Gwyneth Paltrow x Thomas Curran: The Social Psychology of Perfectionism

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2:29Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast. Bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers and seekers. here to start conversations, because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world. Here we go. My guest today is Thomas Curran.

3:10Thomas is a social psychologist and a professor at the London School of Economics. His new book is called The Perfection Trap, Embracing the Power of Good Enough. In it, he explores how perfectionism manifests why it's on the rise and its impact on us individually and collectively. As you'll hear in our conversation, I was drawn to Thomas's work because of where I find myself at this juncture in my life and the reckoning I've had with my own levels of self-criticism over the years. We talked about how we have both felt a softening of this in our own lives, and we discussed how and why perfectionism is growing among young people and teenagers.

3:47Thomas explains the trap of perfection and why it's ultimately a form of self-sabotage. And he shares the steps that we can take to break free from the cycle and into being more radically and wholly ourselves. Let's get to Thomas Curran.

4:04Hello. Hello. How are you doing? Very well, thank you. I'm in Canada at the moment. I'm going back to London in a couple of weeks. But for the moment, I'm enjoying a bit of downtime and just talking to people about perfectionism, which is great. Yeah, really great. So you're also a professor at the London School of Economics. There's psychology in the London School of Economics? I know. Can you believe it? Interesting. What is the psychology of economics? Well, kind of like behavior science. Why do people make decisions? Are human beings rational? Yeah, values, preferences, marketing, psychology, all that sort of stuff.

4:45what's your conclusion there if human beings are rational absolutely not couldn't be more irrational if we tried i don't think but that's fine because that's what makes us human beings so there's something quite enlightening about that although it does drive economist math when i came across your book i was so struck by the title and it resonated so much. And I had so much curiosity around your work and your research on the subject of perfectionism. The book is called The Perfection Trap, which I think perfectly encapsulates where I find myself at this juncture in my life. And I think sort of reckoning with where it stems from, what it is, why so many of us have it, why it's sort of like the acceptable flaw when someone asks you, you know, tell us about your, your downsides.

5:44It's like, oh, I work too much, or I'm a perfectionist, or I'm, I'm a recovering perfectionist. So I guess I'd sort of like to frame the conversation by asking you how you got down this particular academic funnel. What was it that drew you to this subject and how did you start to research it? I mean, I'm a perfectionistic person for sure. And I think from an early age, I was definitely an anxious kid. So I would find it difficult to perform in really challenging situations. I had a lot of natural talent, I suppose, and I was good at sports and in school. But when it came to like high pressure situations, I always tended to struggle.

6:27and I don't think I obviously want you young you don't connect the dots but as I got older and a lot of other pressures came into my life things like you know academic pressures or pressures to look a certain way behave a certain way pressures to have a relationship or to succeed in work and all these other societal pressures that were kind of bombarded with really started to have an impact kind of interact I suppose with that underlying anxiety and push me into doing things that weren't very comfortable like working really hard trying to perfect myself manage impressions and all that sort of stuff and over time that really culminated some quite significant mental health problems which led me to therapy and through that process i was brought to the awareness that rather than helping me so i thought the perfectionism was holding me up it was the one thing keeping me going it was the thing that was making me bulletproof rather than actually doing those things it was actually creating the problems and it was at the root of the difficulties and that's really where my, I guess, motivation sparked to understand this trait more because we actually don't know a great deal about it.

7:31But particularly at a societal level, like what's going on? Why do so many people feel these pressures and why is perfectionism so pervasive? So I did the first study to look at how perfectionism is changing over time. We're finding that it's on the rise, which is super interesting, but also a little bit worrying. And probably not surprising, right? Given social media's impact on culture, et cetera. Yeah, I definitely think social media is having a big, big impact on this. There's no doubt about that. There are other pressures, of course, like in schools and workplace and all that sort of stuff, but definitely social media is having an impact.

