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How to Overcome Perfectionism: What It Is Protecting, and Why the Tips Rarely Hold

How do I overcome perfectionism?

Overcoming perfectionism usually has less to do with lowering your standards than with finding out what the standards are protecting you from. Perfectionism tends to be a strategy that once worked — it earned approval, headed off criticism, or kept shame at a distance — and it is hard to give up because it still feels like the thing keeping you safe. This page separates perfectionism from simply caring about quality, names the job it is usually doing, looks at what that job now costs, explains why tip lists so often fail to hold, describes what the treatment research suggests does change it, and is plain about where it stops being something to work on alone.

You overcome perfectionism less by lowering your standards than by finding out what the standards are protecting you from. Perfectionism is best understood as a strategy that once worked — it earned approval, headed off criticism, or kept a painful feeling at a distance — and the reason it is so hard to put down is that it still feels like the thing keeping you safe. What tends to loosen it is testing, in small and deliberate ways, whether the outcome you fear actually arrives when you let something be good enough, and slowly separating your sense of your own worth from how flawless the result turned out.

Most of what is written on this question is a list: set time limits, aim for eighty percent, celebrate progress, challenge your all-or-nothing thinking. Some of those moves are genuinely useful. Offered on their own, though, they tend to go after the behavior and leave the fear underneath it untouched, and a behavior that is guarding against something rarely stays put down for long. So this page takes a different route. It looks at what researchers mean by perfectionism, as distinct from caring about quality; what job it is usually doing; why that job has become so expensive; why the tips so often fail to hold; what the treatment research suggests does change it; and where it stops being something to work on by yourself.

Perfectionism is not the same thing as high standards

The word collapses two things that researchers have spent a long time pulling apart. In a 2006 review in Personality and Social Psychology Review, Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto organised the field around two dimensions. One is perfectionistic strivings: holding very high standards and pushing hard toward them. The other is perfectionistic concerns: worry about making mistakes, fear of how others will judge you, and a persistent sense that what you produce never quite measures up.

Much of the harm people associate with perfectionism tracks the second dimension far more closely than the first. A 2016 meta-analysis by Andrew Hill and Thomas Curran pooled 43 studies and nearly 10,000 participants on perfectionism and burnout. Perfectionistic concerns showed medium-to-large positive relationships with burnout. Perfectionistic strivings, by contrast, showed small negative or non-significant ones. In that body of data, wanting to do excellent work was not what tracked with burnout. Dreading what an imperfect result would mean was.

It would be too tidy to conclude from this that there is a safe, healthy perfectionism and an unhealthy one. A 2018 meta-analysis led by Martin Smith, covering 45 studies and more than 11,000 people, found that perfectionistic strivings as well as perfectionistic concerns had small-to-moderate positive associations with suicidal ideation, and the authors wrote that this calls into question the idea that strivings are healthy or advisable. The fairer reading is that the strivings dimension is less clearly harmful — not that it is harmless.

A narrower, clinical definition helps locate where the trouble actually lives. Roz Shafran, Zafra Cooper and Christopher Fairburn proposed in 2002 that what makes perfectionism clinically significant is an over-dependence of self-evaluation on the determined pursuit of personally demanding, self-imposed standards, in at least one area of life that matters a great deal to the person, despite the pursuit causing adverse consequences. The important word there is dependence. A high standard is not the tell. The tell is what happens to your sense of yourself when the standard is missed.

Explore: self discrepancy theory

What perfectionism is doing for you

Here is the move that makes the rest of this workable: assume the perfectionism is competent. Not wise, and not good for you — competent. At some point, in some setting, being flawless paid. It might have been the reliable route to approval in a household where approval was scarce, the way to stay out of trouble in a classroom or a workplace where mistakes were punished, or simply the one area of life where you could control how you were seen. Nobody can tell you from outside what your particular history is, and perfectionism does not have a single universal origin. But the question "what did being flawless get me, and what did it keep away?" tends to have an answer, and the answer is usually more specific than "success."

Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection, published in 2010, frames the job this way. She describes perfectionism not as a pursuit of excellence but as a belief that if you look and do everything perfectly, you can avoid or minimise the pain of blame, judgment and shame — a shield carried for protection that ends up being the heavy thing holding you back. She distinguishes it from healthy striving by where it points: healthy striving is oriented toward improving, while perfectionism is oriented toward what other people will think.

Paul Hewitt, Gordon Flett and Samuel Mikail's relational approach, set out in a 2017 book, describes perfectionistic tendencies as rooted in early relational and developmental experiences, and Hewitt's research group has studied what they call perfectionistic self-presentation. In a 2003 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they described it as having three facets: promoting an image of your own perfection, avoiding being seen to be imperfect, and avoiding admitting imperfection out loud — and they found it consistently related to psychological distress. Read those three as a list of jobs. Be seen as flawless. Never be caught being flawed. Never have to say so. Each one is a way of managing how you will be received by other people.

Self-discrepancy theory, which E. Tory Higgins set out in 1987, adds a useful distinction about how that pressure feels. Higgins proposed that a gap between who you are and who you would ideally like to be tends to produce dejection — disappointment, sadness — while a gap between who you are and who you believe you ought to be tends to produce agitation: anxiety, fear, guilt. Many perfectionists will recognise which of the two they live with. The standard does not feel like a hope. It feels like a debt.

Explore: the gifts of imperfection · shame resilience

Why the strategy has become so expensive

If perfectionism is a strategy, the useful question is not whether it works. It often does work, at the specific thing it is for. The question is what it costs, and the research on that is fairly consistent.

It does not reliably buy better performance. A 2018 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Dana Harari and colleagues found that perfectionism had sizable and consistent relationships with a range of workplace factors but an equivocal overall relationship with job performance. It is associated with putting things off rather than getting them done: a 2017 meta-analysis by Fuschia Sirois, Danielle Molnar and Jameson Hirsch found that trait procrastination was positively associated with perfectionistic concerns, at a correlation of about .23 across roughly 10,000 participants, and negatively associated with perfectionistic strivings. Put plainly, the fear-of-imperfection side of perfectionism tends to travel with delay, which is the opposite of what the strategy promises.

It also shows up across a wide range of psychological difficulty. A 2011 clinical review by Sarah Egan, Tracey Wade and Roz Shafran gathered evidence that perfectionism is elevated in anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders compared with healthy controls, and argued that it acts as both a risk factor and a maintaining factor across them — what clinicians call a transdiagnostic process.

And the pressure appears to be rising. In a 2019 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill analysed 164 samples covering 41,641 college students in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom who completed the same perfectionism measure between 1989 and 2016. All three forms they measured — self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed perfectionism — increased linearly over that period, with the largest increase in the sense that others are demanding perfection of you. The authors connect the trend to cultural shifts toward competitive individualism; that is their interpretation of a trend over time rather than something the data isolate as a cause. What can be said is that if the bar feels higher than it used to, the data on college students point the same way.

That is what "overpriced" means here. The protection is still being delivered. The price — in time, in sleep, in the projects that never quite get sent, in the relationships where no one gets to see you unfinished — is what has changed.

Why the tips rarely hold

Most perfectionism advice targets the visible behavior: spend less time on it, send it at eighty percent, stop checking, stop comparing. When the behavior is protecting you from a feared outcome, removing it without touching the fear tends to raise the alarm rather than lower it. You send the email without rereading it three times, and then you reread it in your head for the rest of the afternoon. The checking has not stopped. It has moved somewhere you cannot see it.

There is a second reason, and it is built into how perfectionism maintains itself. The cognitive-behavioral model developed by Shafran and colleagues describes a cycle in which unmet standards bring intense self-criticism, successes get discounted, and counterproductive behaviors such as excessive checking, comparison and reassurance-seeking keep the whole thing running. A tip that gets you to lower the bar once can be absorbed by that cycle without changing it. If the lower bar goes fine, the success is discounted — it was only because the stakes were low. If it goes badly, the self-criticism confirms that the bar should never have been lowered.

