Our Addiction to Perfection

There was a study done in England where they gathered people from age 18 to 72 who were on social media daily. They divided them into two groups. For one week, the first group stayed with their normal social media usage and the other completely went cold turkey.

At the end of the study, they found that the group who took a break had significant improvements in their well-being, depression, and anxiety. What is going on here? I think a big part of it is our addiction to perfection. When we go on social media, we see a tiny slice of a person’s life, the slice that is the best and the most acceptable, and then we compare our lives to them, usually coming up short. As you scroll through social media it’s pretty hard to remember that every single one of those posts is done by a person who also has messy days, messy emotions and, at times, messy relationships.

This is particularly challenging for young people because they get an idea that the goal in life is to have your life altogether, wrapped up with a bow of perfection. But it isn’t just young people, it’s all of us that fear imperfection. It took me a long while to finally realize there is no such thing as perfection in this constantly changing world. We can lose the weight we’ve always wanted to lose and yet our body is aging. We can have the most amazing meditation and think we will be at peace forever, only to have inner storms take over our lives, and we can find the perfect mate, only to discover they squeeze the toothpaste tube from the center!

Our addiction to perfection is the nightmare of our minds, which believe we’re not okay as we are. It brings up cruel judgment inside of us, along with a constant sense of trying, and the grief of never quite becoming what we think we and our lives should be. It can be so strong it can destroy our life. The much-beloved and highly successful country singer, Naomi Judd, killed herself the night before being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame because, according to her daughter Ashley Judd, she didn’t feel she was enough, was worthy and was loved!

It does take courage to let go of endlessly trying to create a perfect mind or body or personality or relationship or life, but when we do, we become liberated from the trap of the illusion of perfection, discovering that accepting ourselves as we are, is one of the most powerful catalysts to true and lasting change. It doesn’t mean you don’t facilitate change in your life. It just means that the movement toward change, rather than coming from your fixing, pushing, judging mind, comes from the wisdom of your heart.

What is on the other side of our addiction to perfection? It’s love. It is learning how to move through life from a foundation of self-acceptance, knowing that we will always be a mix of dark and light, of easy and difficult, of joy and sorrow. When acceptance comes to the forefront, we begin to find out who we really are underneath our addiction to perfection. It also opens the door to who we always have been before we were told it was not okay to be ourselves, not okay to trust ourselves, and to trust our wise, wise hearts.

It is astoundingly wonderful when the impatience that comes from not trusting our natural evolution no longer hooks us in its web. Instead, we learn to say to ourselves, I am enough, and I am exactly where I need to be on my journey through life.