Hey there,
It's Renee Noah-Harris here,
Fellow perfectionist.
This is my third attempt at this video because I didn't like the way I said hey there in the first two.
And if that feels remotely familiar to any of you,
Let's talk about perfectionism.
Of course,
Different people become perfectionistic for different reasons.
It could be praise,
Validation,
Control,
Self-esteem.
Today though,
I want to focus on one common explanation,
Threat perception.
To do that,
Let's look inside that room.
Piece of organic machinery inside of your head.
When your brain perceives a social threat.
Criticism or embarrassment or rejection.
A region called the amygdala acts like your head of security and sounds the alarm.
And I'd like to focus today on how that alarm impacts another crucial teammate.
The anterior cingulate cortex or ACC.
One of its jobs is helping to detect errors,
Monitor performance,
And draw your attention towards anything that doesn't seem quite right.
Because I love an analogy.
Let's imagine that your ACC is your internal newspaper editor.
In a healthy system,
Your editor is fantastic.
They notice the typo.
They spot the sentence that doesn't quite make sense.
They flag the argument that deserves another look.
They draw your attention the places worth reviewing so that way you can produce work that you genuinely stand behind.
But when your amygdala,
When your head of security starts screaming that judgment or criticism could lead to deep emotional pain,
Your editor's job quietly changes.
It is no longer just trying to help make the work good.
They're now trying to anticipate every possible criticism and fix it before the world can see it.
Because remember,
We are biologically wired to belong.
For most of human history,
Being accepted by the group mattered for survival.
So in these moments.
Your head of security has sounded the alarm.
And your brain is treating mistakes as if they carry much bigger consequences than they actually do.
And suddenly,
Your editor starts working in a panic-driven overtime.
You can see it.
Disheveled hair,
Sleeping on the office couch,
Living on coffee,
Haven't been home in weeks because they are reading and rewriting the same article over and over again,
And not because they're finding actual mistakes anymore.
The work is good.
But because reviewing it just one more time feels safer than letting the world see it.
And your brain is just trying to make sure that you are safe.
Maybe for you it looks like changing one more sentence in a presentation or tweaking a graphic for the 10th hour or ruminating over a word choice in an email.
The work is probably ready.
Your editor just isn't ready to send it to print.
But you can imagine the paper eventually prints,
Your work eventually goes out,
People see it,
The editor reviews it.
Good outcome,
The checking worked.
Bad outcome,
I should have checked more.
Either way,
It's the same reinforcement,
The same loop.
The brain learns that it was the endless checking that is the thing that was protecting us.
And every time we stay in that checking loop.
We reinforce that panic.
Now stepping out of this cycle is not about lowering standards.
Having high standards is good.
But the struggle for many people becomes when self-worth is tied to meeting those standards.
Eventually,
We have to trust that a piece of feedback can tell you something about someone else's perspective of your work.
Without telling you something about your worth.
Our job becomes to help our internal editor recognize that exact moment where further tweaking stops adding value and only adds exhaustion because there does come a point where you are no longer improving the work.
You are just trying to improve the feeling,
Perhaps even trying to control for every possible outcome.
And so the next time you find yourself in that loop,
Pause.
And ask yourself this honest question.
Am I actually improving the work right now?
Or am I just trying to protect myself from something?
And if the work is ready Let the paper go to print.
Every time you do,
You give your brain a different experience to learn from and you teach yourself.
That you are entirely capable of handling.
Whatever opinions come your way.