None of this means behavioral work is useless. It means the kind of behavioral work matters. A 2022 meta-analysis by Galloway, Watson, Greene, Shafran and Egan pooled 15 randomised controlled trials of cognitive behavior therapy for perfectionism, with 912 participants, and found medium-to-large reductions on perfectionism measures, along with medium reductions in eating-disorder and depression symptoms and a small-to-medium reduction in anxiety. The authors noted real limitations, including the small number of trials and the absence of comparisons against other active treatments. Still, the difference between that work and a tip list is instructive. Treatment of this kind leans on behavioral experiments: doing something imperfectly on purpose in order to test a specific prediction about what will happen. That aims at the fear directly, instead of simply forbidding the behavior that manages it.

Explore: behavioral experiments

What tends to actually change it

Start by naming the job, because everything after depends on it. Finish this sentence as honestly as you can, about one specific thing you have been polishing: "If this were not perfect, then ___." People answer it in very different ways — then they would see I am not as capable as they think; then I would be blamed; then it would be obvious I do not belong here; then I would feel the way I felt when I was nine. Whatever your answer, it is the prediction the perfectionism has been working to prevent you from ever testing.

Then test it, small. Pick one low-stakes task where the consequences of imperfection are genuinely recoverable. Before you do it, write the prediction down concretely: what exactly will happen if you do this at a level you would call good enough, how bad it will be, and how sure you are. Do the task at that level, on purpose, and stop. Afterwards, write down what actually happened, as specifically as the prediction. This is the basic logic of a behavioral experiment. The point is not to prove the fear wrong in one go. It is to collect a kind of evidence your protective strategy has never let you collect, because it has never let the imperfect version out of the room.

Watch closely for the discount. When the experiment goes fine, which it often does, notice the move that immediately explains it away: it was only because nobody important saw it, it was only because it was an easy one. That move is the maintenance cycle in action, and catching it in the act is part of the work rather than a sign that the work is failing. Run the experiment more than once, and let the evidence accumulate before you decide what it means.

Alongside the experiments, work on what a missed standard means about you. This is where self-compassion earns its place, and it is worth being clear that it is not a synonym for lowering your standards. In a 2018 study in PLOS ONE, Ferrari and colleagues surveyed 541 adolescents and 515 adults and found that self-compassion weakened the link between maladaptive perfectionism and depression in both groups. That is a cross-sectional finding, so it shows an association rather than proving that self-compassion causes the protection. But it fits the account on this page: self-compassion does not change the standard, it changes how much your worth is riding on meeting it.

Finally, there is the relational side, which tip lists almost never touch. If perfectionistic self-presentation is a strategy of concealment, then concealment can only really be tested by being seen. Let one person you trust see something before it is finished, and notice what they actually do with it. Hewitt's group has built a treatment around exactly this territory: in a 2015 study of a short-term psychodynamic and interpersonal group therapy for perfectionism, 71 community-recruited participants reported clinically significant decreases in perfectionism, and post-treatment scores on most measures were lower than in a waitlist comparison group — though that waitlist group was not randomly assigned, which limits how strongly the comparison can be read. What that approach works on is not the checking or the polishing but the underlying relational patterns: how you expect to be received, and how you receive yourself.

None of this is fast. Expect the alarm to go off the first several times you let something be good enough, because that is what an alarm protecting something important is supposed to do. The change people describe is rarely that the fear disappears. It is that it stops being in charge.

Explore: self compassion

When perfectionism is more than a coaching matter

Everything above assumes a person who is functioning and wants to loosen a pattern. Because perfectionism so often travels with other conditions, it is worth being specific about where that assumption stops holding.

If your perfectionism is bound up with food, weight or how your body looks, that deserves a clinician's assessment, because the same review that describes perfectionism as transdiagnostic places eating disorders squarely among the conditions it maintains. The same goes for low mood that is present most of the day, most days, or anxiety that has started to organise your life around avoidance.

