How to deal with perfectionism in your everyday life

Hey, brave soul!

As promised, here is my follow-up article on how to battle perfectionism (to this article), as someone who is struggling with c-PTSD. For all my brave souls, who are not affected by it, but struggle with depression or anxiety, these things might be of help to you as well! Please don’t hesitate to read through them, and take with you what suits you best. 🙂

Even if you stumbled onto this article first, I ask you to give the knowledge-filled pre-post a glance, to understand how perfectionism works. Yes, there is a summary at the bottom.

So, what are the rules we should remember?

1. You must understand that your perfectionism, is part of your security system. It is not a bad part of you, but one that is a bit out of control, trying to protect you from future harm.
2. Every time you are angry about yourself for making a mistake or “not getting it right”, you are also angry towards your inner child/ teen /young adult who has learned that making a mistake is a grave thing to do.
3. You cannot blame / punish / guilt trip yourself into change. The only thing that lets us grow is self-acceptance and being kind to ourselves.
4. You need to accept that not every day, is a 120% day. Heck, 120% days, should be rare – not the regular thing to happen. Showing up every day, is far more important, then striving to be perfect. The later one, will get you exhausted, frustrated, numb and irritated rapidly. Aka, overwhelmed.
5. Change takes time. Your traumas and your “bad habits” have also not evolved over-night in 9/10 cases. So, give yourself the permission to take it slow, steady and therefore really create a change in your life.

These rules you should remember at any given moment, especially when you feel your perfectionism is acting up again. And how do we regocnize that? Read further~

FEELINGS – Rule of thumb:

• If you feel like the idea of:
  • – not finishing your task at a certain time
  • – not finishing your task fully
  • – not finishing your task how you expect it to be
  • – someone looking at your work
  • – someone rating your work
  • – someone doing a teamwork with you, but now how you want it to be done
  • – not having item X with you
  • – not wearing clothing Y today
  • – not looking a certain way
  • – telling someone your opinion
• … already stresses you out, there is a high change your perfectionism is chewing on your inner peace.

My personal worst moment of perfectionism? Well, I like to write down things on paper, as I also do for my blog here. And you might bet that I on days when I am already stressed, I will rip the entire page off my notebook, if I dislike the way I wrote the headline. I am talking the style, not even making errors or such. Going out of the house, without feeling perfect in my clothes? On bad days, no chance. I will re-dress 3 times if needed. There are plenty of things, that I recognize me doing, when my inner perfectionist is holding the reins.

And I figured there are certain sentences, that he loves to infuse my thoughts with, making me stress out even more.

ACTIONS – Rule of thumb:

• Spending hours tweaking tiny details others might not even notice.
• Avoiding a task completely because you’re scared you won’t do it well.
• Rewriting a message or email 10 times before sending.
• Not celebrating your achievements because they “could’ve been better.”
• Never feeling “ready” to share your art/work/story/product/you name it.
• Never feeling good enough to take a photo of yourself, or even post it.
• Editing your social media captions over and over.
• Over-researching before starting something simple.
• Comparing yourself constantly, even to strangers on the internet.
• You feel guilty and to blame, if you “wasted your day” because you have been “unproductive”.
• You reject help because you need to do it alone, to prove that you are not a failure.

WORDINGS/THOUGHTS – Rule of thumb:

• “This isn’t good enough—yet.” (even if you’ve already done an outstanding job)
• “If I mess this up, everything will fall apart.”
• “I should be able to do this perfectly.”
• “I can’t show this to anyone yet.”
• “I just want to do it right.”
• “It’s not perfect yet.”
• “If I don’t give 200%, I’m failing.”
• “Others are better at this than me.”
• “If I cannot do this, I am worthless.”
• “If I cannot do this, XYZ will think lowly of me.”
• “If I do/don’t do this, my friends will think badly of me”.
• – the list is endless, but the main point is, that you either cannot even start, or finish something because you fear the judgement of others.
  • Exception: “They are doing this wrong, I must correct them, else my day will be ruined!” (Aka, you are actually forcing your own perfectionistic thoughts onto others.)

