This is what burnout feels like
In her pursuit of ‘perfect’, Lydia O’Donnell was running 170 kilometres a week. She was also exhausted, her social life and relationships in tatters.
At the height of her training, Lydia O’Donnell was running about 170 kilometres per week. As an elite athlete and marathon runner she was laser focused on her goal to make the World Championship team. She was also physically exhausted, her social life and relationships fell by the wayside.
By her own admission in an Instagram post earlier this year, unrealistic benchmarks and self-criticism flooded her thoughts: “I’ve always had the confidence that I can achieve something great. So anything less feels like a failure,” she reflected. “My reasonable mind knows I’m not failing, but my addiction to chasing ‘success’ believes it is.”
Like many high-performers and a growing cohort of young people, O’Donnell struggled with perfectionism. A pivotal 2017 study of college students published in the Psychological Bulletin, found a dramatic increase in perfectionist tendencies and self-criticism among millennials. Examining data from the late 1980s to 2016, researchers found so-called ‘self-oriented’ perfectionism (our own internal benchmarks) rose by 10 per cent, while socially prescribed tendencies (perceived pressure and expectations from those around us) shot up by a whopping 33 per cent.
You may have described yourself, a friend, or a colleague as a perfectionist, but as it happens, society’s take – overachieving, detail-oriented and driven to succeed – is short of a perfect definition. “I would describe it as a personality trait, just like being optimistic or extroverted,” says Dr Kate Tonta, a clinical psychologist and lecturer at Curtin University. “It’s similar in that people can exist along a spectrum. You can’t be diagnosed with perfectionism, but that trait can be lower or higher, and if we reach that higher end, it can create problems.”
When perfectionism pivots from helpful to hindrance, those problems can include fear of failure, chronic self-criticism and exhaustion from striving – and attempting to maintain – unattainably high standards. “I’ve had clients who have been doing an extra three or four hours of work a day basically just checking their own work because they’re so scared of failure,” says Jennifer Kemp a self-described
“recovering perfectionist” and clinical psychologist who helps her clients identify and manage perfectionist tendencies. “They’re running from failure more than striving for what they want.”
“You can’t be diagnosed with perfectionism, but that trait can be lower or higher, and if we reach that higher end, it can create problems”
Before he penned that viral New York Times article about languishing, best-selling author and organisational psychologist, Adam Grant, was a springboard diver who became so fixated on the minutiae of the most rudimentary dives, he couldn’t progress to more challenging ones. “It’s something I thought was going to be a useful tendency and turned out to be a major liability,” says Grant, who is now a globally recognised thought leader on perfectionism, motivation and potential. Noticing that he paused at the end of the diving board before each takeoff, his coach pointed out something that stuck. “He said, ‘Well, that’s perfectionism in action because even before you leap in the air, you’ve already decided that your takeoff’s not going to be perfect. So why bother going?’”
While putting in hours at the office and repeating a skill are both perfectionist hallmarks, there’s another ‘p’ at play: procrastination. The research isn’t definitive, though experts have noticed something curious: people with perfectionist tendencies can be so concerned with executing a task flawlessly, they struggle to even get started. “So putting off starting an assignment or putting off writing a paper because you don’t think you’ll be able to do it perfectly, or you’re so concerned with doing it perfectly that you delay it,” explains Tonta. “It’s so paralysing that somebody can’t manifest direction towards it.”
Mastering every task on your to-do list is unrealistic, so Grant recommends setting appropriate benchmarks with wiggle room. “There’s always a tiny flaw that can be improved. There’s always room for growth,” he says. “And so what I’ve tried to do is to calibrate based on the importance of what I’m working on. Am I aiming for a nine on this? Am I aiming for a seven? Would a six be good enough? And then I try to set the bar for where that would be,” says Grant, adding a new book he’s penning may warrant a nine, while a podcast episode is further down the order. “A bunch of typos in a book would look careless, a bunch of stumbles in a podcast conversation is genuine.”
When mistakes and setbacks inevitably pop up, Kemp suggests a dose of self-compassion. “Mostly people’s internal voice – the way they speak to themselves – is so much harsher than they would ever speak to anyone else. If you can find a softer voice to speak to yourself with, be a little bit more understanding of yourself, you can diffuse the anxiety.”
O’Donnell admits she’s “still figuring it out in terms of balancing my career, my training, my overall health”. But a shift in focus – she now helps others fulfil their dreams in her roles as a Nike Pacific run coach and co-founder and CEO of Femmi, a running app tailored to women – has proved beneficial. To be sure, she’s still kicking goals. Her days start early with either a light jog or a pacesetting run depending on her mood, and in May, she completed her tenth marathon. “Trying to undo perfectionism is incredibly hard. But once you go on the journey, where you do see progress based on actually looking after yourself and being compassionate towards yourself, that’s where the results lie,” she says. “I’ve realised that the end results aren’t the be all and end all, and as clichéd as it sounds, it’s actually the journey that matters.”
This article appears in the July issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.
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