That Feeling of “Always-Behind and Never-Enough”—Here’s the Antidote | Ellen Hendriksen
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It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How we doing? Perfectionism can really be the ultimate head fuck.

You know it's driving you crazy, that feeling of always behind and never enough. But you tell yourself that you need this relentless self-criticism in order to get anything done, in order to succeed. That anything less would be an unacceptable, even dangerous lowering of your standards.

All lies, according to my guest today, Ellen Hendrickson, who's a clinical psychologist at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. She's got a new book. It's called How to Be Enough, Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists.

This is Ellen's second appearance on the pod. She actually came on several years ago to discuss her first book was about social anxiety. It was called How to Be Yourself. I'll drop a link to that in the show notes if you want to go check it out. Anyway, in this conversation, we talk about the relationship between perfectionism and anxiety, the definition of perfectionism and why that word may actually be a misnomer.

We talk about Dr. Hendrickson's own struggles with perfectionism and how those struggles manifested physically, the difference between healthy perfectionism and unhealthy perfectionism, changing your relationship with your inner critic, shifting from rigid, self-inflicted rules to flexibility, how to keep high standards while making room for mistakes, overcoming procrastination, navigating social comparison, and much more.

Before we dive in, and on a very related note, I do want to tell you about something I'm doing over on danharris.com all week, starting today at 4 p.m. Eastern. I'm going to be doing live guided meditations where I focus on specific forms of meditation that were designed by the Buddha as an antidote to anxiety.

As you may know, there are four related meditation practices that are collectively known as the Brahma Viharas or divine abodes. Not my preferred branding, but really I found these styles of practice to be immensely helpful in my own life. And you can think of these four interrelated flavors of meditation as a way to take it easier on yourself and more skillfully navigate the world.

These styles of meditation have stood the test of time, having been practiced for 2600 years and are increasingly being validated by modern science, which suggests these practices can have psychological, physiological and even behavioral benefits.

So again, I'll be doing live guided meditations all week over at danharris.com. Like any good drug dealer, I give you the first dose for free, meaning today's session is open to everybody. And then the rest of the week is really just for paid subscribers. So you know what to do. Again, head on over to Dan Harris and get all the details. We will get started with Ellen Hendrickson right after this.

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Dr. Ellen Hendrickson, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be back. Excited to have you back. All right. So tell me how this latest book came about, because the last time you're on the show, we're talking about social anxiety. This book is related, but quite distinct, related in some ways to anxiety, but quite distinct from social anxiety. I suspect this and I'd love to hear this story if you're comfortable telling it. I suspect this book has its roots in your own struggles with perfectionism.

How did you guess? Yes, I write about my own problems. Oh, yeah. Well, and there are enough people out there, I've realized, with the exact same problems that it forms an audience and therefore a community. So, yeah, for sure. You're absolutely right. Yeah, social anxiety and perfectionism are, at the very least, siblings. Or to change the metaphor, if we drill down on social anxiety, we find a foundation of perfectionism because they're both based on the same thing.

flawed perception of self, the felt sense of inadequacy that keeps us separated from others. And in both, we have to work, or rethink, we have to work hard to avoid finding ourselves in a situation that would reveal that inadequacy to others. So we need to either hide or avoid or overcompensate. But regardless of whether it's social anxiety, perfectionism, that hiding and concealing and overcompensating backfires because that

steals the credit for keeping us safe. And in both, we think we have to perform as superbly as possible for people to like us. So that's the connection. And then you asked personally about perfectionism. And yeah, for sure. So let me back up and give a definition of perfectionism. I find it

Highly ironic that perfectionism researchers can't agree on a perfect definition of perfectionism. And so the one that I like is that it's demanding of ourselves a level of performance higher than is required for the situation.

And I like that because you can look at it two ways. You can look at it as like, that's quite healthy. Please keep doing that. You know, shoot for the stars, do more than the bare minimum. You know, research shows that setting goals and striving to achieve them confers all sorts of cool things like mastery and purpose. So like, yeah, please demand of yourself a level of performance higher than what is required for the situation. However, where it tips over into less healthy situations

mindsets and behaviors is when we start to equate our performance with our character. We look to answer that universal, very human question of like, am I okay? Am I good enough? By looking at how well we do things, like looking at our performance.

For me, for too much of my life, I held that classic mindset of making my self-evaluation, my self-worth overly dependent on meeting my personally demanding standards that I set for myself. So high school and college probably put too much stock in grades.

When I was a young adult and social life is very important, I probably put too much stock in social behavior. When I was launching my career and like a young mom, the measure was productivity. And so not only was I conflating what I did with who I was, but I also did three things that made my life harder. The specifics gets into the universal because this is what we all do when we start to conflate who we are with our performance behaviors.

One is that I would focus on flaws and details. For example, in my social behavior era, if there was an awkward silence on a date or like I told a joke no one seemed to get, even if everything else went well, that details what I would think about afterwards. I would do the equivalent of focusing on the one frowning face in the crowd of smiles. Two, I would give myself only two options, all or nothing.

for evaluating outcomes. Let's look at grades. If I was aiming for straight A's, and I got that, except for 189, that disqualified all the other A's and shunted me from all to nothing. So I gave myself this very narrow criteria for success and a very wide gulf for if we're defining failure as not meeting expectations.

for failure. When I was looking at productivity too closely, if there were a couple of things on the to-do list that went undone, like that wasn't good enough. And then the third thing I did is that I was hard on myself. And so when we fall short of our personally demanding standards, we will often self-criticize. But this is, I find ironic, if we somehow pull out all the stops and meet our personally demanding standards, we decide those standards were insufficiently demanding in the first place and move the goalposts. So...

