The rise of perfectionism - and the harm it's doing us all

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Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium The rise of perfectionism - and the harm it's doing us all    About a decade ago, Thomas Curran, a psychology student, travelled to Australia to embark on a postdoctoral fellowship and was crushed with anxiety, exhaustion and panic attacks. Beyond making the round-the-world flight, he'd really pushed himself hard to make it there. Curran is from Wellingborough, a town in the east Midlands, and grew up "without much money". His mum used to work as a receptionist at the Hind Hotel, his dad was a construction worker who was famous locally (Curran tells me with a touch of pride) for riding the statue of a deer mounted above the hotel's entrance. As a teen, Curran thought he'd go into construction, too, but spurred on by the New Labour education drive, he chose university. Now he was far beyond the expectations of his youth - and surely well on the road to success in academia - yet found himself in pieces: "a failure". With all going south Down Under, Curran returned to the UK. At a less prestigious institution, the pressure eased. He dropped his competitive streak and decided "to stop trying to please other people". Able to let his mind wander, he began to look more forensically at perfectionism, a trait he recognised in himself and - until that point - had rather celebrated. After all, surely it was perfectionism that enabled him to meet the high standards he placed upon himself and rise from his working-class roots? And surely it was the same impulse that kicked him out of bed when he felt crushed by self-criticism, and pushed him through panic attacks to keep striving? "I was genuinely of the belief that perfectionism was the one thing that was holding me up when everything around me was collapsing," he says. "But it was actually perfectionism that was creating those problems." Perfectionism, according to psychologists, can blind us to our achievements while enforcing impeccable - often impossible - standards upon ourselves. It can be inflicted from within (self-oriented), projected on to others (other-oriented) or absorbed from those around us (socially prescribed). Trying (and failing) to meet these expectations can be destructive and perfectionism can make someone vulnerable to anxiety, depression and suicide. As a trait, it had certainly caused Curran plenty of anguish, but as a research subject, it turned out to be a good match. In 2017, he co-authored a far-reaching study with Dr Andrew Hill that demonstrated that perfectionism had been steadily rising since the 1980s. Recent generations of young people, he wrote in the Psychological Bulletin, "perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves". Continued here

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