Navigating Perfectionism: Breaking Free from Unproductive Patterns

White knuckling your way through dumpster fires + stacked deadlines might *seem impressive* but underneath constantly second-guessing yourself, obsessively counting of how much you accomplished while beating yourself up — are hidden costs eating away at your efficiency (and overall ability to enjoy the life you’ve worked so hard to create). This episode names what you couldn’t explain...until now.

Resources Mentioned In Episode 255:

•  The Impact & Intention Framework Ep. 171
• Finding Your Compelling Why’s Ep. 174
• Asking High Quality Questions Ep. 231
• Giving Yourself Validation Ep. 237
• Having Impeccable Boundaries 239
• Being A Curious Scientist Instead Of The Judge Ep. 208
• Using Your Mood Meter Ep. 254
• Understanding Your Person Account Ep. 252
• Measuring Your Person Account Ep.253
• Identifying Perfectionist Prediction Loops Ep. 250
• Popping Up In Perfectionistic Brain Ep. 249
• Deliberate Disruption The Calibration

Timestamps:

00:00–Striving for excellence in a dumpster fire  while white knuckling

01:59-Definition of perfectionism

03:13–Uncomfy confession my overfunctioning

04:48–When powering through stops working

05:35–Fear uncertainty and doubt in disguise

06:40–Second guessing yourself despite the evidence

07:17–  Are You Making This Huge Perfectionistic Mistake

08:31–Why overachievers get to disappointed in myself spirals

09:06–Over functioning feeds control issues BEST analogy

09:55–Beating yourself up When is enough enough

11:03–How I’m able to stop pushing through before burnout

12:05–Why perfectionist tendencies turn poisonous

13:45–The Clueless Mismatch Tool

14:20– Choosing what's familiar over what's functional

15:03–Disrupt overachiever autopilot with The Calibration

16:12–Tools to stop second guessing yourself

17:56–Perfectionism Podcast BTS

Quotes on Perfectionism:

"Most perfectionists conflate measuring with counting. You count how much you got done that day, you look at your to do list, all the check marks you count and you think that is measuring." –Courtney Love Gavin, Expert on Perfectionism Neuroscience

"You can't solve a problem when you continue to use methods that perpetuate it. And until you disrupt where those perfectionist tendencies are coming from, your brain will continue choosing what's familiar over what's functional." –Courtney Love Gavin, Expert on Perfectionism Neuroscience

Highly Credible Sources Cited in this Perfectionism Podcast:

1. Anderson, E. C., R. Nicholas Carleton, Diefenbach, M., & Paul. (2019). The Relationship Between Uncertainty and Affect. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02504
2. Attwell, D., & Laughlin, S. B. (2001). An Energy Budget for Signaling in the Grey Matter of the Brain. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism, 21(10), 1133–1145. https://doi.org/10.1097/00004647-200110000-00001
3. Barrett, L. F., & Bar, M. (2009). See it with feeling: affective predictions during object perception. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1521), 1325–1334. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0312
4. Barrett, L. F., & Bliss‐Moreau, E. (2009). Chapter 4 Affect as a Psychological Primitive. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 167–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0065-2601(08)00404-8
5. Braem, S., Coenen, E., Klaas Bombeke, Bochove, van, & Wim Notebaert. (2015). Open your eyes for prediction errors. Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 15(2), 374–380. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-014-0333-4
6. Clark, A. (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36(3), 181–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x12000477
7. Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
8. Egan, S. J., Piek, J. P., Dyck, M. J., & Rees, C. S. (2007). The role of dichotomous thinking and rigidity in perfectionism. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45(8), 1813–1822. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2007.02.002
9. Kummer, K., Mattes, A. & Stahl, J. Do perfectionists show negative, repetitive thoughts facing uncertain situations?. Curr Psychol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04409-3
10. Mattes, A., Mück, M., & Stahl, J. (2023). Perfectionism-related variations in error processing in a task with increased response selection complexity. Personality neuroscience, 5, e12. https://doi.org/10.1017/pen.2022.3
11. Petersen, J., Ong, C. W., Hancock, A. S., Gillam, R. B., Levin, M. E., & Twohig, M. P. (2021). An Examination of the Relationship Between Perfectionism and Neurological Functioning. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 35(3), 195–211. https://doi.org/10.1891/jcpsy-d-20-00037
12. Pollard-Wright Holly (2020) Interoception the foundation for: mind’s sensing of ‘self,’ physiological responses, cognitive discrimination and dysregulation, Communicative & Integrative Biology, 13:1, 198-213, DOI: 10.1080/19420889.2020.1846922
13. Roy, M., Shohamy, D., Daw, N., Jepma, M., Wimmer, G. E., & Wager, T. D. (2014). Representation of aversive prediction errors in the human periaqueductal gray. Nature Neuroscience, 17(11), 1607–1612. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3832
14. Solms, L., Koen, J., A.E.M. van Vianen, Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., Anne, & Matthijs de Hoog. (2022). Simply effective? The differential effects of solution-focused and problem-focused coaching questions in a self-coaching writing exercise. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.895439
15. Sugiura, Y., & Fisak, B. (2019). Inflated Responsibility in Worry and Obsessive Thinking. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 12(2), 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41811-019-00041-x‌