The dangers of seeking perfection
Is it any wonder that generations told they could ‘have it all’ are increasingly worried they’re not passing muster, asks Will Storr
We’re living in an age of perfectionism, yet it is a far less flawless world than we might have believed. Psychologists have linked the trait to a grim roster of mental health maladies from self-harm to eating disorders and even suicide; a major study published this week, analysing data from more than 40,000 people across the UK, Canada and the US, found that the obsession with seeming perfect in order “to secure approval” has risen by more 30 per cent among young people over the past three decades.
Between 1987 and 2017, researchers at York St John University and the University of Bath recorded a 16 per cent increase in students imposing unrealistic standards on those around them, while 10 per cent more of this age group, compared to previous generations, “attach an irrational importance to being perfect”. The bad news, then, is that for all of perfectionism’s shortcomings, we still seem intent on achieving it.
For me, the results of this week’s study didn’t come as a surprise. I’ve spent the past few years researching both the damage wreaked by the dawn of perfectionism and its historical causes. As I describe in my book, Selfie: How We Became so Self-obsessed and What It’s Doing To
Us, evidence that something has been going badly wrong in our society has been emerging for years.
Between 2000 and 2014, the number of adults reporting suicidal thoughts jumped from 3.8 per cent to 5.4 per cent, while in the decade leading up to 2014, hospital admissions for eating disorders in young women and girls grew by 172 per cent.
Body image troubles used to be thought of as a primarily female issue, but males are succumbing in ever greater numbers.
A BBC investigation published this week found steroids being illegally sold to boys as young as 14, while the UK has seen a 43 per cent increase in male referrals for eating disorders over just two years – the crippling fear of not living up to the physical ideals that they see widely disseminated in popular culture and on social media are thought to be at the heart of this pernicious issue.
Perfectionists of all ages are vulnerable to these problems because they’re highly sensitive to signals of failure in their environment. When things go wrong for them, they tend to blame themselves, so a failure in one small compartment of their life can seem like a total failure of the self.
Debbie Hampton, 43, is one such case I spoke to. After years trying to be the perfect wife and mother, her marriage failed – “My thoughts were, ‘You’re not a good enough mother, you’re getting older, you’ll never get a man and please him,’” she told me. She took an overdose of 10 different prescription drugs, only to wake up in hospital with brain damage. Perfectionism isn’t like a virus or a fungal infection: it’s not something you have or don’t have. We’re all, to some degree, perfectionists – more or less sensitive to signals of failure in our environment, and the major shifts we’ve experienced in social media, gender and the economy in our lifetime are undeniably at the heart of why so many more of us now feel we are letting ourselves down.
Today, the millennial self-image is one of individualistic entrepreneurial hustle. In the Eighties came a competitive dawn in which entrepreneurship was key, and success crucial – to get along and get ahead meant pushing yourself and being a star. As success has become synonymous with economic well-being, and today’s young people are routinely told by their parents that they can “have it all”, it can make those who lack money and career success feel like they are not passing muster. This is exacerbated
‘I just felt that if I wasn’t outstanding, then I was being less of a person’
by the relative lack of safeguards we now have when people encounter problems such as unemployment. That middle aged men are the most at-risk group for suicide is thought to be linked to perfectionism: men who lose their jobs feel like they’ve failed in the eyes of their families, and the world. While researching my book, I met Graeme Cowen. Having failed to hit targets at his recruitment company, he made the first of two attempts on his life, the second coming after he encountered problems during the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. “I just felt that if I wasn’t being outstanding, I was less of a person,” he told me.
One study of what both sexes believe it takes to “be a man” found they have to be a “fighter”, a “winner”, a “provider”, a “protector” and “maintain mastery and control” at all times. “If you break any of those rules you’re not a man,” said the paper’s author, clinical psychologist Martin Seager. On top of this, “real men” aren’t supposed to show vulnerability; for all the benefits that the gender revolution has brought us comes added pressure on both men and women to achieve everything all at once; to be caring and family-minded, while simultaneously at the top of their game professionally.
And now, into this cooker of roiling pressures, has come social media. One of the fundamental ways the brain keeps track of how we’re doing is by comparing us to those around us – an affliction now being suffered by children as young as eight, whose use of sites and apps is exposing them to “significant risks emotionally”, according to the Life in Likes report out today, and is making them increasingly anxious about their online image as they head into their teens.
Social media floods us with images of perfect celebrity bodies; friends select only their glossiest moments to display. Prof Gordon Flett, a psychologist from York University in Toronto, calls this “perfectionist presentation” – the tendency “to put on a false front of seeming perfect, where you cover up mistakes and shortcomings”, he told me.
It’s not just perfect lives we’re required to display, either: we need to be perfect in our opinions, too.
“When a public figure makes a mistake, there seems to be a much stronger, more intense and quicker backlash,” explained Prof Flett. “So kids growing up now see what happens to people who make a mistake and they’re very fearful of it.”
At the core of this age of perfectionism is a message that we hear over and over again: all you need to do to achieve your dreams is to dream big enough. Anyone can be David Beckham or Beyoncé, they just have to try. This has a dark underside, however – the thinking that when we fail, it’s because we didn’t want it badly enough. Without confronting the misguided mindsets that have got us here, our pursuit of perfection looks unlikely to yield.
Selfie: How We Became So Self-obsessed and What it’s Doing to Us by Will Storr is published by Pan Macmillan (£18.99). To order your copy for £16.99 (£15.98 EPUB) call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk.