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What Can You Do As a Perfectionist?

How to Overcome Perfectionism

Do you believe you are a perfectionist? Does your perfectionism limit your life and daily decisions? Maybe it’s making you feel overwhelmed or possibly even affect your health. Studies have shown that a certain amount of healthy perfectionism can be a positive trait, while over-attention to detail is not. How do you overcome perfectionism? Try to figure out what is really important and what is not, this will help identify healthy perfectionism from unhealthy.

What Are Some Signs I Am a Perfectionist?

  • Always avoiding mistakes: There is no room for mistakes in your life. When you make a mistake, you are ashamed, depressed and afraid by your failing.
  • Overtime: You find yourself to be the last one out of the office. You work late to refine, improve and obsessively mess with a project that has already been completed.
  • Is It Teamwork?: You always take on other people’s tasks, believing it’s for the “good of the team” but your competitiveness won’t allow you to turn away from a less-than-perfect job.
  • All About Timing: You push project start dates due to the fact that the timing isn’t perfect or certain circumstances seem to be required.

How to Overcome Perfectionism

Other signs of a perfectionist are having trouble sleeping every day, being critical of yourself and others, caring way too much about how things are being done. Although perfectionism can be unhealthy and overwhelming, it can also be healthy to a certain extent. Healthy perfectionism is caring about your work to do the job efficiently and correctly. While unhealthy perfectionism keeps you working late hours, messing with every tiny detail and stressing over smaller things. Healthy perfectionism motivates you to become a better person. Unhealthy perfectionism habits can turn you to depression or unhappiness. With healthy perfectionism, there is always room for improvements. Bad perfectionism habits can prevent you to move forward without sabotaging the results.

How to Deal with Perfectionism:

Instead of allowing your perfectionism habits to dictate your goals, it should simply guide you along the way. For instance, if you have a paper due by 6pm, it doesn’t actually need to be handed in until the end of the week, therefore allow yourself to take a break and stop. Why not allow your perfectionism to add a new idea to the paper? A new idea or suggestion to your boss.