If you have an eating disorder you struggle with perfectionism. Perfectionism is also an important risk factor predisposing people without an eating disorder to develop one. A perfectionist goes to extremes to get everything right and to avoid mistakes. Relaxing your perfectionistic standards is critical to recovery and to reducing your risk for relapse.
So what does that mean for eating disorder recovery? Should you strive for mediocrity? Resign yourself to being a failure in everything but recovery?
On the simplest level, if it came down to a choice between recovery versus high achievement, your recovery always comes first. YOU are more important than what you produce!
But not so fast. In most instances you don’t have to choose between the two. That’s because perfectionism and a healthy pursuit of excellence are not the same thing. They involve fundamentally different attitudes about yourself and your efforts. Below I list the characteristics of each approach. See which one most closely describes your own attitudes.
Perfectionism
- Black and white thinking: There’s the best and all the rest. If you get anything wrong, you’ve failed. And so forth.
- You feel your worth is on the line: Making mistakes or falling short of the mark mean you are less deserving, less worthwhile as a person.
- You are harshly critical with yourself when you fall short of perfect: You can really kick yourself around when you don’t get it right.
- You experience feelings of shame when you aren’t perfect: Shame is the crushing emotion you experience when you feel unworthy as a person.
- You seek excellence as a cure for defectiveness: You doubt you are worthwhile as you are and hope high achievement will make you feel better about yourself.
- You feel joyless in your efforts to achieve: With your very worth on the line, the stakes for achievement are way too high. You feel oppressed and burdened by what you feel you must achieve.
Healthy pursuit of excellence
- Starting from a baseline of being fine as you are: Failure to achieve excellence may be disappointing but it has no effect on your worth.
- You expect mistakes to be part of the process: You aren’t running the gauntlet, trying to avoid mistakes as if they are landmines lurking in your path.
- Your mistakes don’t reveal personal defectiveness: Mistakes provide useful feedback about the path you’re on and the need for course corrections.
- Your efforts give you pleasure, not a feeling of oppression and obligation: Freed from the burden of proving your worth, striving can be an enriching form of self–expression, self–discovery, adventure, and exploration.
If you identify most with perfectionistic thinking, take time to notice this healthy alternative: A pursuit of excellence grounded in the reality of human imperfection will not only support recovery but has the potential to make your life more satisfying and less burdensome. Even if it feels beyond your reach now, it’s a goal you can work toward a little at a time.
Here’s a bonus: mistake–making strengthens brain development and increases expertise! Research shows that getting your brain to function optimally for any given skill requires making and correcting lots of mistakes. The struggle makes your brain more efficient and expert than that of the person who seems to breeze through. Who knew?!
