How To Spot Perfectionist Thinking Styles

People often interpret their environments using what psychologists call Heuristics. Heuristics are quick ways of interpreting the environment and making decisions, and they often lead to correct decisions, which is why the human mind continues to rely on these strategies for processing the information. However sometimes people process information in a way that is biased, these are called cognitive distortions. Let’s take a closer look at them!

• All or Nothing Thinking – this is the tendency to see things as either right or wrong; without recognizing that situations are often complex. Lets look at a few examples – anything less than sticking to my diet perfectly is a failure! If I eat one cookie, I may as well have eaten ten cookies; If I don’t get an A+ in this course, I don’t deserve to be in this program; I seem to be the only person in this house who knows to clean things properly.
• Mental Filtering- this is a tendency to selectively focus on and magnify negative details at the expense of positive information, which is dismissed as less important. A few examples – when Lisa is told that she looks good she assumes that the person complimenting her is insincere and that they feel sorry for her or are trying to manipulate her in some way. In contrast when someone tells Lisa that she looks tired, she assumes that she is unattractive and feels extremely self-conscious; Melody’s son has become much better at putting away his toys in recent months. However, on one occasion when he left a toy on the staircase, Melody got very angry.
• Mind reading- this involves assuming that you know what other people are thinking and that their thoughts about you are negative. Examples – When Jack’s supervisor does not give Jack feedback on his report for over a week, Jack assumes this is because his supervisor thought that the report was not good enough; Maria cooks dinner for friends, she is convinced that her guests are not enjoying their meal when one of them excuses himself to visit the bathroom.
• Probability Overestimation – a tendency to predict negative events are more likely to occur than they really are. Example – Andrea is a straight A student, yet before every exam she believes that she is definitely not going to pass.
• Tunnel vision – is a cognitive style in which people pay too much of attention to detail and hence miss the big picture. Tunnel vision can slow people down and get in the way of task completion. Examples -
• Catastrophic thinking- involves incorrectly assuming that one could not cope with a negative outcome if it were to occur.
• Interpersonal Sensitivity- this is an extreme need for approval from others.
• Excessively rigid and inflexible standards – when people are unable to achieve a goal or influence someone else they may keep trying or lower their standards or expectations. Perfectionists sometimes view a decision to lower their standards as giving up or settling for less than they should.
• Over responsibility and Excessive Need for Control – often perfectionists believe that they have more control over events in their life than they actually do, this may lead people to feel overly responsible for events, that in reality, they cannot control. Feeling overly responsible can lead people to spend too much time on tasks, engaging in excessive checking & rechecking or go to great lengths to protect themselves from making a mistake or being harmed.
• Difficulty Trusting Others – perfectionists have difficulty delegating tasks to others or may feel the need to closely watch people when they are completing tasks.
• Inappropriate Social Comparisons- people who are particularly perfectionistic may find themselves making social comparisons more frequently. They also may compare themselves to others in manner that serves to maintain their perfectionistic attitudes; that is they may compare themselves to others whom they perceive as much better in a specific dimension thus helping them to maintain perfectionistic beliefs which would foster a negative self-image or feelings of being “not good enough”.

If you have a few of these thinking styles it means that you also would be subscribing to some perfectionistic behaviour patterns –

1. Behaviors designed to help a person meet his/her unreasonably high standards, such as checking & reassurance seeking, repeating actions, correcting others, dwelling too long before taking decisions.
2. Behaviors that involve avoidance of situations that trigger the need to be perfect. Avoidance behaviors include procrastination, giving up on tasks prematurely because perfectionistic standards are unlikely to be met.

Perfectionism occurs on a spectrum, but the word is usually attributed to people with more of these below mentioned perfectionistic tendencies:

• Feeling pressured to live up to high expectations
• Exaggerated negative reactions to mistakes
• Higher levels of self-doubt and insecurity
• Difficulty overlooking small mistakes
• Personalization of mistakes as failure or incompetence
• Intense fear of being judged or rejected because of mistakes
• Spending excessive time, effort, energy to reduce mistakes
• Hypersensitivity to criticism and negative feedback

The good news is that there are constructive healthy ways to combat these tendencies and gain a more balanced outlook to being “perfect”! We shall explore this in our next blog….