Many of us believe striving for perfection leads to success. But perfectionism is counter-productive and can result in soaring levels of stress. The a

The rise of perfectionism – and the harm it’s doing us all

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2023-06-04 17:30:07

Many of us believe striving for perfection leads to success. But perfectionism is counter-productive and can result in soaring levels of stress. The answer, believes Professor Thomas Curran, is to go a little easier on yourself

A bout 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.”