That's me. So again, I wrote this book for myself, but I also wrote it for everyone else. I think there's a silent epidemic of perfectionism happening. And as a clinical psychologist at an anxiety specialty center, the vast majority of my clients say,

have perfectionism at the center of their challenges. But no one has ever come in and said, Ellen, I'm a perfectionist. I need help with perfectionism. No one ever says that. What they say is things like, I feel like I'm failing or I feel like I'm falling behind. I'm not reaching my potential. I have so many things on my plate and I'm not doing any of them well. We all say things like that. That's because perfectionism is a little bit of a misnomer. It's really not about striving to be perfect.

It's about never feeling good enough. And that's something that a lot of us can relate to, especially in 2025. Well, let's just pause on that for a second. I hate when people do this to me, but I'm going to ask you to say that again, because I think it's worth dwelling on. Perfectionism as a word is a bit of a misnomer when applied to the actual condition. Yes, because the mindset through my own experience and observing that of clients and the research is,

shows that it is less about striving to be perfect and more about never feeling good enough. We think we have to perform as superbly as possible to be sufficient as a person. So it's not actually about nailing it. It may manifest as a desire for the perfect outcome of whatever you're doing.

But the underlying issue is not enoughness. Correct. Yes. And we often think about perfectionism as like a personality profile, like sort of type A, picky, detail-oriented. And it can be that. But again, that heart of it is conflating our self-evaluation with our performance. And it can be about anything. Like I talked about grades.

and social behavior and productivity, but it could be our work evaluation, our weight, our bank account, our last musical or athletic performance, or even more subtle things like, did I stick to healthy eating today? Was I a good parent today? Did I meditate? Did I do it well enough? Did I get distracted? You know, it's anything where we think we have to perform as superbly as possible to be sufficient, to be enough.

16 years of meditation and you're describing my inner dialogue to this day. Although I will say that I catch myself much more rapidly and much more kind to myself in a million different ways. But the conditioning remains because it is so, so deeply ingrained culturally and historically. The question that comes screaming out of this conversation is,

Well, how do we address that insufficiency? And we will get to that. But I do want to stay on perfectionism for a second and specifically on your perfectionism, because if memory serves, it manifested physically for you. Yeah. So when I was...

researching this book, I came across a paper, and I'm going to mangle this title, but it was something like, Perfectionist at 20, Work-Life Balance Issues at 40. And I was like, oh, have these people been in my house? What is this?

So yeah, for me, I think I had been grinding for so long, basically. This is a tangent, sorry, that you use the word culture, that our culture rewards in an ever more competitive, ratings-oriented, optimization-focused culture. It makes sense that we respond by feeling like we're never doing enough, aren't good enough. So I had been grinding for a long time. And yeah, around

40, it really started to manifest in my body. And I went through like a number of rounds of physical therapy. I woke up one morning, I couldn't turn my head to the right because my muscles were too tight. I had blown out my forearm from typing too much. I got a GI illness. So yeah, it absolutely manifested physically. And I'd already kind of known this wasn't sustainable, but that really drove that message home that something needed to change.

So it manifested physically for you. That makes sense for me, just to me, because, you know, I've had so many of my psychological ailments manifest physically. It's like there's a mind body connection or something. Ellen Langer would say it's mind body unity. It's not even a connection. It's the same thing.

I want to pick up on something that's related to this and also that it's a breadcrumb you dropped several paragraphs ago where in your work at a center that specializes in anxiety and related disorders, your sense is that perfectionism is at the root of, and I believe you write about this in your book, it's at the root of or at least linked to obsessive compulsive disorder and eating disorders. Can you say a little bit more about this? Yeah, absolutely.

So perfectionism is not a disorder in and of itself. It's not diagnosable. It's more of a mindset or a trait, but it definitely lies at the heart of other diagnosable disorders like social anxiety or OCD, eating disorders, some kinds of treatment-resistant anxiety. Sometimes we will worry ourselves into a depression because of perfectionism.

perfectionism. Yeah, the heart is that we have to perform as superbly as we can. And so in eating disorders, it's either on body weight or shape or on feeling in control when we eat or

In social anxiety, it's that idea that there is kind of a fatal flaw about us and it will be revealed unless we work really hard to conceal it. We have to perform correctly socially and not make mistakes. So it's at the heart of a lot of what we do. The number of clientele

clients I have who are struggling with perfectionism. If you line up a hundred different people, you will see a hundred different phenotypes of perfectionism. I work with a musician, a stay-at-home mom, an academic, a neuroscientist. Like there's just all sorts of varieties of people who are making their performance a referendum on their character. Performance a referendum on your character. I suspect you're

Many heads are nodding asynchronously as people consume this podcast. Where does this come from? Do we evolve for perfectionism or is that a more modern development? OK, it definitely comes from both within perfectionism.

And from all around us, which I think is really interesting. So it has been shown to be genetic. Again, even though it's not diagnosable, it definitely runs in families. And then speaking of families, it can be conferred upon us from certainly any kind of family, but there are a number of sort of different styles of families.

parenting that have been identified as making it more likely that will come out perfectionistic, that is if we are from a family that's perfectionistic itself. If we're from helicopter, snowplow family where caution and avoiding risk and mistakes is really important. If we're from a family that conferred a lot of contingent approval or like love sort of got confused with pride, we

we got attention and positive regard when we accomplished things. And then fourth is if our family was sort of chaotic or dramatic or erratic, abusive, when that's where kids will often find safety and control through their performance. You know, if I can't control dad's drinking, at least I can control my grades. If I can't control mom getting angry, I can be charismatic and be the most popular kid in school. So definitely there's

that comes from within, but it also comes from all around us, from the environment. And I would argue from 2025, because every human reacts to the situations we're put in. And so in a society that really is getting more

more demanding, competitive, performance-oriented due to capitalism, competition, advertising, social media, you name it. All these messages are coming at us saying that we have to perform and consume and achieve to ever higher levels to be sufficient as a person. The researcher Andrew Hill says that perfectionistic climates turn us all into perfectionists.