• Tension in the shoulders, neck, or jaw while working.
• Trouble sleeping because your brain is nitpicking your day.
• Exhaustion after finishing something that didn’t even need that much energy.
• Panic or freeze response when someone gives you feedback.
• Clenching your hands, making fists.
• Constantly crunched eyebrows ò_ó , or elevated eyebrows. ó_ò, while you are working.
• Picking your skin, f.e on the face, out of rising tension while working.
• Deep sighing, from time to time.
• Flat breathing for most of the time.
• Sucked in tummy, belly muscles hardened to be prepared for action / impact.

To make it short: From outside you look like you are solving the world’s biggest problems, and the weigh of every human’s life is on your shoulders – while you are baking a cake, that you have baked 200 times already.

Sounds familiar from the “This is: c-PTSD” article?

Recap of the article from the article “Perfectionism – a socially glorified survival mechanism of c-PTSD”: High standards are fine because you need to deliver and to do things right, and it is okay, to want the best for yourself and your loved ones – problematic perfectionism is when you get feelings of discomfort, if something is not done the way you want it to be. Or when you do things a certain way, out of fear of the reaction of others.

Okay, so now we get to the practical things. Here are some things that I, personally, do to keep my perfectionism in check. They might be different for everyone, but maybe you will find some things that might be helpful for you or someone you know and who is important to you.

Set realistic standards (But Alkaaaa, how does one do thaaaat?! – Ya,ya let me explain!) I have worked out two ways that help me keep my perfectionism in check, in general:

• One, you start with a low aim, and try to see where you would land naturally.
  • Number one might take a toll on you because you need to practise staying relaxed throughout the journey, to not fall back into your perfectionism behaviour.
    • You must make a fixed list of “rules” for this try. F.e “I don’t work on this longer than 3hrs per day.”, or “I will only do 3 things of my to-do list per day, on this project.”
    • You can use relaxation methods like progressive muscle relaxation, meditation and practising awareness, to help you get through this phase. The later one will help you stop catastrophising by staying in the current moment.
    • You can also make a list of things you would like to say to your younger self, if they feel like they are not doing enough, and everyone else is doing better.
• Two, you take your current level of performance and downscale it.
  • That approach, on the other hand, might hurt your current “pride”, because you need to address, that you might currently not be able to hold up, what you have been delivering so far.
  • For getting through this phase, it helps me a lot to remind myself, why I want to unlearn my pathologic perfectionism behaviour.
    • Make a list of 5 to 10 reasons why you would like to become better at handling these things. Write them similarly as mine, if you want to.
      • 1. I want to become better, at handling my PFCT, so my stress level will be lower over all.
      • 2. I want to become better, at handling my PFCT, to avoid stressing out my loved ones too.
      • 3. I want to become better, at handling my PFCT, so I can have a better work-life-balance.
      • 4. I want to become better, at handling my PFCT, so I stop re-doing my tasks for no good reason.
      • 5. I want to become better, at handling my PFCT, so I can finally try new things, with more joy.
      • 6. I want to become better, at handling my PFCT, to learn to allow myself to be human, and stop beating me up for not performing to an imagined expectation.
      • 7. I want to become better, at handling my PFCT, so I do not force my inner wound onto others.
      • 8. I want to become better, at handling my PFCT, to experience more freedom in my choices.
      • 9. I want to become better, at handling my PFCT, to finally find my true voice in conversations.
      • 10.I want to become better, at handling my PFCT because being stressed out (over nothing) 24/7 sucks. Period. I want to enjoy life.

The core idea of working with a perfectionist brain to me is, that you

1. Calm down the body regularly with exercise like muscle relaxation and meditation.
2. You create resources to look at, and remind you why you want to do better.
3. You set boundaries with yourself, that you try not to cross.
4. Always remind yourself, that healing is a process, and becoming better in the median of a month, is worth more than having 3 perfect days and plunging afterwards for the rest of the month.

