in the underground He's talking about if everyone got everything that they wanted They became perfect, they would find a way to sabotage that In order to create an imperfection Because it's almost as though we are these problems solving creatures And I think there's something about perfectionism That says, I need something to fix I'm going around with a solution in search of a problem Yeah, you're touching on that human aspect of it And something that surprised me when I was researching for this book And thinking about my clients is that perfectionism is compulsive Like this person who cannot stop doing it, it is compulsive And compulsivity is often a marker for dysfunction If you can't control it, then something's wrong But then I started thinking about other stuff that's compulsive Like the need to tell stories or to touch or kiss or talk even And that it's actually not a sign of health if we just sit here And our templates of what a human being is supposed to be And we never kind of let the, I guess it's a little bit of what I would call Activation Anxiety to like touch the thing or talk to the person Or you know, it's like sitting in this quiet quote unquote meditative state all the time I think that's a little bit overrated frankly Yeah, so let me ask you, someone who has like an unhealthy level of perfectionism in their life Would you recommend for them to like, I don't know, first look at kind of the connection that they have in their lives? Is that a good place to start? Yeah, I mean a really good place to start is understanding that all people who consider themselves perfectionists Are both healthy and unhealthy perfectionists So we talk about health and mental health in particular as this kind of like flag that you can catch And then plant and you're like, I'm healthy now And that is not how it works And mental health is so much more fluid and so much more context dependent Than we think of it as and the reason that we think of it that way is because Mental health right now is organized in these categorical models of like, I'm depressed Or I'm not depressed I'm, you know, suffering from bipolar disorder, I'm not And everything actually operates on a continuum And we're all like sometimes a little bit of a narcissist Or a little bit depressed-ish I like a lot of gray language and mental health But that doesn't help when you need the label to help you understand Like this is going to show up in this way in your life And here's how to understand it and plan for it and kind of manage it And in that way labels are healthy But in another way they're not because when someone is in like a healthy space I think they feel like, well nothing can happen to me now or I'm not at risk of like slipping Because I'm doing all the healthy stuff, you know?