Today’s episode is about perfectionism.
Perfectionism robs us from joy.
It shows up looking like ambition, hard work, high standards. You get praise, gold stars, promotions.
But underneath it all, there’s fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of rejection. Fear of being unloved.
Perfectionism is a coping mechanism. It’s a strategy you developed to feel safe, loved and like you belonged.
Perfectionism can show up anywhere. in work, in your body, in your relationships, in how you eat, and how you show up in life.
It can make living hard.
If you’re tired of your own pressure, if you feel like it’s never enough — this one’s for you.
What’s Really Behind Perfectionism (It’s Not Ambition)
Perfectionism is not just a strive for excellence or ambition.
It’s a trauma response.
A protective response that someone might develop when secure attachment and internal regulation skills are lacking.
If attachment and social needs weren’t consistently met when your nervous system was developing, you may not have learned how to regulate your inner world effectively.
You learned to perform to feel safe, to be accepted, to belong.
To ensure love, connection, and social belonging, you may have developed perfectionist behaviours in an attempt to change yourself so you’d be included.
It’s a primal survival response. Being separate from the herd — on a nervous system level — can feel like a threat to your survival.
These behaviours became strategies to avoid separation and keep you safe when your nervous system didn’t know another way. That’s what a coping mechanism is.
Over time, you might confuse it with who you are: “I’m a perfectionist.” But this isn’t true.
It’s not who you are, it’s a behaviour you learnt to get your needs met.
Like all coping mechanisms, it works until it doesn’t.
Perfectionism is deeply destructive — to your health, to your relationships, and to your ability to feel joy.
Perfectionism can be looked through the lens of addiction.
According to Gabor Maté, “addiction manifests through any behaviour in which a person finds a temporary relief or pleasure and therefore craves, but that in the long term causes negative consequences and yet the person refuses or is unable to give it up.”
According to this definition, perfectionism is a form of addiction:
- Short term relief or pleasure: When you complete something and get praise, you feel seen and safe for a moment. It gives you a dopamine hit.
- Long term suffering: Anxiety, burnout, insomnia, strained relationships, chronic pain, tension, autoimmune issues, and even illness.
- The inability to stop: Even when you tell yourself to relax, the pressure is still there. The self-judgment is still there. It sneaks in, even when you don’t want it.
The tricky thing with perfectionism is that society rewards it.
You’re praised for your ambition, your niceness, your drive. You’re labelled “high-achieving” and “driven.” From “good job” in childhood to school grades to work promotions — it’s baked in.
But in reality? A perfectionist fits that broader definition of an addict.
Some people drink to cope with the pain of not feeling safe.
Others, like myself, obsess over details, trying to control everything and become the perfectionist people pleasers.
They are different responses that stem from the same underlying feeling of inadequacy.
They seem like opposite behaviours – ambition vs self destruction in the form of drug use.
One group is labelled as the stars of society while another is marked as a group of poor, unfortunate souls, but in reality they belong to the same camp, the shared feeling of not being good enough.
How Perfectionism Shows Up in Your Everyday Life
How does perfectionism look like, exactly?
Let’s look at that.
- Inside yourself: The internal pressure to meet impossible standards. And as a recovering perfectionist, I can tell you that the perfectionist herself doesn’t even know what perfect looks like. (And they can’t—because it doesn’t exist.)
- Extreme fear of making mistakes. The inability to receive feedback because it feels like rejection of you as a person.
- Outside yourself: Needing the environment to be perfect to feel safe — excessive cleaning, eating perfectly food, or having the perfect body.
- Need to control people around you — what they do, how they dress, what they eat. Essentially judging others when they don’t match your version of “perfect.”
- Trying to match a parent’s or society’s definition of perfect — again because of a deep fear of rejection.
- People pleasing and being overly nice. Not having any needs of your own. Wanting to be seen as perfect and liked at all times.
- Being hypercritical of others. Complaining, nitpicking seeing what’s missing instead of what’s there.
- Constant comparison. Ranking yourself in terms of performance, looks, money, everything.