You might now ask yourself maybe, why I mention this again, but it is important. I want a brief moment of your attention to hammer home one thing, that to me is a core fundamental thing, that we must acknowledge and work with, in order to not just suppress the perfectionism, but gently remove it from our system. This is, from my perspective, the only long-lasting way to heal this wound and make sure, it will not take over our life again.

When you experience trauma, especially “chronic trauma”, as the science lingo goes in terms of c-PTSD, you developed a so-called “inner critic”. We will talk about this part of c-PTSD in a later article, but I want you to remember, that a perfectionistic brain, most likely is caused by emotional/mental harm someone caused you.

So, when your perfectionism is acting up, here are a few questions to make use of, to get a glimpse behind the curtains:

1. Have I had a situation like this already?
2. Can I remember, if it was connected to a painful feeling?
3. Was I alone, or was there someone who saw me?
4. Who is the person, who judged me?
5. How was their reaction to me, after they saw I did not do as they expected me to?
6. What has this person done, after I failed their expectations?

I want to show you, that you are not alone, and that also something small, can cause huge distress.

⚠️ [Trigger warning: Recollection of aggressive parent behaviour; emotional punishment] ⚠️

When I was around 6~7ish years old, my mother did three things, that came back from my buried memories while I was writing this article.

The first one is, that when she and my stepdad tried to teach me how to ride a bicycle, and I had huge problems doing so. I simply was scared, and my little body had no good balance to it. I fell over easily and falling on the ground was something I struggled with for a long, long time. Their answer to me being overwhelmed, scared and crying was, to shout at me and throw my kids’ bicycle into a field nearby. She screamed at me, and both decided to simply walk further, telling me I should pick up my bicycle and get home on my own. It was dawning at that point.

The second thing is, that when I did not clean up my room as perfect as my mother wanted it to be, she came with a big plastic bag and threw away all of my toys, plushies and everything I owned. She had kept like a handful of things, but many of the toys I had, my plushies and building blocks were gone. She gave some of the few back to me when I “behaved”.

And on a last note, she abandoned me from the dinner table, if I did not behave well. You might imagine now, that I was throwing fits, or food. But the only thing at that special evening I remember, was that I was in my thoughts and played with the handle of my tea mug. That was all that was necessary for her to shout at me, and lock me with my dinner plate into the bathroom. Stating “pigs eat where the toilets are” or something along the lines.

Now that I think about it…One of her worst things to do was, when we played hide-and-seek; which yes, she was aware about; and I decided to hide in a little floor cupboard in the living room. Her best answer to finding me there, was not to open the floor cupboard and take me out and maybe be a little bit angry that I was hiding in there and show that she was distressed about not finding me directly – nooo, no, no, no. She placed her feet in front of the cabin, blocking the light from coming in, and not letting me out. I cried my eyes out, and she only let me out when I had stopped. Thinking she won, but first of: what is there to win over a child? And second, I did not manage to regulate myself, I was scared to death and my body went into shutdown mode.

All of these 4 examples, have 1 thing in common. I did not do, what she expected me to do. I did not live up to her expectations. Within the next years I had turned into “the perfect child”. Well-behaved, not arguing, not playing with things I should not, always scoring high grades in school.

If you find yourself, or someone who is important to you, to be claimed as “the perfect well-behaved kid”, please ask the needed questions. Please look deeper into that. Kids are meant to mess up, they are meant to be rebellious, or maybe even a bit whinny. Kids are meant to be expressive. If you find a shutdown kid, be cautious.

~

I apologize for ending this article perhaps on a bummer, but we are here to improve things, right? And therefore, we need to talk openly about things that happen so that the awareness can grow about what, why, and what follows certain events. I hope that my vulnerability does not scare you and that you – if affected – find comfort in knowing that you are not alone.

Even though I don’t feel like it now, I ask you for a little support, if you found this to be helpful and hope that you share it with someone else too, who might profit from this article.

I see you again at the next article – and now I will go, breathe some air, hug my inner child and ground my nervous system once more.♥

Be kind to yourself.
Cheers, Alka.