8:03Are perfectionism and anxiety kind of paired in your mind? Yes. There's a lot of research to suggest that perfectionism is very strongly correlated with anxiety and ruminative anxiety, the worries about how we're looking, appearing and performing in comparison to others but also in the eyes of other people we're petrified of doing things wrong for instance or failing or slipping up because in our minds we feel like people are watching and they're waiting and they're going to let us know so perfection is really about concealing hiding it's about trying to create for ourselves and other people this perfect life and lifestyle that we want other people to see which is fine until things start to go wrong until cracks start to appear.

8:46And when those situations come into our lives, when we do find ourselves in challenging situations, perfectionist people really struggle because essentially they go in on themselves, they're very self-critical and they tell themselves all the time that they're not good enough. And that's really problematic from a psychological perspective. So the sort of seed of perfectionism, is it coming from growing up in a household with a parent of a certain type like what are the origin stories so perfectionism is about 30 to 40 percent genetic really yeah it's very strong but that's very consistent across most personality characteristics in fact a lot of other personality characteristics like neuroticism ridiculousness conscientiousness agreeableness and all the rest of it are about 50 inherited so it's really strong like really really strong genetic component but we also have to bear in mind that that leaves a lot for the environment to explain too so you know 30 to 40 percent genetic but that still leaves at least 60 percent for an environment to explain and when we're talking about environmental factors yep you can talk about early life experiences parenting conditionally regarding parents is something we're zooming on when we're thinking about perfectionism that's parenting where you know when you've done something well you're given a lot of praise and approval but when you haven't quite succeeded that praise approval is withheld or subtly deferred on the condition that young people keep doing more, keep trying harder, keep working to do better.

10:11That's problematic because what that teaches young people is that they're only really worth something when they've succeeded and that when they haven't quite met that benchmark that there must be something wrong or that they need to continually work and do more to correct those mistakes. And of course, that makes us very failure averse. It makes us worried about making mistakes and slipping up, which are very highly perfectionistic tendencies. But it's not just conditional regard. Parents can also project their own perfectionism onto young people too. So, you know, you have perfectionistic parents, young people see that.

10:42They're very impressionable creatures and they will, of course, mimic and take on those tendencies themselves. Anxious forms of rearing as well, where you're hypersensitive about or worried about managing impressions or not slipping up. again young people will will see this and they'll also they'll also see that as um ways in which they should um behave too so there's all sorts of parenting uh styles and practices that can enter perfectionism but i must emphasize that it's not just about parents and in fact there's a lot of evidence to suggest that this is a broader problem than just those early life experiences because modern society these days just radiates perfection everywhere perfectionistic ideals and fantasies just bombarding us through social media, as you talked about, and other areas, advertising, movie theaters, and all the rest of it.

11:32And that can also impact on our sense of need to be perfect. Right. And I would think too, even as you say, there is a genetic component, but we are currently swimming in this culture of, you know, highly presentational perfection, sort of, you know, unnatural ideals. I mean, I grew up obviously in an era without social media and all of that. And I, I definitely think I had those tendencies anyway, but I feel like they sort of kicked in later in life. Like I don't think of myself as a perfectionistic kid at all. I was kind of much more easygoing and accepting. And so I'm not sure exactly what happened along the way, but I feel like it was more in my twenties and late twenties when I started to get infected with it and then really, really hung on for a good, you know, couple of decades there.

12:28I'm not sure if it matters like so much, even why I'm a perfectionist, but the, the patterns that it's driven me to are quite punishing. Can I ask you what that perfectionism looks like in your own life? It's changed over time. I would say, you know, in my thirties, I was trying to hold everything together. And I had a real focus on keeping myself physically strong, being able to do multiple things at one time. I sort of had this complex around like I can bear what other people can't bear. That's how my perfectionism showed up, like loaded on me, whether it's like emotional trauma or, you know, trying to do two careers at the same time raising kids by myself it was like that that to me it was most pronounced in that phase like that I I wanted to be able to do things that nobody else could white knuckle through and it became really important to my identity and it was incredibly harmful yeah it's it is it's a it's quite a punishing way to to go through like trying to push through all times and all causes and all situations sometimes it's really healthy to slow down but perfectionism doesn't give us a permission to do that it continually forces us to work through challenge and setback and strife when actually what we really need to do is slow down seek help and and recuperate I suppose allow ourselves to do that and and that's actually one of the most difficult things about perfectionism it it just it just doesn't allow us to do that and are all high achieving people do they have this perfectionist streak i would say a good proportion yes we don't actually have any like hard data on that so it's really hard to say but i would caution that it doesn't necessarily mean that perfectionism is necessary for success right i think what we see it is the tip of the iceberg in the in the extremely high high before people have made it to the very, very top.

