Perfectionism.

The standard advice about perfectionism is to lower the bar. Accept that good enough is good enough. Be kinder to yourself.

That advice rarely reaches the thing it is trying to address. Not because it is wrong exactly, but because it misidentifies where the difficulty lives.

The standards are not the source of the problem. For most people, the standards are protecting something: the self has become organised around the performance. What they are when the performance is not there is the question perfectionism prevents them from having to answer.

When people try the standard approach, the anxiety often increases. The performance is load-bearing: it is not just producing results, it is producing the sense of being acceptable, oriented, worth something. Take that away and there is a gap where a self should be.

People who arrive with this often have tried the standard approaches: CBT, mindfulness, firmer limits around work. None of it touches the thing underneath, because the thing underneath is not a cognitive distortion: it is the structure the self was built on, which formed long before any of this.

The shift, when it comes, does not come from better self-talk or more realistic goal-setting. It comes through a different kind of relationship, one where being present without producing is not just tolerated but genuinely received: where the person is responded to as a person, not a performance. Over time, the self has somewhere else to stand.

The more useful question is not whether the standards are too high. It is what the performance is carrying.

The work is not about the standards. It’s about what’s underneath them.