The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power

by Katherine Morgan Schafler

We love perfectionism; we can’t get enough of it. Of course, we don’t love maladaptive expressions of perfectionism. Unless the dysfunction is packaged for Bravo, we don’t love maladaptive expressions of anything. If it’s delivered in the right context, our culture extols perfectionism. An exploration of what the “right context” is doesn’t take long. Do you think it’s a coincidence that our culture embraces, celebrates, and syndicates female perfectionists when their perfectionism is expressed through improving and decorating the home, hosting social gatherings, and tidying up? The celebration serves as both reward and signal: this is how to behave.

Perfectionists are bad at decompressing because they thrive on pressure. The reason you can’t relax while you’re watching TV, for example, is because you’re secretly clocking the ratio between the time you’re spending on the activity and how restored you feel. If the ratio isn’t churning fast enough, you get the sense that you’re wasting your time and being unproductive; you start feeling more frustrated than you did before you started “relaxing.”

Perfectionists don’t like “doing nothing.” Regardless of what the wellness world tells you, you don’t need to figure out how to enjoy doing nothing to be healthy. It’s okay if doing nothing is boring for you. Just as there are different iterations of support in addition to emotional support, there are different iterations of rest in addition to physical rest.