14:37Of course, we want to learn from those experiences and we can learn a lot from their experiences, but sometimes they can mislead us a little bit into believing that it was the perfectionism got there when it was probably they got there despite the perfectionism, not because of it. And we know that because a lot of data suggests that there's a very weak relationship to perfectionism performance. Actually, in fact, there is no relationship between those two things. So yes, it is true that a lot of perfectionistic people are really high performers, but that doesn't mean perfectionism is why they got there.

15:05right okay so there's a correlation there but if there's not a causation yeah so there's two reasons why we don't necessarily see a high correlation with affections and assess the first is that they work really really hard but it's unsustainably hard and you tend to find perfectionism is closely linked to things like burnout just a kind of cynicism devaluation and reduced accomplishment in the workplace or whatever it is we might be doing but there's a second more interesting reason why perfectionistic people find it really difficult to find lasting success And that's because the world-class self-sabotages.

15:38And what I mean by that is that they will avoid or need to avoid failure to such an extent that they'll sabotage the chances of success to do that. Because avoiding failure is way, way more important than feeling like we've been successful. And we know this because we've done a lot of lab-based research. And I'll tell you quickly about one study. I've got people in the lab and we told them to do a cycling task. These are young athletes. And we said, you should comfortably meet a certain distance in a certain amount of time. That should be comfortable for you. So go away and do it. So they got on the bike and they cycle really, really hard to meet this goal.

16:13And then at the end, we told them that sadly you failed. You didn't quite meet the goal, but it's okay. You can try again. And then the non-perfectionistic people, well, on that second attempt, they put in just as much effort, if not a little bit more. But the perfectionistic people did something really interesting. their effort fell off a cliff on that second attempt because in their minds you can't fail at something that you didn't try and so what they're doing is they're preserving themselves they're wanting to avoid that shame embarrassment guilt that they felt the first time by just taking themselves away from the situation and it's not just avoidance that we see by the way it's also things like procrastination which are wrapped up in this same psychology where something is so tough, so difficult, so challenging that we just want to do anything we can to avoid feeling those really difficult emotions so that we just avoid them and remove ourselves.

17:05But we're only damaged, of course, by the passage of time. And so that also is not conducive to performance either. So perfectionists work unsustainably hard, they burn out, but they also self-sabotage, procrastination avoidance, which is not in any way conducive to success. So that's why perfection as a wheat relation performance. That's super fascinating. Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month.

17:39It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness.

18:07Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. So what are the other, for lack of a better word, what are the other symptoms of it, right? So you said they work really hard, but they burn out. They're self-sabotagers. If someone's trying to diagnose whether they're a perfectionist or not what are the other symptoms quote unquote well think about a time where you've been successful there's a good good starting point now what was your first emotion was it relief that you didn't screw up well that's probably an indication that you might have a little bit of perfectionism because really perfectionism is the thief of satisfaction is a thief of joy essentially what it means is we can't derive any lasting satisfaction from success because the better we do, the better we feel like we're expected to do, both ourselves and other people.

