Do you criticize yourself and feel inadequate. Do you berate yourself when you fail or critique yourself when you succeed? Do you think that nothing you do is ever good enough? Sometimes you throw in the towel and don’t try at all and other times you set the bar so high that you feel pressure to keep up to these standards.
You may be a perfectionist if:
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- When you succeed you only have a short-lived positive sense of achievement
- You hold yourself to high and rigid standards
- You believe anything less than perfect is deficient and inadequate
- You obsess over what other people think of you and how they perceive you
- You don’t forgive yourself for making mistakes
- It takes you a very long time to respond in text because you don’t want to sound “weird” to the recipient
- You struggle to make simple decisions like which shoes to buy
Perfectionism is the psychological undercurrent that is responsible for many causes of stress including: depression, anxiety, OCD, eating disorders, and even sexually acting out. Fortunately, therapy has been shown to be highly effective in helping people who struggle with these issues so that they can take back control of their life and be happy with who they are.