36 | New Scientist | 17 August 2019
of success or that the goalposts need to be
placed further away.
If the experts find perfectionism difficult to
identify, it is also hard for many perfectionists.
Take Jonathan Stern, a master’s student at
Florida State University in Tallahassee,
who competes in cross-country races at a
national level. For him, the word perfectionist
was something that people without high
standards used to describe people with them,
to denigrate them. “That’s the way I saw it
for most of my life,” he says. Although he
didn’t acknowledge them, his perfectionist
tendencies drove him to run hundreds of miles
a week and continually challenge his personal
best. But he was still dissatisfied. “Even when
I ran my fastest, it never felt like enough,”
he says. Eventually, it led to severe burnout.
“I got to the end of the line. I realised it was
perfectionism that was weighing me down.”
It is impossible to put an exact figure on
how many people experience perfectionism,
says Hill. However, a massive study published
earlier this year leaves no doubt that
perfectionist tendencies are on the rise.
Curran and Hill analysed data from more
than 41,000 US, Canadian and UK students
who had completed the Multidimensional
Perfectionism Scale between 1989 and 2016.
They discovered increases in all dimensions
of perfectionism. The most dramatic, however,
was in socially prescribed perfectionism:
almost two-thirds of students who took the
test in 2016 scored above the 1989 average.
“It was really alarming because that’s the most
harmful kind,” says Curran.
So what has caused this upward trend?
Perfectionism does have a genetic aspect.
When Carmen Iranzo-Tatay at La Fe University
Hospital in Valencia, Spain, and her colleagues
analysed the DNA of 258 pairs of twins theywere able to calculate that genes accounted
for between 11 and 56 per cent of the variability
in perfectionism between people. The team
also found that a person’s environment
influences whether perfectionism emerges,
and can push them towards expressing one
type of perfectionism over another.It is these environmental factors that have
changed in recent decades. “There are new
pressures today that young people have to
negotiate that young people in the past were
not exposed to,” says Curran. A generation
ago, governments took more responsibility,
he says. “Now students take on their own
risk for success and failure. They have to pay
for university, they have to take part in more
standardised testing from a younger age and
they have more competition for good schools
and colleges,” he says. On top of these academic
pressures, social media sites set unrealistic
targets for young people in all other aspects
of their life, says Curran. “If you throw a dodgy
economy into the mix, then you have an
unprecedented storm of pressure to reach
unattainable targets.”A wider toll
Hill and Curran believe their research reveals
a hidden “epidemic” of perfectionism, with
alarming implications for the mental health
of young people. Perfectionism isn’t included
in psychiatry’s diagnostic bible, the DSM-5, as
a syndrome in its own right. But it has strong
links with mental health conditions that are.
When Karina Limburg at Ludwig-
Maximilians University in Munich, Germany,
and her colleagues analysed 284 studies,
which included more than 57,000 participants,
they found that people with eating disorders,
anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive
disorder (OCD) and depression had higher
levels of perfectionism compared with
people who didn’t have any of the conditions.
Those with perfectionist tendencies were
more likely to experience more than one
condition at a time. Perfectionism has also
been linked with suicide.
Physical health may also
be affected as a result of the
stress that perfectionists
subject themselves to,
leading to an increased risk
of things like cardiovascular
disease. Additionally, they
cope less well when they are
ill because they experience
higher levels of anger,
depression and anxiety.
An epidemic of perfectionism among
young people could be storing up trouble
for the future. Martin Smith at York St John
University and his colleagues have found that
perfectionism becomes more problematic
as we age. It sounds counter-intuitive, but
perfectionists become less conscientious, lessBIGSHOTS/GETTY“ On the outside you’re winning,
but you’re giving yourself the
hardest time on the inside.
I always felt I could do better”
diligent, less productive, increasingly neurotic
and more likely to experience burnout.
“Those who strive for perfection perceive a
high frequency of failures and low frequency
of successes. In turn, they become increasingly
disengaged with their work and increasingly
emotionally unstable,” says Smith. This helps
explain why perfectionism is often associated
with procrastination. “The slightest failure
can be catastrophic to a perfectionist’s
motivation for subsequent efforts,” says
Curran. “So rather than opening themselves
up to failure, they shut down and don’t try
in the first place.”
Are there any benefits to having exacting
standards? Admittedly, perfectionists tend
to achieve academically or in their career. But
it comes at a price. Even among elite athletes
and professional dancers, perfectionism is a
double-edged sword, according to research
by Sanna Nordin-Bates at the Swedish
School of Sport and Health Science inJonathan Stern