I certainly agree. Just to go back to evolution, would it be safe to say, and this is kind of just a surmise on my end after having listened to you, that there may be aspects of the human mind dating back to our origins that predispose us toward this trait, but that latent potential has been put on steroids because of how culture has evolved? Yeah, I'll surmise along with you for sure.

So perfectionism, we usually think of it as a personal problem, but it's really an interpersonal problem, and we can talk more about that later. But my point is that perfectionism is interpersonally motivated. We do it to try to stay in others' good graces, to try not to get criticized or rejected or judged. And so, again, we're doing things as well as possible to...

tried to keep criticism and judgment at bay. And ultimately, it's because we want to connect with people. And so I think evolutionarily, yeah, we learned to perform as well as possible because we thought that it kept the group together, kept it going, helped us get along harmoniously with everybody else. That is my surmising. Yeah, it makes complete sense based on the very limited understanding I have of how we evolved. I mean, it all whittles down to

Love and safety. Absolutely. Yeah. But I think the thing that we get confused when we double down on performance is that admiration and being impressive is different fundamentally from being accepted or belonging. Again, pride and love are different. Yes. Yes. And the persona, which is actually probably a kind of form of armor, is

that we create in order to get what we think is love but is actually admiration paradoxically and maddeningly gets us further away from what our underlying goal is

We could end right now. That is absolutely, that is the message for sure. Because the wall that we put up to try to protect ourselves from criticism and judgment acts as a wall that separates us from others. So we end up being on this pedestal, but that means we're alone. When we're singular,

We're separate. It's ironic that we are doing this to try to gain connection, love, belonging, and we end up with sort of an ersatz version of that admiration, approval, compliments, but those are fundamentally different. And I would just add to that, even if...

you're not getting the approval and you're still a perfectionist because I think that describes many of us. I've been a failed perfectionist in many areas of my life. I'm not getting what I hope for and I'm kicking my own ass. The compulsive, reflexive, persistent self-evaluation removes you from the world, makes you less available, less authentic, and widens the gulf between you and what you actually want.

whether you are singular or not in your achievements. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we don't see the world as it is, right? We see the world as we are. And so if we're holding ourselves to personally demanding standards, we assume other people are holding us to those same standards. But

That's not what relationships and connecting are about. Think about why your friends are your friends. Are you friends with your friends because they're good at things, because they meet personally demanding standards and metrics? Like they're good at public speaking, or they always pick a good restaurant, or they're good at meditating? You know, probably not. Like I'm guessing you're friends with your friends because of how you feel when you're together. You feel supported and

understood like you can be yourself and that you don't have to perform at all. Like that's that difference. Real friends. Yes. Real friends. Right. Not connections or networks. Yeah, right. Exactly. I can't remember who said this, but it's something like people never remember what you say. They remember how you made them feel.

Yes. So the Internet taught me that that's a Maya Angelou quote, but the Internet is often wrong. So I could be wrong on that. But she said so many brilliant things that the odds are pretty high that that's true. All right. There's a term you use in the book, the many salads of perfectionism. Yeah.

Have you heard from Sweetgreen's lawyers, and what do you mean by this? Sure. Okay, what I mean by a salad of perfectionism is that it's this tortured metaphor where there are a million different salads out there, like things as different as tabbouleh and nicoise salad and jello salad are all salads. So there's all these different phenotypes.

Likewise, as I alluded to before, you line up 100 different people with perfectionism and you have 100 different phenotypes. There's infinite ways of being perfectionistic. So again, it could be about how much money you're bringing in. It could be about how healthy you ate today. It could be whether or not you yelled at your kids in so many different ways. But the definition of a salad is that it's a variety of ingredients bonded by a common dressing.

So there are some commonalities in perfectionism. Most people will be sort of allergic to mistakes. I say that we have sort of a peanut allergy to mistakes. If we make a mistake, there's a big reaction. We often procrastinate. We often compare ourselves to others. We do this thing called perfectionistic self-presentation, where we show the world what's going well, and we sort of hide what's

what's not going so well. Colloquially, this is called duck syndrome. It's where we look like we're gliding effortlessly across the surface, but really our little duck feet are working really, really hard underneath the surface. So there are a number of things that bind people with perfectionism, even as we all look very, very different.

That lands, that makes complete sense. As promised, we are soon going to get to like, how does one address the root causes here? This sense of insufficiency, but just staying at a higher level for a second. There's a lingering question that I suspect some listeners are gnawing at in their minds, which is, isn't there a case for perfectionism and high standards sometimes? And I believe you even say in the book, there's a difference between perfectionism

adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism.

Yeah, no, for sure. Okay, it's like some, again, some researchers would disagree with me, but others would totally agree with me that like there is such a thing as healthy perfectionism. And that's when we strive for excellence. We do good work for the work's sake. We set high standards. We care deeply. Like, please keep doing that. In fact, the healthy heart of perfectionism is a personality trait called conscientiousness, which comes from the root word conscious or conscience.

our sense of right and wrong. Essentially, conscientiousness is, according to research, including by the psychologist Dr. Angela Duckworth, who's better known for her work on grit, conscientiousness is the number one trait for a good life, both subjectively and objectively. So if you've got to choose a personality, conscientiousness is the one to choose. And sometimes that does overgrow into...

We have self-control that sometimes gets a little out of control, but yes, it can absolutely be healthy and at its heart means well and can do great things. So how do we walk the line between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism?

So we can't entirely separate out ourselves from our performance, nor would we want to. Of course, we're going to feel proud when we do something well. Of course, we're going to be bummed or disappointed when things go wrong. But I think we can try to separate them out a little bit and be able to gain some distance and perspective. There's a difference between our self-worth and

and our performance. The technical name for this is over-evaluation. Our evaluation of our work gets overgrown and becomes an evaluation of ourselves. So one of the things we can do is we can try to shift from evaluation to information to make it about the work, not about you.

