How Perfectionism Causes Anxiety (And What You Can Do About It)

Have you ever had an experience after a hard situation where you found yourself ruminating about what you could have done better? Maybe you got stuck in a feeling of having failed. Afterwards, you might have found yourself feeling incredibly anxious, going over the situation over and over, even waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about what you could do better next time. If you struggle with perfectionism, it might feel really hard to accept that you won't always get it right. While it’s helpful to have some self-reflection about what we can do better, when our anxiety keeps us ruminating, it can feel overwhelming and debilitating.

Perfectionism can Increase Anxiety

This experience is pretty common for many of my clients who deal with anxiety and perfectionism. If you've been raised or conditioned to believe that you need to be on top of everything, and do your best all of the time, it can feel intolerable to have gotten something wrong. If you are telling yourself that it’s not ok to screw up, to not know, to not be on top of everything, that can be a perfect recipe for anxiety to jump in and try to protect you from future failure.

Anxiety is your Body Trying to Protect You

In my experience, anxiety is usually trying to protect us. Often, for folks who deal with perfectionism, anxiety is trying to help us avoid the horrible feeling of having failed. Of not knowing something. Of dropping balls. So anxiety doesn’t let us relax. It keeps us hypervigilant, in the hope that we will be prepared for what’s coming. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work. The anxiety itself becomes the problem - interfering with our jobs, sleep, our ability to be present and enjoy life, and more. No thank you!

Anxiety Therapy can Help

Emotionally Focused Therapy often uses the metaphor of an iceberg to describe our feelings and behavior. Often we see what's happening above the surface - in this case the anxiety, but if we only treat that, we often aren’t going to address the real issue. Our job in therapy is to dig into everything below the surface, where we often find the root cause and also the path toward relief. In anxiety therapy, we work to figure out what is happening below the surface of the water, what are the fears and feelings that the anxiety might be trying to protect us from. I would love to help you figure out what’s at the root of your anxiety and work towards finding more ease and joy in your life. Schedule a free consult for anxiety therapy to learn more.