Perfectionism: Opportunity with Obstacle or Obstacle in Opportunity

I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Now, how many times have you heard someone saying this? A social get together, maybe, with friends, or perhaps with family at festive days. It's everyone's favourite defect, it's that now quite common response to the difficult, final question at job interviews: "My biggest weakness? That's my perfectionism." You see, for something that apparently holds us back, it's quite remarkable how many of us are quite happy to hold our hands up and say we're perfectionists. But there's an interesting and serious point because our complaining wonder for perfection is so pervasive that we never really stop to question that concept in its own terms.

What does it say about us and our society that there is a kind of celebration in perfection?

We tend to hold perfectionism up as a badge of worth. The emblem of the successful. Yet, in understanding perfectionism, its has seen limited evidence that perfectionists are more successful. Quite the contrary, they feel unhappy and dissatisfied amid a slow sense that they're never quite perfect enough. We know from reports that perfectionism conceals a host of psychological difficulties, including things like depression, anxiety and even suicidal thoughts. And what's more worrying is that over the last 25 years, we have seen perfectionism rise at an alarming rate. And at the same time, we have seen more mental illness among young people than ever before. Rates of suicide in the India alone increased by 25 percent across the last two decades.

Young people today are more preoccupied with the completion of the perfect life and lifestyle. In terms of their image, status and wealth. Young people borrow more heavily than did older generations, and they spend a much greater proportion of their income on image goods and status possessions. These possessions, their lives and their lifestyles are now displayed in vivid detail on the global social media platforms of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat. In this new visual culture, the appearance of perfection is far more important than the reality.

If one side of the modern landscape that we have so abundantly furnished for young people is this idea that there's a perfectible life and that there's a perfectible lifestyle, then the other is surely work. Nothing is out of reach for those who want it badly enough. Opportunity, the self-made person, hard work. The notion that hard work always pays off. And above all, the idea that we're captains of our own destiny. These ideas, they connect our wealth, our status and our image with our innate, personal value where it is a complete fiction. Because even if there were equality of opportunity, the idea that we are captains of our own destiny disguises a blunt truth for young people that they are subject to an almost ongoing economic trial. Metrics and rankings have emerged as the benchmarks for which merit can be quantified and used to sort young people into schools, classes and colleges.

Education is the first arena where measurement is so publicly played out and where metrics are being used as a tool to improve standards and performance which starts young. No wonder young people report a strong need to strive, perform and achieve at the centre of modern life. They've been conditioned to define themselves in the strict and narrow terms of grades, percentiles and lead tables.

· This is a society that preys on their insecurities about how they are performing and how they are appearing to other people.

· This is a society that amplifies their imperfections.

Every flaw, every unforeseen setback increases a need to perform more perfectly next time, or else, bluntly, you're a failure. That feeling of being flawed and deficient is especially penetrative; just talk to young people.

"How should I look; how should I behave?" "I should look like that model, I should have as many followers as that Instagram influencer, I must do better in school."

In many young people these lived effects of perfectionism first hand. And one student sticks out in my mind very vividly. Mayank, not his real name, was ambitious, hardworking and diligent and on the surface, he was exceptionally high-achieving, often getting first-class grades for his work. Yet, no matter how well Mayank achieved, he always seemed to recast his successes as horrible failures, and he would talk openly about how he'd let himself and others down. Mayank’s justification was quite simple: How could he be a success when he was trying so much harder than other people just to attain the same outcomes?

See, Mayank's perfectionism, was only serving to expose what he saw as his inner weakness to himself and to others. Cases like Mayank's speak to the harmfulness of perfectionism as a way of being in the world. Contrary to popular belief, perfectionism is never about perfecting things or perfecting tasks. It's not about striving for excellence. Mayank's case highlights this intensely. At its root, perfectionism is about perfecting the imperfect self.

And you can consider it like a mountain of achievement that perfectionism leads us to imagine ourselves scaling. And we think to ourselves, "Once I've reached that peak, then people will see I'm not flawed, and I'll be worth something." But something perfectionism doesn't tell us is that soon after reaching that peak, we will be called down again to the fresh lowlands of insecurity and shame, just to try and scale that peak again. This is the cycle of self-defeat. In the pursuit of unattainable perfection, a perfectionist just cannot step off. And it's why it's so difficult to treat.

Now, we've known for ages that perfectionism contributes to a host of psychological problems, but there was never a good way to measure it. Until now, the first is self-oriented perfectionism, the irrational desire to be perfect: "I strive to be as perfect as I can be." The second is socially prescribed perfectionism, the sense that the social environment is excessively demanding: "I feel that others are too demanding of me." And the third is other-oriented perfectionism, the imposition of unrealistic standards on other people: "If I ask somebody to do something, I expect it to be done perfectly."

Now, research shows that all three elements of perfectionism associate with compromised mental health, including things like increased depression, increased anxiety and suicide thoughts. But the most problematic element of perfectionism is socially prescribed perfectionism. That sense that everyone expects me to be perfect. This element of perfectionism has a large correlation with serious mental illness. And with today's emphasis on perfection at the forefront of my mind, I was curious to see whether these elements of perfectionism were changing.

To date, research in this area is focused on immediate family relations. All three elements of perfectionism have increased over time. But socially prescribed perfectionism saw the largest increase, and by far. Remember, this is the element of perfectionism that has the largest correlation with serious mental illness, and that's for good reason. Socially prescribed perfectionists feel a compelled need to meet the expectations of other people. And even if they do meet yesterday's expectation of perfection, they then raise the bar on themselves to an even higher degree because these folks believe that the better they do, the better that they're expected to do. This breeds a profound sense of helplessness and, worse, hopelessness.

But is there hope?

Of course, there's hope. Perfectionists can and should hold on to certain things they are typically bright, ambitious, conscientious and hardworking. But a little bit of self-compassion, going easy on ourselves when things don't go well, can turn those qualities into greater personal peace and success. And then there's what we can do as supporters.

Perfectionism develops in our formative years, and so young people are more vulnerable. Parents can help their children by supporting them unconditionally when they've tried but failed. Mom and Dad can resist their understandable urge in today's highly competitive society to helicopter-parent, as a lot of anxiety is communicated when parents take on their kids' successes and failures as their own.

But ultimately, the research raises important questions about how we are structuring society and whether our society's heavy emphasis on competition, evaluation and testing is benefiting young people. It's become every day for public figures to say that young people just need a little bit more strength in the face of these new and exceptional pressures. But I believe that is us washing our hands of the core issue because we have a shared responsibility to create a society and a culture in which young people need less perfection in the first place. Creating that kind of world is an enormous challenge, and for a generation of young people that live their lives in the 24/7 spotlight of metrics, achievements and social media, perfectionism is inevitable, so long as they lack any purpose in life greater than how they are appearing or how they are performing to other people.

What can they do about it?

Every time they are knocked down from that benchmark, they see no other option but to try scaling that peak again. So long as we teach young people that there is nothing more real or meaningful in their lives than this hopeless quest for perfection, then we are going to condemn future generations to that same futility and despair. And so we're left with a question. When are we going to appreciate that there is something fundamentally inhuman about limitless perfection? No one is flawless. If we want to help our young people escape the trap of perfectionism, then we will teach them that in a chaotic world, life will often defeat us, but that's OKAY. Failure is not weakness. If we want to help our young people outgrow this self-defeating snare of impossible perfection, then we will raise them in a society that has outgrown that very same delusion. But most of all, if we want our young people to enjoy mental, emotional and psychological health, then we will invite them to celebrate the joys and the beauties of imperfection as a normal and natural part of everyday living and loving.