So we could take the stance of like a sculptor eyeing a block of marble or like a chef tasting a dish. We inherently know that the sculptor and the sculptor are different. The chef and the dish are different. All right, I'm going to mix my metaphors. Our attention is like a spotlight and we get to choose where to point it. If we point it at the work, whatever it is we're trying to do, we generally feel better and perform better.

If we point it at ourselves, we generally feel worse and perform worse. And so I'll tell you a story from the book to illustrate this. I tell the story of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his time at UCLA under the legendary basketball coach, John Wooden. During his time there,

or around that time, the UCLA basketball team was just a powerhouse and had seven in a row national titles. It was incredible, all under Coach Wooden. And so two education researchers, doctors Roland Tharp and Roland Gallimore, decided to sit in the stands for every single practice of the 74-75 season to see, like, what is the secret sauce? How does Coach Wooden do this? And what they discovered is

is that he very seldom...

praised or criticized his players. That instead, he would focus on the work. He would tell them what to do and how to do it. So he wouldn't say things like, good job, or no, you stink, you have to practice more. He would say, pass from the chest, take lots of shots where you might get them in games, pass the ball to someone short. He would give you information as opposed to evaluation. And that shift from your

yourself to the work seems subtle, but makes a big difference. So do you never want to say to yourself, good job? No, no, no. Again, there are degrees of this for sure. You know, we can certainly be proud of what we do, but it's, we're trying to get some perspective and get some

distance that we are not our work, we are not our performance, that those two things can be related, but not. If you picture a Venn diagram, we want it to not be completely overlapping, which is what I will often see when folks come into the clinic. So we work to try to crank them apart just a little bit. And that, okay, here, this is another quick story.

a potential client, email me and say, "Hey, I'd like to work on perfectionism." I said, "Cool, come on in." And we set up an intake.

And the day before, she emailed me again, and she said, you know, I have given this some thought, and I want to wait until I have lots of time and can put lots of energy and effort into fighting this problem. What I said to her and what I would say to listeners who might be nodding is that, to your question, you don't have to separate out

worth and performance or never say good job, just like a 5% difference, a 10% difference, that's really all you need. It's not this complete cleaving of worth and performance. Coming up, Ellen talks about the seven key shifts for addressing the underlying causes of perfectionism.

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and 365-day returns. Quints.com slash happier. Well, you've brought us to the practical, which I've been promising for a while. And the book consists of seven different shifts we can make to help us

address what you're calling, and I'm sympathetic to your argument, what you're calling the underlying root cause of perfectionism, which is a sense of not enoughness, insufficiency. So shift number one is from self-criticism to kindness. My goal for the rest of the interview is to kind of just go through as many of these shifts as we can cover. The first one is from self-criticism to kindness. Can you, I suspect we may have already covered some of this, but can you hold forth on that one?

Yeah, for sure. Let me just normalize things also that everybody criticizes themselves from time to time. Self-criticism is the core of humans' ability to self-regulate. A healthy dose of self-judgment helps us evaluate our behavior, modify it to improve ourselves, like get along more harmoniously with our fellow humans. Evolutionarily, we critique ourselves to better ourselves. So,

Some self-criticism is going to happen. But perfectionistic self-criticism is particularly harsh and particularly personalistic. It's about us. I have found that as an anxiety therapist, I have two levers I can pull. I can pull change or acceptance. We could change self-criticism, and we can. But I've gotten a lot farther with folks by trying to change their relationship to self-criticism.

What I mean by that, actually, here, this is a good story. Many years ago, I was on your show,

And I was there as a first-time author. This was the biggest show I had ever been on to date, and I was quite anxious. We recorded, and you asked such good questions and were so kind. And along the way, I made a totally reasonable number of mistakes. I think I lost my train of thought at one point. I think I stumbled over my words a couple times. At one point, I actually remember

thinking that I had offended you. And so after recording, despite you and your producer and everyone just being so nice and so complimentary, like that's all I could think about. All I could think about was like the errors. And so I was just kicking myself on the way out the door. And my poor editor who had come with me steered me into the nearest bar and bought me a gin and tonic ostensibly to celebrate. But I think he knew that my self-criticism had really started going. And

And so I have now, fast forward seven years, done this enough, like something with a microphone or put my work out into the world enough that I know this is just kind of what happens.

that I will do something with a microphone and then my brain will just start to zero in on the mistakes or the details or the things that went wrong. And we'll focus on that. But rather than trying to not think about that or like, let me reframe this, which, you know, absolutely can work.

I have tried to change my relationship to the self-criticism and think, you know, this is just how I'm wired. This is what happens when I do something involving a microphone. And it's just part of the script. Kind of like, you know, I go to a restaurant, the hostess seats me, the waiter comes, I order, the food comes, I eat it, pay, I leave. Okay, that's just the script. When I do something, a podcast recording, part of the script is that I record, I leave, I

I think it stinks. I think about all the mistakes I made. And then usually it's fine. And if it's not fine, either I can learn from that or sometimes...

things just don't go well. And that's okay. And I know that other people have their own version of this. Like my partner, whenever he gives a PowerPoint presentation, comes home and thinks it sucks and will think of all the mistakes he made. And we've learned this is just how it goes. This is just part of the script. And so by taking the stance of kind of listening to my self-criticism, like the music at a coffee shop,

That has made all the difference. It's there. My brain is still making those thoughts. I can hear it, but I don't have to sing along. I don't have to take my self-criticism seriously or literally. It can just happen and I can change my relationship to it. I'm really interested in this

dialectic change. I don't know if I'm using that word correctly, but change and acceptance. The argument you just made for acceptance completely lands for me. And as you were talking, I was thinking about the work of both Kristen Neff and Ethan Cross, both of whom have been on the show. I'll put some links in the show notes. They both talk a lot about

rewiring your own inner chatter. So it would be less on the acceptance side, although they're both pro-acceptance, but more, their emphasis is more on the change side that you can learn, anybody can, without massive meditation interventions or anything like that, learn how to just develop the habit of talking to yourself kindly. And it doesn't have to be

cheesy, well, it can be cheesy, but it doesn't have to be unrealistic affirmations, pretending that you're perfect or being in denial, etc, etc. It's more like the way a good coach talks to their players. And so I'm just curious, what's your take on the we've talked about acceptance, but what about on the change side here as it comes to the inner critic?

