You freeze at your keyboard, heart pounding, as you reread the email you’ve edited for the tenth time. A tiny mistake feels like it could unravel your credibility, so you keep tweaking, chasing a perfect version that you can’t quite achieve. By the time you hit “send,” your stomach is clenched, your anxiety is on bust, and you’re sweating. Why is it that the more competent and experienced you are, the more anxious and uncertain you’re becoming?

DOING IT PERFECTLY MIGHT BE COSTING YOU

If you’ve spent decades performing, excelling, and holding yourself to high standards, slowing down can feel impossible. You know perfection isn’t real, yet the pressure to keep everything together feels crushing. After years of making mistakes and being corrected for it and receiving ‘constructive feedback’ at home and at work, many high-achievers develop MAJOR perfectionist tendancies. While this might not seem like a terrible outcome, here’s the truth most high-achievers never hear:

Perfectionism isn’t the same as “high standards”.

It’s a maladaptive coping mechanism.

What does that mean? While it’s tempting to defend a desire for things to be perfect and to explain it as having “high standards” – research by Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett shows it’s a coping pattern driven by fear, self-protection, and conditional self-worth. In other words, it’s less about achievement and more about avoiding shame, rejection, or perceived inadequacy.

PERFECTIONISM + MIDLIFE = EXHAUSTED HOT MESS

Before we can understand how to work on perfectionist tendancies, it helps to understand why they develop in the first place.

When life becomes heavy, unpredictable, or overstimulating, perfection gives you the illusion of control. It helps you feel competent on the outside when internally you feel overwhelmed or like things are spinning out of control.

If you’re unaware that this pattern is part of how you show up, you fall into a predictable trap:

• you overfunction,
• you self-criticize,
• you avoid new habits unless you can do them flawlessly,
• you treat rest like failure, and
• you perform worthiness – instead of experiencing it.

Perfection keeps you stuck in a never ending spin cycle because your nervous system doesn’t feel safe to do things imperfectly.

Here’s what the research shows about why this intensifies, often becoming unsustainable, in midlife:

1. Perfectionism Activates the Brain’s Threat System

Neuroscience research shows that perfectionism isn’t about high standards – it’s about threat detection.

The anterior cingulate cortex (the brain’s error-monitoring center) becomes hyperactive in people with high self-imposed standards. This increases “error-related negativity” (ERN), meaning the brain interprets mistakes as danger.

This activates the amygdala, triggering:

• vigilance
• muscle tension
• anticipatory stress
• emotional reactivity
  

Over time, your nervous system learns:
“Anything less than perfect isn’t safe.”

Your brain is doing what it is designed to do by being protective.

However, after years of living with perfectionist thinking, it becomes more and more difficult to try new things, to receive productive feedback, and to be compassionate to yourself and others. The amygdala hyperactivity can lead to similar physical changes over time as what is described in this article about why ambitious midlife high-achievers are hitting a wall, negatively affecting your health and well-being.

2. Midlife is NOT the Season for Perfection

Studies in lifespan development (Salthouse, 2010; Lachman, MIDUS study) show that midlife adults experience:

• more simultaneous role demands (career leadership, aging parents, teens, community responsibilities)
• increased decision-making complexity
• higher emotional labor
• more “invisible load” from coordinating, planning, anticipating, and managing others

What this means is that, in midlife – baseline cognitive load is already high. Cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort your brain is using at any given moment. It’s everything your mind is trying to hold, process, plan, remember, and manage—simultaneously.

When cognitive load is high, you might notice trouble focusing, feeling overwhelmed more quickly, decision fatigue, mental fog, irritability, forgetting simple things, or feeling “maxed out” even when you haven’t done much.

This isn’t just about tasks; it also includes:

• emotional labor
• anticipating others’ needs
• planning and problem-solving
• managing uncertainty
• worrying or overthinking

Perfectionism increases cognitive load because it adds extra layers of self-monitoring, doubt, rumination, and pressure—using up mental energy that would otherwise go toward something else.