19:15So we always set a new floor for ourselves that we can never regress from. And it's so exhausting to keep running on that treadmill. That's the most debilitating thing I think about perfectionism. It kind of exposes our dreams as nothing more than dead ends because the next thing that we make it, it's like chasing the horizon. The closer you get the further it moves like that is what perfectionism is and it doesn't allow us to just savour and and and be content in the moment of our accomplishments and being able to reflect on his accomplishment and find a lasting sense of joy and satisfaction from having made it a certain way because we've got to keep doing more we've got to keep having more so that's i i think that's the biggest one there's also a very harsh self-critical component of perfectionism that i think we also have to be attentive to because perfectionistic people can be very self-critical particularly when things haven't gone well very hard on themselves and that's by the way that's one of the reasons why it can be really problematic in terms of our mental health but yeah if you are worried about a failure if you are highly self-critical and you and you find it hard to derive lasting satisfaction from success those are those are very key signatures of perfectionism are you looking at me

20:28i i you know what like i when i was going through this research it was like yep yep yep that's me that's me that's me like this was very much me searching for respect i mean a lot of people feel these things yeah it's it's super interesting you know to to read through a book because when you're a perfectionist you feel isolated in it you know it's not something that people really talk about in terms of, you know, I don't know what I'm being driven by and I can never satisfy myself. Like it's not really dinner party fodder. So I think it was really interesting for me to have it articulated in these ways, because also it's become this catch-all, this sort of like trite, like, oh, I'm a perfectionist.

21:10It just means, you know, I have OCD in this particular way, but it's okay. It's like culturally acceptable. And actually it's, it's very damaging. Well, it is. And I'll, I'll ask you a question in your world. Do you think that perfectionism is something that you've seen grow? Do you think it's something that's very widespread right now where you are? I'll start with the cohort of people that I'm like with a lot in my life in a non-professional way. And that's teenage girls. My daughter's 19. My son is 17. All his friends, his female friends, my daughter's friends, my stepdaughter. It's so startling to me, the standards that these girls are holding themselves to.

21:56And luckily, I wouldn't say it indexes extremely heavily into physical looks. It's more, what am I getting done? What is the quality of my work? Am I impressive? How am I showing up in the room? How much responsibility can I bear? It's really extraordinary to me to see how these cohort of girls are like hyper, hyper capable in a way that I'm like, is this okay? Like, aren't they supposed to be, you know, 17 and kind of fucking around? I mean, I was not like that when I was 17, But I observed that in such an incredible way. And then also in my peer group, women who are, you know, probably my best friends are probably like 45 to 50.

22:52I see a kind of easing of it starting to happen now where we're all a little bit like, this is fruitless. Like, what are we driving towards? You know, my friend Glennon Doyle, who has a great podcast, she, I've referenced this a lot. It really stuck with me at the beginning of the year. She discovered she had anorexia, but she was talking about how she had this unbelievable amount of discipline, which I think is just run right in parallel with perfectionism, right? You're so disciplined because you're driving towards achieving something so hard. and then she kind of stopped and asked herself but then what am i a disciple of and that to me is such an interesting question like i want to be the disciple of something that i contemplate and ruminate on as opposed to like whatever my wiring is whatever the genetic pieces whatever the culture has told me and then whatever i've reinforced by brutally telling myself over and over again, that I'm not good enough that at the end of the day, like I'm not enough.

23:59I'm not enough. I can't, you know, I can't get there. So I'm on the one hand feeling positive about the fact that these 50 year-ish old women are like, forget it. Like, who am I? I want to like myself. Like, it's good enough, you know, but, but also as concerned about these teenage girls, I mean, it's striking. Yeah, it's so interesting that you make that distinction because I am concerned actually about the world that young people have to come of age in these days with social media and the pressures there. I'm sure there is a lot of pressure at school to continue to excel because they're standardized, tested all the time, which way more than we were.

