes, self-doubt, the sense of falling short in others’ eyes — are linked with practically every form of psychological distress, from anxiety to eating disorders.

If, reading these lines, you feel that your perfectionism speaks in a voice that isn’t quite yours — perhaps the voice of parents, teachers, your surroundings — you may also relate to the piece on the inner critic, where I explore whose voice it actually is and what it is trying to achieve.

Why there are more of us: perfectionism as a sign of the times

You may have the impression that there is more perfectionism around you than there used to be. It isn’t just an impression. In 2019 the British researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill published a meta-analysis of data from more than 41,000 students in the USA, Canada and the UK between 1989 and 2016 — and found that all three forms of perfectionism had risen statistically significantly over that period. By far the largest rise was in socially prescribed perfectionism, the most damaging one: by roughly a third.

The authors attribute the rise to a culture in which a person’s worth is measured more and more by performance and comparability — grades, selection procedures, career as a personal brand, and of course social media, where a carefully curated selection of other people’s lives is on display every day. Younger generations are therefore not “softer”, as public debate likes to put it; they are growing up in an environment that constantly tells them they will be accepted conditionally. I’ve written in more detail about what constant comparison does to the brain in the piece on comparison on social media.

Why does this matter to you personally? Because it takes some weight off. Your perfectionism is not a flaw in your character — it is an understandable response to an environment that trains conditional acceptance from an early age. And what has been learned can also be unlearned.

How an unreachable standard sets thought spinning

Now to the connection the title promises. Why are perfectionists so often chronic ruminators as well?

The mechanism is actually simple. An unreachable standard means the task is never really finished — there would always be something more to improve, check, correct. And the brain has a particular relationship with unfinished tasks: it holds them open, returns them to awareness, keeps flagging them. Where a healthy worker stops (“submitted, next”), the perfectionist gets caught in an endless loop of checking: was it enough? did I miss something? what will they think? Flett, Hewitt and colleagues showed that people with marked perfectionism have more frequent automatic perfectionistic thoughts (“I should be better”) and that it is precisely these thoughts that predict rumination and distress — more than the standards themselves.

In a perfectionist, overthinking runs in two directions. Backwards: chewing over what is already done — replaying conversations, hunting for mistakes in what was sent, regretting phrasings. That is rumination in the proper sense of the word; I’ve explained how exactly it works and why the brain can’t stop it on its own in the piece on rumination. And forwards: anxious planning of what is to come — a hundred scenarios of everything that could go wrong and how to prevent it. Both are driven by the same engine: the belief that a mistake must not exist, and the quiet faith that thorough enough thinking will prevent or erase it. That this faith deceives — that rumination only pretends to be problem-solving — I’ve described in detail in the main piece on overthinking.

And so the circle closes: an unreachable standard creates a permanent sense of incompleteness, incompleteness feeds rumination, rumination strengthens anxiety, and anxiety raises the need for control and perfection still further. Perfectionism and overthinking are not two problems — they are two faces of the same fear: the fear that as you are, you are not enough.

Fear of mistakes and its unexpected fruit: delay

At first glance it’s a paradox: people with the highest standards often delay the longest. But if you understand the logic of perfectionism, procrastination makes complete sense. When every task is a verdict on your worth, starting work becomes a dangerous moment — the moment when it might turn out that you are not enough. Procrastination is a way of postponing that verdict. As long as you haven’t started, you can still be “someone who would do it brilliantly if they got round to it”.

Research confirms this with an interesting distinction: a meta-analysis by Fuschia Sirois and colleagues (2017) showed that procrastination is not linked with high standards as such, but with perfectionistic concerns — fear of mistakes, doubt about one’s own actions, the sense of a gap between who you are and who you “should” be. Healthy striving even slightly reduces procrastination; it is fear that paralyses.

And procrastination has one more cruel property: the time you would have spent working gets filled with thinking about the work. Instead of writing the report — three hours of anxious thinking about the report. In the end the task is done in a rush, the result is worse than it would otherwise have been, and the perfectionist gets “evidence” that next time even stricter control is called for. The circle closes.

“Good enough” isn’t surrender — it’s courage

In the middle of the last century the English paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined a term that has become one of the most liberating ideas in psychology: the good enough mother. Winnicott observed that a child does not need a perfect mother in order to develop well — it needs a good enough one. More than that: a perfect mother who removed every frustration would actually make development harder, since it is precisely through small, bearable disappointments that a child builds trust that the world holds, and that they themselves hold too.

I like to stretch that metaphor across a whole life. A good enough piece of work, a good enough decision, a good enough parent, a good enough partner — in every one of those “enoughs” there is a courage that perfection never demands. For perfection is, paradoxically, a hiding place: as long as I’m polishing, I don’t have to show it. As long as I’m checking, I don’t have to step into anyone’s view. “Good enough” means: I show myself as I am able to be today, and I risk someone seeing the imperfection. That is vulnerability — and that is exactly why it is strength, not weakness.

Let me also say what “good enough” does not mean. It doesn’t mean sloppiness, it doesn’t mean standards don’t matter, and it doesn’t mean giving up on growth. It only means that the standard serves you — not you the standard. A question I like to offer here: what is this piece of work for — and when has it served that purpose? A report is there so that colleagues get the information; once they have it, the purpose is met. A fourth review no longer serves the report — it serves the soothing of your fear. And fear, as we know, only grows fatter on soothing.

How to build a healthy relationship with mistakes

A relationship with mistakes can be changed — not overnight, but steadily. A few directions that prove most useful in my work with people:

• Separate the work from yourself. When you catch the thought “I’m not enough”, translate it back into a fact: “this report has one mistake in it”. The mistake is a property of the work, not of you as a person. It sounds like a small thing, but that translation is where the whole difference between healthy striving and perfectionism lies.
• Define “enough” in advance. Before you start, write down when the task will be finished (two reviews, one hour, three quotes). Make the decision about the standard while you are calm — not in the middle of anxiety, when fear always demands a little more.
• Practise imperfection deliberately. Send a message without a third read-through. Publish something with a small cosmetic flaw. Then watch what actually happens — as a rule: nothing. Every such experience is evidence for the nervous system that no amount of persuasion can replace.
• Careful with the “growth mindset”. The idea that abilities develop and that mistakes are part of learning is useful — but only if it doesn’t become a new whip (“I should be learning better from my mistakes!”). The goal isn’t to come to love mistakes, but to survive them without a verdict on your worth.
• Look shame in the eye. Underneath perfectionism there is almost always shame smouldering — the sense that something is wrong with you at the core, and that perfection is the only way to keep anyone from finding out. If that sounds familiar, read the piece on shame; and it is possible to cultivate an active kindness towards your own imperfection — I write about it in the piece on self-compassion.

And when should you seek help? When perfectionism is no longer stealing only your time but your life: when you delay the things that matter to you, when every mistake throws you off for days, when behind the flawless facade you feel more and more alone. Perfectionism turns out to be a rewarding theme in therapy — because underneath it there is always a story: about where you learned that love has to be earned. If you’d like to look at that story in a safe space, I am here.