3. Perfectionistic thinking consumes a disproportionate amount of working memory

Research on maladaptive perfectionism (Flett, Hewitt, 2015) shows that it is characterized by:

• rumination
• self-monitoring
• fear-based prediction
• mistake scanning
• performance rehearsal

These are all heavy executive-load tasks, meaning they are handled by the brain’s prefrontal coretex, the same region that is relied upon for creativity, problem-solving, and emotional regulation.

Midlife adults, already managing more responsibilities and demands, hit the limits of their prefrontal cortex faster—creating the experience of “I can’t seem to keep my arms around everything”, or “What is wrong with me that I can’t….?”.

The additional mental real estate occupied by perfectionist patterns of thinking mean that you’ll hit this limit even faster again.

4. Emotional regulation shifts in midlife, and perfectionism gets in the way

Midlife is normally a period where many adults develop greater self-compassion, improved emotional stability, and more perspective-taking.

But perfectionism blocks these developmental gains by activating shame, elevating fear of judgment, and reinforcing hypervigilance. If these patterns of thinking aren’t challenged, it causes you to replay mistakes, worry constantly about how you are perceived by others, set harsh standards for yourself and push through stress instead of recovering.

All of that creates more emotional pressure, not less. So even though your brain is wired to handle emotions more smoothly in midlife, perfectionism keeps you stuck in ruts like overthinking, self-criticism, and fear of getting it wrong.

The result? A cognitive-emotional bottleneck where the brain is working hard but not as effectively as it could be.

5. Perfection Blocks the Consistency Your Nervous System Needs for Change

High-achievers often believe they need the “perfect plan” or the “perfect conditions” to start a new habit. But the nervous system works the opposite way.

Consistency creates capacity.

Our bodies and brains adopt new patterns when they are introduced slowly, one step at a time – not as a big bang or total overhaul of our routines or way of living.

Small practices signal safety.
Safety creates readiness.
Readiness makes new habits stick.

Too much change too fast overwhelms your system.

This is why micro-practices succeed and are the secret to lasting, sustainable change. Accepting this requires you to challenge perfectionist ways of thinking, which wants the target end state (ie. perfection) yesterday! That backfires, and is a big part of why many diet, exercise, and other routines don’t stick.

Slow and steady progress over perfection wins every time.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Perfection isn’t helpful – it’s biologically expensive.

In midlife, the combination of chronic stress, identity pressure, and increased cognitive load outpaces what your already over-taxed nervous system can handle. This is why perfectionism suddenly feels heavier, harsher, and more draining than it did years ago.

You don’t need to perform harder.
You need to support your system.

And the way you do that is through small, consistent practices that challenge the perfectionist thought patterns that have developed to help cope with uncertainty and a lack of control.

THE GOOD NEWS

The same science that explains why perfection backfires also explains why supportive micro-practices, done persistently over time, work to shift these maladaptive thought patterns.

Practice not perfection rewires your nervous system.

Micro-practices can restore clarity, emotional stability, and most importantly – your sense of self.

Examples of micropractices that target perfectionism include:

• taking 1-3 slow breaths before responding to something that has spiked your anxiety,
• doing three minutes of journaling instead of a one-hour session,
• intentionally choosing “good enough” instead of pouring in more effort trying to reach for perfection,
• grounding for one minute before a meeting by noticing 3 things that are blue, 3 noises in your environment, and the way that the fabric on three pieces of clothing feels when you touch it,
• drinking water before having coffee, or
• stepping outside for 60 seconds.
  

These work because they provide a moment of pause in which you can be intentional about your next step. These pauses are opportunities for neurological recalibrations.

If you want to start rebuilding capacity now, explore the Re-Anchored Reset our free mini-course for the first 100 subscribers. You’ll learn a simple 5 10-minute nervous-system-centered process to reduce overwhelm and recalibrate quickly when your inner perfectionist is screaming that it all has to happen – and happen right now!

When you notice your inner dialogue telling you this – gently push back. Remind yourself that things don’t need to be perfect to begin. You just need to start with one small step in the direction you want to go.

With love,

Angelina