Perfectionism also overlaps with two diagnoses that are easy to confuse. Obsessive-compulsive disorder involves intrusive, unwanted thoughts and compulsions performed to relieve the distress they cause, and the thoughts are typically experienced as unwanted. Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is a different condition, and the DSM-5 lists "perfectionism that interferes with task completion" among its criteria, alongside rigidity and preoccupation with detail and control. A clinical overview in StatPearls, hosted on the National Library of Medicine's bookshelf, notes that people with that personality pattern often experience these traits as simply correct rather than as a problem. If you recognise either description, that is a reason to talk to a professional rather than to diagnose yourself.

One signal belongs in its own category. The research on perfectionism and suicidal thinking is substantial enough to be said plainly: if you are having thoughts of harming yourself, that is a matter for a clinician or a crisis line, not for an article or an app. In the U.S., you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any hour. When it is genuinely unclear which side of the line you are on, a reasonable default is to start with the more careful option and let a professional tell you whether working on it yourself is a sensible fit.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is perfectionism a mental illness? No. Perfectionism is a personality trait or pattern, not a diagnosis in its own right. It does appear inside diagnostic criteria — the DSM-5 lists perfectionism that interferes with task completion as one criterion for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder — and clinical researchers describe it as a transdiagnostic process that is elevated in anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders. So it is not an illness, and it can be a meaningful part of one.

Is perfectionism ever a good thing? It depends on which part you mean. Researchers distinguish perfectionistic strivings, which is holding high standards and working toward them, from perfectionistic concerns, which is fear of mistakes and of how you will be judged. The concerns dimension is consistently linked to outcomes like burnout and procrastination, while strivings on their own look considerably less harmful in that research. But a 2018 meta-analysis found strivings were also associated with suicidal ideation, so the idea of a reliably healthy perfectionism is contested rather than settled. Caring a great deal about quality is not the problem; needing flawlessness in order to feel acceptable tends to be.

Why am I a perfectionist? There is no single cause, and anyone offering one for your particular life is guessing. Relational researchers such as Paul Hewitt describe perfectionistic tendencies as rooted in early relational and developmental experiences, and data on college students between 1989 and 2016 show the sense that others demand perfection rising over time. A more useful question than where it came from is what it does: finish the sentence "if this were not perfect, then ___" and you will usually find the outcome the perfectionism has been protecting you from.

Why do perfectionists procrastinate? Because starting or finishing makes the work available to be judged. A 2017 meta-analysis found that procrastination was positively associated with perfectionistic concerns — the fear-of-mistakes side — and negatively associated with perfectionistic strivings. Put simply, it is the dread of imperfection rather than the high standard that tends to produce the delay. Putting a task off keeps it in a state where it has not yet fallen short.

Can you overcome perfectionism on your own? Many people make real progress with structured self-help, and the cognitive-behavioral approach to perfectionism has been adapted into a self-help guide by Roz Shafran, Sarah Egan and Tracey Wade. The core moves — naming the feared prediction, testing it with small deliberate experiments, and noticing when you discount the results — can be practised alone. What is hard to do alone is spot the discount while you are the one doing it, which is where another perspective tends to help. If your perfectionism is entangled with an eating disorder, OCD, depression or thoughts of self-harm, work with a clinician rather than on your own.

How long does it take to stop being a perfectionist? There is no honest number. A structured program has a set length, but that describes the program, not how long a lifelong strategy takes to become optional. What people tend to report is not a switch that flips but a gradual loosening: the alarm still sounds, and it is increasingly possible to act without obeying it.

Where IX Coach fits

This page is deliberately about perfectionism rather than about us, and the experiment it describes works with a notebook. The part that is hard to do alone is the part that happens after: noticing the discount while you are making it, and seeing the protective job clearly while you are the person it belongs to. That is much of why people bring this kind of pattern to a coach at all.

