Years ago now, for my MSc at Goldsmiths, I did a piece of research on perfectionism in working professionals. Not students, which is who most perfectionism research is done on, for the very good reason that students are sitting right there in the building and will do a survey for a biscuit. Actual working people, in actual jobs, recruited mostly through LinkedIn and my own network.
I wanted to know something quite specific. Everybody already knew perfectionism was associated with psychological distress. That has been in the literature since the fifties and nobody serious argues about it. What I wanted to know was how. What is the thing in the middle? Because "perfectionism makes you miserable" is not actually useful to anybody. It is a bit like telling somebody their car is broken. Fine, but which part.
So I measured three dimensions of perfectionism, and then I measured two things I suspected were doing the actual work, and then I measured worry, anxiety, and general psychological distress, and I ran the numbers.
I should say up front that this was a modest study with the limitations of any modest study. Self-report data, a sample that included people who knew me, a survey that turned out to be so long that a lot of busy professionals gave up halfway through, which is either a limitation or the most on-brand finding in the whole thesis. I am not claiming to have settled the question. But what came out was clear, and it has shaped how I work ever since.
The two things in the middle
The first is intolerance of uncertainty.
The formal definition, and I am quoting my own thesis here so forgive the register, is a cognitive, emotional and behavioural reaction to uncertainty which leads to faulty appraisals and poor coping. In plainer terms: some people find not knowing genuinely intolerable. Not annoying. Not inconvenient. Intolerable. And because they find it intolerable, their brain treats uncertainty itself as evidence that something bad is coming.
This is why the perfectionists I work with are so often exhausted by things that have not happened. The email that has not been replied to yet. The meeting that got moved without explanation. The client who was slightly quieter than usual on the call. There is no information there. But an intolerance of uncertainty does not sit neutrally in the absence of information. It fills the gap, and it never fills it with anything good.
The second is fear of negative evaluation. Which is more or less what it says. It is the fear of being judged badly by other people, and more specifically the anticipation of it, the running of the tape in advance.
What I found
All three of my hypotheses were supported, which was a relief, because it was quite late in the year by then.
Perfectionism predicted psychological distress. Specifically, self-oriented perfectionism, which is the demand for perfection in yourself and the rigorous evaluation and censoring of your own behaviour, was a significant predictor.
Perfectionism also predicted both of the mediators. People high in self-oriented perfectionism, and people high in socially prescribed perfectionism, which is the belief that other people expect perfection from you, were much more likely to be intolerant of uncertainty and to fear negative evaluation.
And then those two predicted distress in their own right.
Which is the bit that matters. It means the standards are not what is hurting you. The standards are upstream. What is actually hurting you is that a high standard, in a person built a certain way, produces a permanent state of not knowing whether you have met it, and a permanent expectation of being judged for it.
That is the mechanism. Not "you want things to be perfect and that is stressful". It is: you cannot tolerate not knowing whether you are alright, and you are braced for someone to tell you that you are not.
Why this matters practically
Because it explains things that otherwise look like character flaws.
It explains why you re-read the sent email. There is no new information in the sent email. You wrote it. But you are not checking the email, you are trying to resolve an uncertainty, and the email is the only object available.
It explains why feedback lands so strangely. You get a review that is ninety percent glowing and one line of "could develop further in this area", and you carry the one line around for a fortnight like a stone in your shoe. That is not you being oversensitive or ungrateful. That is fear of negative evaluation doing precisely what it does, which is to treat the negative fragment as the real message and the rest as politeness.
It explains why ambiguity from a manager is so much worse than bad news from a manager. Most of the senior people I work with can handle being told something has gone wrong. What they cannot handle is somebody saying "can we have a chat later" and then going into a meeting for three hours.
And it explains why reassurance does not work, or works for about ninety seconds. Reassurance resolves the specific uncertainty. It does not touch the intolerance. So the relief is real and immediate and then something else arrives to be uncertain about, because there is always something else, and you are back where you started but slightly more tired.
What you do with it
Here is where I have to be honest rather than useful. Knowing the mechanism does not fix the mechanism. I am always a bit suspicious of the idea that insight alone changes anything, because if it did, my job would be about twenty minutes long.
But it does change where you point.
If you believe the problem is your standards, you will try to lower your standards, and you will fail, and you will feel worse, because your standards are load-bearing and part of you correctly knows it.
If you understand that the problem is your relationship with not knowing, and your expectation of judgement, then you are working on something that is actually the problem. And those two things are genuinely workable. Tolerating uncertainty is a skill. It is uncomfortable and it is slow and it looks, from the outside, like deliberately leaving things unresolved and sitting with how horrible that feels until it becomes less horrible. Which is not a sentence anybody wants to read. But it is the actual work.
Anyways. That is what my thesis found, and I have thought about it nearly every working week since.
The question I would leave you with is this one. When you check the thing for the fourth time, what are you actually hoping to find out?
Until next time, Stacy