24:48and i certainly was and they they're so concerned about how they're doing and whether they're doing enough and and even objectively high grades are not enough because they they feel like they should be doing better they should be doing more because suddenly now they're surrounded by elite achievers and it's it's all a pressure cooker it's so much of a pressure and we're seeing that in the data we're seeing that exactly that in the data that young people are really struggling with with a lot of these pressures and they're internalizing them as pressure to be perfect but what's really interesting is it's social pressures so we have three dimensions of perfectionism self which it comes from within other which is projected outwards onto other people and social which is perceived to come from the outside world and young people are telling us that it's those social pressures to be perfect which they're feeling in greater regularity and it's on an exponential curve right now so this is going up really quickly and it will continue to go up really quickly into the future so yeah young young people have got a difficult uh world to navigate right right now and and i think it's up to us as parents and those in who work with young people teachers educators to really work hard to push back against that culture because i think it's so important that young people know it's okay that just you know existing being living breathing it means you're enough that's all that's all that matters that makes you enough and that you don't have to prove yourself all the time you don't have to demonstrate to other people that you're worth something all the time that you know it's it's about joy it's about purpose it's about trying to find meaning in life to flourish like a flower you know flowers don't compete with each other by the way they grow in their own special ways and that's the most important thing the message i think that young people need need to hear right now that you know they if they keep chasing this perfect idea of it's gonna it you know this it's impossible and they have to find their own ways in life so But so, yeah, it's really interesting to make that distinction because we see that in the data.

26:39I wonder for those of us raising these teenagers who are being bombarded all the time by these ideals. It's so the water that we're all swimming in. And I don't know the degree to which we're even aware of our unconscious biases towards achieving and capability and perfection and all of that. So what is the antidote to that with with a teenager? Because also they don't listen to very much that we say anyway. So does it become about us trying to model stuff or are there practical things we can do to help kids orient towards self-valuing instead of the perfectionistic tendencies? Yeah. And at first, this is a really important question.

27:23I'd like to first preface it with a clear statement that it's not easy to be aware, particularly in the modern world. and there are a lot of pressures, very real pressures, by the way, out there to succeed because life is becoming a bit harder for young people. It's harder to get into the best universities. It's harder to get into the elite professions and the elite professions are the only professions right now where wages are increasing. Like everywhere else, it's becoming a lot, lot tougher for young people. So of course, look, those pressures are real in their life and it's understandable that parents will feel them and want their kids to do well.

27:57That's the first thing to say. but you can have high expectations you can have high goals but you can do so in a warm and caring environment that provides love and support unconditionally and and what does that mean that means that no matter how well your offspring do if they come home and they've got an a grade amazing celebrate that hug them tell them that's an incredible achievement well done but if they come and they don't get the grade that they wanted and they're upset which they will be tell them it's so tell them the same things exactly the same things be unconditional in that love and affection that you showed them tell them it's just one test out of many many hundreds of tests that they're going to give it's not an indictment on them it doesn't it doesn't say anything about how much they're worth or how much they matter or how much they're loved or approved of by their parents or their teachers this is just one stepping stone in a in a in a path that's going to take you in the direction that you want to take and i think that's the most important thing unconditional love and approval no matter no matter what's happening in young people's lives that's so so crucial they need that uh but also you know like you mentioned try to be to lead by example to you know teach young people that failure is humanizing it's not humiliating you know so whenever you fail share that with with your kids tell them you had a bad day like tell them you screwed up share that information with them and teach them the joy of that, the very humanizing joy of being a fallible human being.

29:29And sometimes things don't work out the way we planned. That's okay. There's always next time. So those are the things I would bear in mind when thinking about parenting practices and all the rest of it. But I would just say it's tough. It's tough. And you're doing such a great job. Well, that remains to be seen. So you touched on this, but these three types, types of perfectionism that you studied, the self-oriented, the socially prescribed, and the other-oriented. How did you land on these three segments? So to answer that, decades of work that hasn't been done by me, it's been done by two clinicians called Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flat.