Man, you teed me up just right. That was great. Okay, so yeah, absolutely. No, I love Kristen Neff. Her work actually helped me understand perfectionism because she says that self-compassion consists of three things, of self-kindness, of nonjudgmental mindfulness, and connection to the larger human experience.

But the perfectionistic brain is reverse threaded for all three of those things. So instead of self-kindness, we're wired to be self-critical. Instead of nonjudgmental mindfulness, we can be judgmental. You know, we zero in on flaws.

And instead of connecting to the larger human experience, we see our struggles or mistakes or shortcomings as things that set us apart rather than as common experiences that connect us to others. That is not carved into a stone tablet. Like we can absolutely change all of those things, but just our starting point is kind of coming from inside a hole basically.

And so I was taught the Kristen Neff method that self-compassion was talking to yourself like a good friend or talking to yourself like a coach. But my perfectionist brain thought that that meant that I had to generate a steady stream of articulate and effective self-compassionate hype. And that was too high a bar. So in pulling the change lever, I learned, oh my gosh, Ellen, you don't have to make it that complicated, that it can be one word. It can be easy or two words.

two words, you're okay, or something way less self-compassion presidential speech writing-esque. But in addition to words, again, pulling that change lever, I learned that self-compassion can also be actions. And for me, at least, that was a lot easier because I feel like it is hard to control our thoughts. Like, don't think about a cheeseburger floating above my head.

It is hard to control our feelings. You know, if you've ever been told, calm down or just relax or cheer up, you know, you probably wanted to punch the person in the face. You can't just change your emotion. But you can, and when I say you, I mean everybody, we can control our actions. So self-compassion can be turning towards our pain and suffering and asking, what do I need? And so it could be something as simple as taking a few more minutes unburdened

under the warm shower on a cold morning. It could be, I did this yesterday, I made myself go to the gym, even though I didn't want to, because I knew, I just know from experience that it'll make me feel better. But it can also be giving ourself permission not to do everything we expect of ourselves. It could be deciding to skip the gym, because what we really need is an extra hour of sleep. All in all, self-compassion can be words that

And can be actions, which was really helpful for me. And it's turning towards our pain and suffering and asking, what do I need with care and understanding? Chris Germer, Kristen Neff's longtime research partner and pal, said here on the show that the preeminent question of self-compassion is, what do I need right now? And so amen to everything you just said. Shift number two, so just to reset.

We're talking about perfectionism. Ellen's thesis is that what lies beneath perfectionism is a sense of insufficiency. And so like, how do you start to feel like enough? Well, there are these seven shifts that she's going to propose in the course of her book, which you should read. We talked about the first one, which is from self-criticism to kindness. Shift number two is coming home to your life. What do you mean by that?

So with the coming home to your life, essentially what I mean is that perfectionism drives us to focus on performance, to focus on being good at things. And I posed the question of, essentially, let's change the yardstick. Rather than measuring ourselves by, did I do the thing? Let's

switch over and ask a completely different question, which is, am I living the life I want to live? Am I being the person I want to be? And so that implies that that takes us from a lower power position where we have to do the thing and our, you know, every performance is a referendum on our character. So our worth is never a settled question to being able to

choose, and we'll get into this later, but based on our freely chosen values, what do I want to do? What is meaningful, important, purposeful, fun for me? And if I could choose to

how to live my life and what to do next, what would I do? And surprise, we can, you know, within our context, we can do that. That's essentially in a nutshell what I mean by coming home to your life. Just trying to think this through as it would apply to me. So I could be obsessed with being a

successful, and then that's a goalpost that always moves for sure writer and podcaster, and that would be a label, or I could be more focused on hewing closely to my underlying values, which would be cultivating positive relationships in every aspect of my life. And the latter is much confers much more agency.

Amazing. Yes. Yeah. And then what's under being, quote unquote, like successful podcaster and writer is that you're helping people, is that building a community, is that serving others, like those sound like values. And as long as those feel freely chosen and not like a new rule, yeah.

Then, yeah, absolutely. You're running in the direction of values as opposed to trying to stick to some rule or some label. Right. And freely chosen seems important also because depending on what your chromosomal structure or pigmentation is, society can impose upon you values that may not be your own.

Yeah, for sure. In the book, yeah, I tried to make a distinction that folks from sexual, racial, gender minorities, there's another layer. Because again, yeah, all humans react to the situation we're put in. And so if we're put in a society or an institution or a workplace that...

overtly or covertly tells us you don't belong here, you don't deserve to be here, then that resulting urge to prove ourselves, you know, to earn our way into the group is no longer a personality trait, but like an understandable reaction. An example I give, so Dr. Gary Mitchell from Duke researches college prep programs.

designed to launch high-achieving black and brown kids into impressive career trajectories. And he finds that at some of these schools, the kids in the college prep programs may be subject to higher standards.

of behavior, of academics, than kids from say like legacy or like donor families. Perfectionism can be institutionalized even, and there can be higher expectations for certain folks. And so one solution there is representation. You know, when everybody belongs, it lessens that external pull to prove that you belong.

And so you can spend less of your bandwidth proving you belong by doing excellent work. And instead, you can just simply do your excellent work. And then another solution is community. And so Dr. Mitchell calls this a thick sense of cohort. And that assures us that we're not alone. So there can be a very real pull to prove ourselves. And then, yeah, that is conferred by the environment for sure. Shift number three.

you nodded to this a little bit earlier is from rules to flexibility. Say more.

