Unhealthy perfectionism: How do I get rid of it?

People have thoughts about everything. Often they go together with similar feelings that make these thoughts seem the truth. Instinctively this determines the choice of what we do (behaviour). This always leads to benefits in the short term. In the long run it often leads to considerable disadvantages.

An example to illustrate this is a perfectionist employee who handles customer e-mails. During the handling of every mail, the thought and feeling of uncertainty always pops up and therefore each mail will be read three times (behaviour) befor it is sent. This will in the short term give less fear for a “bad e-mail”. After all, the frequent reading reduces the fear that it won’t be good enough. In the long run however, this results in a greater risk of exhaustion, which is a risk factor for burnout. After all, reading your e-mails three times entails a lot of unnecessary work.

However the employee notes that the colleagues don’t treat their e-mails so thoroughly and that this doesn’t have any adverse consequences.

It is therefore very important not to have your actions (behaviour) determined by your perfectionistic thoughts and feelings.
But how? We will elaborate on this in the next lesson.