30:11And they just asked perfectionistic people, you know, what does perfectionist look like to you? What are the thought processes? What are the behaviors? is what the emotions that you feel and across hundreds of interactions they arrived at these three elements because they they saw that perfection wasn't just a personal characteristic that i need to be perfect nothing but perfect but it also contains all sorts of social elements around everybody expects me to be perfect and that's why i need to be perfect but also my perfectionistic standards are what i expect other people to also hold themselves to and so these kind of three really core elements came what sort of generated organically through just interacting with perfectionistic people and that's where they come from and in society does everybody have some degree of each one of these aspects yes so it's useful to think of perfectionism as a spectrum rather than a kind of i am or i'm not a perfectionistic person a couple of reasons but the main one is to say you're a perfectionist and you're not a perfectionist means quite fixed right then that suggests that there isn't a process that we can we can go about changing those tendencies whereas if you think about perfectionism as a spectrum what we can begin to see is that some people will be high some people will be low some people will be more or less in the middle and that spectrum can move and that's also the most curious thing about perfectionism because everyone will score somewhere along the spectrum of self-social and other oriented perfectionism some will be high on self some will be low on social some will be in the middle of other and then all sorts of different combinations and so no one perfectionistic person looks like another and that's also the really fascinating thing about perfectionism so it's really useful to think about it as a spectrum but there's criticism at the heart of each one of these right because in self-oriented perfectionism it's like that negative voice in your head criticizing yourself the socially is that your friends or the world at large is going to be critical.

32:05And the other is that you are critical of other people for not living up to standards. Absolutely. That self-criticism is the root of these three. And it makes sense if you think about it, because if you're putting yourself through high self-criticism when you haven't achieved excessively high goals, and it's only fair that other people are going to be expected to go through that too, right? That's only fair. So as much as I expect me to be perfect and I'm critical of myself, I'm going to be critical of you if you're not perfect. But there's also that social element. Because we criticize ourselves for not being perfect, we then feel that everybody else is doing that too.

32:44That we're no different to those around us. And as a consequence, it isn't just that I expect you to be perfect or I expect myself to be perfect. But everyone else expects me to be perfect too because they're waiting to pounce with judgment and criticism when I haven't met those high expectations. So absolutely right. It's that critical response to imperfection that really drives these three elements. So how is that genetic? That feels so environmental to me, like being self-critical, because it feels like you're embodying a voice, right? It's like a personification of a voice. So how can that be genetic?

33:21Perfectionism, like a bit akin to neuroticism, a kind of worry and anxiety about how we're doing how we're forming how we're looking and that part of perfectionism is certainly genetic in the sense that there's a kind of ruminative orientation that unfortunately we're just born with and we tend to be a bit of a worry water suppose you could say for want of a better phrase as we go through life but the self-critical element of perfectionism this idea that we're never enough, we're not enough as we are, in my mind, is very much environmental. That part is certainly learned outside in wider culture, in what we're told about how satisfied we should be with our existing life circumstances, how we're told all the time that there's something more that we could be, that we could have, that we could do, to never stop, to keep chasing, and never necessarily feel contented, because if we did feel contented, that would be a massive problem for our economy as it's organized right now because if we stop if we stop consuming and everybody was happy with a good enough standard of life then you know we're going to soon find that businesses are going to close jobs are going to be lost health care education all these things we won't be able to afford anymore and and the whole thing comes crashing down we know what happens in a recession so there is a sense that this is systemic that there is a constant need for us to continually improve ourselves because that's how we improve our economy and i think that's where these feelings are not enough and never enough and this feeling is a deficit and lack and worry and self-criticism i think that's that's where they're coming from and why it is that we're seeing a lot of that these days as young people are growing up into a really rich economy with social media at the heart of it as much as we can talk about this at an individual level and we should there is also there is also a really important message in my book this this is not your fault that the way you feel and and these issues that you're struggling with and perhaps feeling fun it really hard to snap out of have a broader context and actually they're logical and rational responses to almost relentless social conditions going on around you that telling you're not enough there's always something more there's actually something incredibly comforting about about that knowing that there is a there is a bigger picture here and that none of this is anything that's wrong with you and that actually you're living in a society that's that's pushing you in this direction and if you can if you can wrap your head around that then you can really start on a journey of what we might call rehabilitation from perfectionism from much more informed place and you can begin to see everywhere and all around you that these things are designed to make you feel like that and you can choose to reject them you can choose to ignore them and you can choose a different direction instead one that's predicated on finding meaning and purpose and living inside the joy that is our families and children and communities and not having to consume and not having to work so hard all the time.