Yeah. Okay. So we alluded to rules a little bit, like, okay, I got to be a successful podcaster and writer. We all have rules. And especially like those of us with perfectionism, we want to know the rules so we can follow them. And like, ironically, if there are no rules, we set up personally demanding rules, and then we follow those. So, you know, think about making up rules for healthy eating or making up rules for like, I don't know, training for a 5k or something. I

studying for your chemistry exam. Like, it's not that rules are bad. It's when three different things happen that they start to get in our way. So one is when our rules become rigid.

We apply them no matter the situation. So like we try to follow the diet even on Thanksgiving. Then we're getting ourselves into some questionable territory. Two, the rules are all or nothing. If we follow the rules acceptably, we're acceptable. If we mess up, then it renders us unacceptable. I ate a cookie, so like that ruins my entire healthy eating for the day and I'm bad. And then three is when we start to impose our rules on other people.

it can get in the way of our relationship. For example, I'm sure I have the right way to load the dishwasher. But if I try to impose that on my other family members, then, you know, it's going to cause some commotion. The dishwasher just always comes up. That's the classic example. So the shift is trying to shift from following the rules. Did I do the thing?

to values, which we alluded to before. And I want to take just a minute to define values because it's a word that gets thrown around a lot. So I'm going to give you the definition that Mike Tuhig and Clarissa Ong, who wrote an excellent book called The Anxious Perfectionist, define values as having four qualities. And I think the fourth one is the most important. So one is values continuous.

So you're never done, you know, living a value. So a value is different than a goal. It's like making a million dollars is not a value. That's a goal. But like financial security or wealth or I don't know, whatever, that could be considered a value. You're never done. Values are intrinsically meaningful, meaning you'd care about it even if no one else knew. So like getting famous isn't a value, but like putting in the work and putting good work out into the world is.

Values are under your control, meaning they're not contingent upon anyone else. So like being loved isn't a value, but being loving is.

And the fourth one, again, this is the one I think is most important, and we've, we already used these words, but it's, they're freely chosen. Values are never coercive or obligatory. So you freely choose to follow them. And you're probably even likely to be willing to tolerate some discomfort or inconvenience to do so. So it's like the value of sustainability or like giving back might be why you're willing to give up your Saturday morning to go volunteer to pick up trash on the beach, rather than spending that same morning, like relaxing at

at the beach. And in perfectionism, the thing that I feel like we need to watch out for is that oftentimes rules will sort of masquerade as values or values will function as rules. That sense of it being freely chosen is what differentiates them. So the example I always like to use is I had a client who said, through a combination of God and my mother, I was taught to be generous.

But she said that that meant if somebody on the street asked her for a dollar or a neighbor asked her to babysit, she had to do it. It was the very opposite of the spirit of generosity because it was obligatory and coercive, the sense of I have to. That's what I have clients and folks watch out for is does this feel obligatory or does this feel freely chosen? If it's freely chosen, it's functioning as a value.

This is a very long answer, but when we stop living by only rules and shift over to values, we might not even do anything particularly differently. So, for instance, I had a client who was very concerned about being a good friend.

amongst other things, there are things she had to do if she was going to be a good friend. She has to remember her friend's birthday. She has to ask them detailed questions about their life. Like if they go for a walk together, she's going to surprise them with their favorite coffee order. None of these things are bad. They're lovely. Please keep doing them. But it's that sense of have to. It's

It's that sense of coercion, like the duty, the obligation behind it that can make that friendship feel like a people-pleasing grind. So this client, she tried to shift to a value of being supportive, being attentive.

And then she was freely choosing to remember their birthday, ask them detailed questions about their life, maybe surprise them with their favorite coffee order. But the quality of the experience changed. It felt like a want rather than a should. And that made all the difference. Let's just go back to the cookie for a second, because I think that's probably deeply resonant for a lot of people. And it describes me and

Thankfully, not anymore, although occasionally. But you were using the example of I have these food rules,

I slipped up and ate a cookie and the whole day's out the window and I'm a bad boy. Smack me on the snout. If I'm understanding this heuristic of, you know, moving from rules to flexibility, it's like, yeah, I can have cookies once in a while. My value is to take care of my body, to be as healthy as I can, but not miserable. Sometimes some cookies, that's what's called for. Am I stating the spirit of this correctly?

A hundred percent. Yeah, for sure. So are we getting into mistakes now? Oh, sure. Let's let's do that. So that that is OK. That is shift number four, which is mistakes, mistakes, colon from holding on to letting go.

Sure. When we're over-identified with our performance, whether that's, yeah, healthy eating or productivity, social behavior, et cetera, et cetera, good parenting, whatever it is, there's no room for mistakes because then it reflects on us personally. I have a shout from the rooftops rant where, okay, so I think the conventional advice about perfectionism is you have to lower your standards or you have to stop when things are good enough.

And that doesn't go over well with people with perfectionism. If we're still working on separating out our worth from our performance, settling for subpar or mediocre performance means we're subpar or mediocre, and we're not going to do that. So I think semantics are important. Keep your high standards. The high standards are not the problem.

What I try to focus on is to make some room for mistakes. That's different than lowering our standards. And so I've told the story before, but I think it bears repeating. I was working with a pediatrician.

And she had been a pediatrician for 25 years, you know, long storied career. She came in one week and was just beside herself because she had misdiagnosed a little girl who came in with what she thought was constipation, and it turned out to be appendicitis. Kind of a big mistake. The little girl ended up later having to go to the emergency room, have emergency surgery. She was fine, but my client was just kickass.

kicking herself, saying things like, I should retire early. Maybe I should get my head examined. Like, I'm a terrible doctor. For her, I would argue that we actually don't want to lower her standards.

or stop when things are good enough, she should keep the high standards of correctly diagnosing every kid who comes through the door. But there are going to be inevitable mistakes over a 25-year career, not because she's incapable, not because she's incompetent, but because she is human. It's just going to happen. Mistakes is part of the package deal of being human. And so I like to try to

Ask people appropriate to their situation, like, all right, over a 25-year career, like, what percentage of misdiagnoses do you think is reasonable? Or, you know, how many cookies do you think you're going to eat in a day? What is a reasonable amount of mistakes or screw-ups or escape hatches or whatnot? It doesn't even matter what the answer is as long as that answer is non-zero.