IX Coach is an AI coaching system built for the individual, and it is designed for that specific move: staying with the prediction you actually wrote down, asking what the result meant rather than supplying reassurance, and noticing when a good-enough outcome is being explained away. It is available at the hour the polishing is actually happening rather than at a scheduled appointment, and its guidance draws on a library of evidence-graded practices, including the ones this page links to — behavioral experiments, self-compassion, self-discrepancy theory and shame resilience.

It is coaching, not treatment, and that boundary is worth stating plainly. The ICF Code of Ethics asks a coach to "remain alert to indications that there might be a shift in the value received from the coaching relationship" and, where appropriate, to explore "the potential for a different coach, professional, or resource." Applied here, that means perfectionism tied to an eating disorder, OCD, persistent low mood or any thought of self-harm belongs with a licensed clinician, and 988 reaches the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the U.S. right now. What is left is the ordinary and very common case this page was written for: a person who is functioning, who keeps paying too much for the feeling of being safe from judgment, and who would like to find out what would happen if they stopped.

How do I overcome perfectionism?

Overcoming perfectionism usually has less to do with lowering your standards than with finding out what the standards are protecting you from. Perfectionism tends to be a strategy that once worked — it earned approval, headed off criticism, or kept shame at a distance — and it is hard to give up because it still feels like the thing keeping you safe. This page separates perfectionism from simply caring about quality, names the job it is usually doing, looks at what that job now costs, explains why tip lists so often fail to hold, describes what the treatment research suggests does change it, and is plain about where it stops being something to work on alone.

Is perfectionism a mental illness?

No. Perfectionism is a personality trait or pattern, not a diagnosis in its own right. It does appear inside diagnostic criteria — the DSM-5 lists perfectionism that interferes with task completion as one criterion for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder — and clinical researchers describe it as a transdiagnostic process that is elevated in anxiety disorders, depression and eating disorders. So it is not an illness, and it can be a meaningful part of one.

Is perfectionism ever a good thing?

It depends on which part you mean. Researchers distinguish perfectionistic strivings, which is holding high standards and working toward them, from perfectionistic concerns, which is fear of mistakes and of how you will be judged. The concerns dimension is consistently linked to outcomes like burnout and procrastination, while strivings on their own look considerably less harmful in that research. But a 2018 meta-analysis found strivings were also associated with suicidal ideation, so the idea of a reliably healthy perfectionism is contested rather than settled. Caring a great deal about quality is not the problem; needing flawlessness in order to feel acceptable tends to be.

Why am I a perfectionist?

There is no single cause, and anyone offering one for your particular life is guessing. Relational researchers such as Paul Hewitt describe perfectionistic tendencies as rooted in early relational and developmental experiences, and data on college students between 1989 and 2016 show the sense that others demand perfection rising over time. A more useful question than where it came from is what it does: finish the sentence "if this were not perfect, then ___" and you will usually find the outcome the perfectionism has been protecting you from.

Why do perfectionists procrastinate?

Because starting or finishing makes the work available to be judged. A 2017 meta-analysis found that procrastination was positively associated with perfectionistic concerns — the fear-of-mistakes side — and negatively associated with perfectionistic strivings. Put simply, it is the dread of imperfection rather than the high standard that tends to produce the delay. Putting a task off keeps it in a state where it has not yet fallen short.

Can you overcome perfectionism on your own?

Many people make real progress with structured self-help, and the cognitive-behavioral approach to perfectionism has been adapted into a self-help guide by Roz Shafran, Sarah Egan and Tracey Wade. The core moves — naming the feared prediction, testing it with small deliberate experiments, and noticing when you discount the results — can be practised alone. What is hard to do alone is spot the discount while you are the one doing it, which is where another perspective tends to help. If your perfectionism is entangled with an eating disorder, OCD, depression or thoughts of self-harm, work with a clinician rather than on your own.

How long does it take to stop being a perfectionist?

There is no honest number. A structured program has a set length, but that describes the program, not how long a lifelong strategy takes to become optional. What people tend to report is not a switch that flips but a gradual loosening: the alarm still sounds, and it is increasingly possible to act without obeying it.

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