- Procrastinating or avoiding projects completely because you think they need to be perfect before you even begin.
- Being a “maximizer.” Needing to find the absolute best option, researching endlessly, and ending up disappointed.
- Finally, and this is the saddest, perfectionism and deep self-hatred is a 2 for 1 deal. Being extremely hard on yourself, judging yourself and feeling guilt and shame about things not done “perfectly.”
Letting Go of Perfectionism Without Losing Your Drive
How does one move forward from perfectionism?
For a long time, I thought letting go of perfectionism meant letting go of all ambition.
That I’d become this passive person only doing the bare minimum.
To be honest, sometimes dropping everything is a part of healing — especially if you’re burnt out and exhausted. It was for me.
But in the long run, that’s not the point. Letting go of perfectionism doesn’t mean letting go of the things that matter to you.
It means shifting the motivation.
Because there’s a difference between healthy striving and perfectionism:
- Root motivation: Perfectionism is rooted in fear, shame, and a need for external validation. It’s about avoiding mistakes, rejection, and failure. Healthy striving comes from a growth mindset, from curiosity and a desire to improve based on what you care about — not what was handed to you.
- Relationship with mistakes: Perfectionism avoids mistakes at all costs. Mistakes equal failure, rejection, and even emotional death. Healthy striving sees mistakes as part of learning.
- Rigidity vs. Flexibility: Perfectionism is rigid and survival-based. Healthy striving is flexible and allows for creativity.
- Experience: Perfectionism makes you avoid opportunities unless they’re a guaranteed success. Healthy striving says yes — even when you don’t have the full plan — because you trust you’ll figure it out.
How to Start Healing Perfectionism
So yeah, this sounds gloomy. But like all our struggles, this can be a doorway.
There’s so much energy in perfectionism. And when you’re no longer spending it trying to survive, you can use it for something you choose.
But it doesn’t start by telling yourself to “stop.” If you could’ve, you already would’ve.
I want to quote Gabor Maté again:
You don’t heal the behavior. You heal the pain.
Start here:
- Ask: What’s RIGHT with the behavior. What does it give you? Safety, control, love, connection, being seen?
- Then ask: Why the pain? What was missing when you first felt like you needed to be perfect? Let whatever comes up come.
- Explore: What would good enough actually look like? How does it feel in your body when you don’t perform? How does it feel when you do? Feel your perfectionist part in your body.
Ask with curiosity — not judgment. Meet it with love.
You don’t heal your inner critic by being critical of it. You heal it with compassion.
When you ask these questions with compassion and curiosity, you step into the observer mode.
You step out of the perfectionist identity.
You see that you are in fact not a perfectionist.
Rather, the trait is a part of you, a limited version of you that shows up because it had to, and it’s trying to keep your needs met, keep you safe.
From there, start exploring the messiness of life – what do you actually like about other people?
Most likely, it’s not their polished perfect facade. It’s their humanity. Their quirks and messiness.
In the age of AI we see this clearly. People get annoyed when suddenly everything they read and see is extremely polished.
Typos, grammatical errors and other personal quirks don’t exist anymore, because so much is edited through the filter of AI. Why? Because it’s lost its soul. You can say that perfectionism is boring.
Healing also means questioning the messages behind your perfectionism.
A lot of the time, your standards weren’t even about you — they were about trying to control how others feel about you.
To regulate their nervous systems, not your own, so that you could feel safe.
You begin to build trust in yourself when you stop living according to standards that were never yours to begin with, and when you create safety from the inside.
The perfectionist part of you believes you’re not worthy as you are. Intellectually you may believe that you are. But the belief isn’t rooted in your intellect, it’s in your subconscious.
That’s why the practice of “I am enough” isn’t a cute meme.
It’s where the rubber meets the road.
It’s about meeting yourself where you are — in discomfort, in shame, in the awkward middle — and staying.
This is how you build a felt sense of worthiness. It’s not a mantra. It’s a muscle.
Perfectionism can become your teacher. The energy behind it isn’t bad — it just needs a new direction.
Start with awareness. Meet what you find with love.
That’s the real work.