Because that little bit of wiggle room is all we need to allow ourselves some of the inevitable screw-ups that are part of the package deal of life. Yep. Yep. I often tell my staff I expect excellence and I expect mistakes. Amazing. Coming up, Ellen talks about the negative impacts of social comparison, why warmth and connection can be more impactful than high performance, and how to channel who you are at your core.

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and 365-day returns. Quints.com slash happier. Shift number five, from procrastination to productivity.

Yes. Okay. So procrastination. So people are often surprised that this is part of perfectionism, but you know, I think it makes sense. Procrastination is not a time management problem. I think the research is starting to show us and it's starting to show up in popular writing as well. Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem.

And then perfectionism puts everything on steroids because aversive tasks require quite a bit of self-regulation. You have to focus and get your act together, regulate enough so you can do this thing you don't want to do. And self-regulation deteriorates under emotional distress.

So if we're feeling distressed and overwhelmed because our standards are unrealistic, we feel like we have to do the whole thing in one go, or we are not allowed to make mistakes, or we have to do this easily the first time, that sort of overwhelms our self-regulation and procrastination steps in as a coping mechanism. And it's a double whammy because it allows us to both avoid the task that's making us feel bad and immediately replace it with something that makes us feel better, whether that's

pandemic era procrastinate baking or like going into a TikTok rabbit hole. Not that I've ever done either of those things. What we can do is the classic of break tasks down into steps so small you feel no resistance. In perfectionism, we can make them ridiculously small. No one has to know how small our steps are. I worked with a gentleman who was trying to motivate himself to go to the gym and his first step was peel a banana.

Then he would eat the banana that would fuel his workout. And then his next step was find car keys, which I found highly relatable. Anyway, the point is that the steps can be really, really small. And that's okay. No one has to know how small they are. And if you feel resistance, break it down even more. So that's one. And the less classic, newer technique that I found was quite helpful is to connect with your future self. It's found that folks who procrastinate and folks with perfectionism relate to their future self more.

in a brain scanner, almost as if they're relating to a stranger. We think that our future self will feel like washing the dishes or writing our literature paper or working on that slide deck. We know from experience that's not the case. But it doesn't even matter if we picture our future self doing the task or not doing the task. If we can just kind of create a more realistic relationship with our future self and not

kick the can down the road to it, assuming it'll be motivated and happy to do all these tasks, then it's easier to get started now. I love that. We've done episodes. I'll drop a link in the show notes. We did a whole episode about relating to your future self. In the interest of time, I'm going to move us along to the final two shifts. Shift number six of seven is from comparison to contentment. My wife the other day pointed out in a great moment of

using my own teaching against me that I was falling into comparing mind because I joined a new workout group and I'm definitely the least fit person in this group. So anyway, from comparison to contentment, say more about this if you would.

We must be in the same workout or in similar workout groups because I feel the same way every time I go to the gym. Anyway, okay. So I want to start out by saying that comparing ourselves is inevitable. You're not doing anything wrong there. So Dr. Leon Festner, who originated the theory of social comparison, essentially found that it's hardwired. I mean, we can't even tell if we're tall or short without comparing ourselves to others. So to try to stop comparing ourselves entirely is essentially fighting biology. But what

What perfectionism is doing is we're comparing ourselves to others to answer the question like, am I doing okay? Am I enough? But then we're outsourcing our worth to the people we're comparing ourselves to, and our self-esteem will rise and fall with each comparison. So what to do is, so social comparison is at its heart a lack of information.

that we tend to compare on one metric. So to your point, like fitness or something that's happening with a lot of young people, like number of social media followers or likes. I had a client who was comparing herself to her boss based on age and title. So like, why am I not farther along by this point in my life? We compare apples to apple pie, basically. And we always come out

behind. And so what we can do is to try to broaden the comparison points until we're what I call comparing apples to tennis balls. With my client, she was comparing on age and job title

If she's trying to answer the question, am I good enough? We tried to flood the zone with tons of different variables. So we included things she knew like education, time at the company, and then a million things that she didn't have any access to like work hours or partner support or mental health challenges, possible nepotism. The point is, if we're asking, am I good enough? The goal is to include so many comparison points, both in quantity and variety that the answer becomes, well, I can't determine that by comparing myself to this person.

And so the whole thing breaks down. The point is that we compare on very few things and we stake our whole self-worth on it. And so what we try to do is to make it a little bit ridiculous and leave us with the conclusion of, well, only I can determine if I'm sufficient. I can't outsource it to my view of this person. I love it because it's like the antidote to comparison is more comparison.

Right, right, exactly. All right, shift number seven. Okay. From control to authenticity. There's a lot in these chapters under this shift. So this is dealing with emotional perfectionism, which can be internal or external. And essentially it boils down to

needing to be appropriate, however we define that, in one's felt or demonstrated emotion. Oftentimes, people with perfectionism have learned that emotion is a response to the outside situation as opposed to how we actually feel inside, that we present as sad because the situation is sad, or we present as amused because the situation is supposed to be lighthearted.

