How do I stop being a perfectionist?
By No Rush · Updated November 8, 2026
The short answer
Set the finish line before you start. Perfectionism has two sides in the research: high standards, and fear of mistakes and judgement. The fear is the part that goes with putting things off. Choose one small thing, like a message or a page, and decide what good enough means before you begin.
How can I overcome perfectionism?
Separate the two sides of it. Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto went through the research and found two parts. One is striving: wanting to do things well. The other is concern: fear of mistakes, doubting what you did, worrying how others will judge it. Striving went with good things when the concern was low. So the aim is to keep your standards and turn down the fear.
Why does perfectionism make me procrastinate?
Because starting means risking a result that isn't good enough yet. Fuschia Sirois and colleagues combined 43 studies with about 10,000 people. The worry side of perfectionism went with more putting off. The striving side went with slightly less. If you keep postponing, the fear of mistakes is the part to work on, more than how high you set the bar.
What is the root cause of perfectionism?
There's no single known cause, but research shows it's growing. Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill combined studies of students in the US, Canada and Britain from 1989 to 2016. Every form of perfectionism went up. The feeling that other people expect you to be perfect rose the most. So part of the pressure comes from what you think others want from you.
How do I stop being a perfectionist at work?
Decide where the finish line is before you start. For an email it might be: it says what I need, it has the date, the names are spelled right. When those three are in, send it. Try the same with one bigger task this week. Afterwards, write down whether anything went wrong because of what you left out. That gives the fear something real to check against.
In the No Rush app
One step in the app asks you to guess beforehand how something will go, with a score from 1 to 10, and to score it again afterward. The app also asks how you would notice that your guess was wrong. If a step goes worse than you thought, the app says it was maybe too big for this week, and suggests a smaller one.
No Rush app
An iPhone app for people who feel stuck. It sets out one small next step at a time and tells you why that one. It is not therapy.
Sign up free Take the test For iPhone. Coming soon to the App Store. The first seven days are free in the app. After that, you choose whether to subscribe. Sign up now and the app stays free for you, for life.
Sources
- Stoeber & Otto (2006). Positive conceptions of perfectionism: Approaches, evidence, challenges. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(4), 295-319. doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1004_2
- Sirois, Molnar & Hirsch (2017). A meta-analytic and conceptual update on the associations between procrastination and multidimensional perfectionism. European Journal of Personality, 31(2), 137-159. doi.org/10.1002/per.2098
- Curran & Hill (2019). Perfectionism is increasing over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 1989 to 2016. Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 410-429. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000138
Read next
- How do I stop being so hard on myself?Why the harsh voice in your head rarely helps, what research on self-compassion and self-forgiveness found, and one small way to answer it.
- Why am I so afraid of failing?Why failing can feel like a verdict about who you are, why we expect it to hurt longer than it does, and how to test that with one small step.
- How do I stop overthinking my future?Give your worries a set half hour a day and write them down in between. How to do it, what studies found, and when to see your doctor.