So I'll tell you a story about a client named Gus, who we'll call him Gus. So he came in because he wanted to optimize his performance at work and specifically wanted to work on public speaking. And so that already raised this flag for me for perfectionism. Anytime somebody says optimize, that tells me perfectionism. He...

wanted to be really, really good at public speaking and to come off as, you know, not making any mistakes, be impressive, leave everyone with their jaw hanging open. But what happened is that his perfectionistic self-presentation manifested as over-preparing and over-practicing to the point that it came off as wooden and

Before meetings where he would present, he would like stand at the podium like silently rehearsing his slides and he would ignore the people who came in. And then when he gave the presentation, he would perform his slides. Like it didn't really matter who was in the room.

And so what he was doing is to back up to some theory. Susan Fisk at Princeton says there are essentially two dimensions on which humans evaluate each other. There's competence and warmth. And competence is like how skilled, talented, capable is this person? Warmth is like how kind, caring, good-hearted is this person? And in perfectionism, we...

double down on competence. We want to give a good performance. But it turns out that warmth comes first and carries more weight in making a good impression on other people, that we need to determine if people are friendly or on our side or are foe and working against us before we evaluate their competence and whether or not they're capable of carrying out those intentions. That was

nerdy and heady. So what Gus was doing is he was doubling down on competence, but at the expense of warmth. So we tried to double down on warmth. Keep competence. We all want to be competent. We're not doing a 180 and flipping from competence to incompetence, but we're just going to add on some warmth. And so instead of

over-preparing and over-practicing, tried to roll him back to preparing and practicing, but not to the point where he came off as wooden. When instead of silently rehearsing his slides as people came in, he greeted them by name, said, hello, how was your weekend? And then this was the most important. When he presented, he focused on sharing his knowledge and the story he was trying to tell with the energy of, look at this cool rock I found,

Rather than trying to perform as like Gus, the impressive expert. To boil it all down, when Gus was using perfectionistic self-presentation, yeah, sure, he avoided mistakes, but he also missed out on connection with his colleagues and showing his colleagues that like he cared about them and trusted them.

That when we show people a little bit of what's under the rug or allow them to see us before everything is perfectly polished and we have the correct highlighted answer at the end, when we say like, oh, here's a little bit of my mess, we're sending two messages. We're saying, I trust you because I'm showing this to you before it's like perfectly polished. So I trust you not to judge me or criticize me.

And two, we are the same. We are equals. This is not some kind of like mentor-mentee relationship or teacher-student relationship. Like we're both human. We're both equal. And implicitly sending the message of I trust you and we are the same is really going to draw people closer to us and get us that, to come back to the beginning, that connection and belonging that we're ultimately looking for. There was a lot in what you said, but the one thing that really stood out to me was...

the rock. I'm going to present as if I'm showing you a cool rock. And I'm guessing that Gus likes rocks and that you as a wise therapist honed in on who he really is at his core, which is a dude who likes rocks. And if you can channel who you are at your core and bring that energy into whatever room you're occupying, people are going to like you because we all like realness.

Absolutely. Yeah. Like it's the energy of like, hey, look at this cool thing, you know, as opposed to like, I must present this perfectly to you. To your point about authenticity and actually our overall like trying to increase our feeling of enoughness. I feel like so many of us will try to like hype ourselves up or psych ourselves up with I got this or before our client Gus comes

could go onto his public speaking. Maybe he would try to reassure himself. But what we can do instead is to affirm what we know to be true about ourselves, even if it has nothing to do with the situation at hand.

hand. You can do this before or after. So let's pretend Gus's presentation goes poorly. He might be tempted to reassure himself he's actually smart or he's actually talented or to like think about presentations where it did go well and that can try to make himself feel better that way. But that doesn't often work. And what we can do instead is try to focus on the things we know to be unquestionably true about ourselves.

I think rocks are the coolest thing ever. Or like reading books and making art, make my world go round. Or I was put on earth to help the less fortunate. Or like I have wicked awesome style. Or like whatever we genuinely hold dear, I'm a great dad, can shore up the story of ourself and thicken our skin, which can buffer against self-esteem threats. So I didn't make this up. This is the work of

Drs. Jeffrey Cohen and David Sherman, and they find that the goal is not to flatter ourselves or to, again, reassure ourselves that we're actually smart and most things go well, but to really maintain sort of an overarching narrative of the self's adequacy, which, again, creates that buffer against the inevitable mistakes and struggles and setbacks of life. This has been enormously helpful. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book?

the name of the book that you wrote before it, and also anything else that we should know that you're like doing in the world that people can go consume.

Yeah, sure. So this book is How to Be Enough, Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists. The previous book, which is about social anxiety, is How to Be Yourself, Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. And the place I am most active on the internet is Substack.

I have a sub-stat called How to Be Good to Yourself When You're Hard on Yourself, which encompasses both those topics and other related maladies of being human. Anybody who's talking about the maladies of being human is an ally of mine. So we will put links to all of those in the show notes. Dr. Alan Hendrickson, always a pleasure. Thank you. Great to talk to you again. Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks again to Ellen. Always great to talk to her. Don't forget, today at 4 Eastern, live on Substack, I will be kicking off a meditation mini-series where I will be focusing on some styles of meditation that I refer to as the Buddhist antidote to anxiety. I'm talking about the Brahma, the Haras, these four interrelated styles.

styles of practice, which include loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, and something called sympathetic joy, which you can think of as kind of the opposite of schadenfreude. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'll focus on one of these styles of practice. And then on Friday, we'll do a wrap up. And every day I'll talk for a few minutes, just kind of setting up

the Brahma Vihara that we'll be focusing on that day. Then I'll do 10 minutes of meditation. Then I'll take your questions. As I joked at the beginning, like any good drug dealer, I give you the first dose for free, meaning today's session is open to anybody. But if you want to join for the rest of the week, you got to sign up at danharris.com. And just to say, if you can't afford it, just let us know and we will hook you up. Also, just to say, I think this is really the direction we may head in

with danharris.com, just increasing the cadence of community-oriented events where we can get together and do a practice together. And by the way, if you can't make it live, we send out the session the next day via email so you can do it on your own time.

Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.