Why do we push ourselves to be perfect? With Thomas Curran, PhD

In job interviews and in life, perfectionism is often seen as a selling point – an asset disguised as a flaw. But as psychologists have found rising rates of perfectionism in the United States and around the world in recent decades, they’ve begun to recognize the toll that the drive to be perfect can take on people’s mental health and well-being. Thomas Curran, PhD, author of “The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough,” talks about different types of perfectionism, why more and more of us feel the need to push ourselves to perfection, and what can we do – as individuals, as parents and as a society – to recognize that often, ‘good’ is good enough. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:27Kim Mills?

  Have you ever done a job interview where you're asked, "What's your biggest weakness?" And did you answer, "Oh, I'm such a perfectionist"? There's a good reason this answer has become a job interview cliche. Perfection, after all, is usually seen as a selling point, an asset disguised as a flaw. Who wouldn't want to hire a perfect employee, after all? But psychologist research suggests that perfectionism may not be something to aspire to at all. In recent years, researchers have found rising rates of perfectionism in the United States and around the world, and they've begun to recognize the toll that the drive to be perfect can take on people's mental health and well-being.

• 1:09Kim Mills?

  So why do more and more of us feel the need to push ourselves to perfection? Does our achievement culture demand it? Is it social media and the endless comparisons that come with it? And what does it mean to be a perfectionist, anyway? How is perfectionism different from just striving for excellence? And what can we do as individuals, as parents, as a society, to help ourselves and each other recognize that often, good is good enough? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr.

• 1:51Kim Mills?

  Thomas Curran, an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioral Science at the London School of Economics. He's a leading expert on perfectionism and how perfectionism is increasing in the modern world. His popular TED Talk on perfectionism has been viewed more than 3 million times, and his research has been covered by news outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and CNN.com. His debut book is The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough. Dr. Curran, thank you for joining me today.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Glad to be speaking with you, Kim.

• 2:25Kim Mills?

  Back in 2019, you published a study that found rising rates of perfectionism in young people in the US, Canada, and the UK over the past several decades. Tell us about that work. What kind of data did you look at? What did you find?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was the, I suppose, my biggest paper I've ever published. And I didn't realize at the time it was going to be quite the story it was. It was really a hunch. Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest ideas, and I just had a hunch of seeing young people in my office. I'm a professor, so I work with young people a lot. And it became evident to me over the recent years that there was a lot of pressure that young people are putting on themselves. They were feeling that they weren't good enough, or that no matter how hard they tried, they weren't achieving in the ways in which they were hoping to achieve. And I was seeing a lot of requests for not just academic support, but also mental health support as well.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  And all of this seemed to be bound up in this idea of self-imposed pressure. So one of the things I've decided to do was to try to understand if there is a trend here, something's happening, something in the water on young people, and whether we can maybe detect any of those changes in levels of perfectionism. So that was the hunch and collected all the possible information I could possibly collect on levels of perfectionism in college students from the US, UK, Canada, starting in around 1989, so late 80s, and all the way through to around 2021, 2022. And because college students have broadly similar characteristics, which is, by the way, a terrible thing for sampling generally in psychology, but it does happen to have an advantage when it comes to comparing across generations because they're broadly similar, can make reliable comparisons.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  And if you string them out over time, you see rising levels of perfectionism among young people. And that hunch was confirmed in the data, and those rises were quite steep, particularly for what's called socially prescribed perfectionism, which is a sense that other people and everyone around me expects me to be perfect. That was rising exponentially at a rate of about 33% increase since the late 80s. So yeah, some really interesting and challenging findings. And that propelled me, I suppose, into the TED Talk sphere and writing a book and all the rest of it, because people really wanted to know about this phenomenon.

• 4:39Kim Mills?

  Well, how do researchers measure perfectionism? Was there some kind of scale that you used or did you have to create one?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so luckily, there is a scale that most researchers use when they study perfectionism. It's called the multi-dimensional perfectionism scale. It was developed by two psychologists, Paul Hewitt, Canadian psychologist, Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flat. I think Gordon Flat's been on the podcast previously. Incredible scholars did a lot of heavy lifting in this area, developed the scale. And that's what we've been using across the years. And that's amazing because we've got one consistent tool there. It's a paper and pencil questionnaire that measures socially described perfectionism, as I mentioned, but also some called self-oriented perfectionism, which is perfectionism comes from within high self, high self standards and excessive self standards. And yeah, students have responded to this same survey now for about thirty, thirty-five years.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  So that gives us a treasure trove of data really to make these cohorts, do these cohort analyses. And that's what we've used to derive our conclusions from.

• 5:34Kim Mills?

  What are a couple of the questions, just so our listeners can understand what you ask people? That indicates that, yeah, you're a perfectionist.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  So self-oriented perfectionism is a form of perfectionism that comes from inside of us. It's high self set goals and expectations. And we might use an item like, I expect myself to be perfect or everything I do has to be perfect. And we might measure that on a one to five like it scale. So if you don't agree with that statement, then you might, I don't agree with that statement. So it might be a one. If you really agree with that statement and strongly agree, you would put a five and everywhere in between. So, you know, these affectionate constructs, they really operate on a spectrum. So higher or lower, most people are in the middle. And that middle bit is increasing over time, as we saw in our data. Socially prescribed affections are another form of affections that we, that we measure. And that's really rooted in pressures from the outside world. So the people expect me to be perfect.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  My parents expect me to be perfect. For example, those are the sorts of things we might ask and measure of self socially prescribed perfectionism. And again, same principle. If you disagree, it's a one. If you agree, it's a five and everywhere in between. And once you aggregate those to items, get an average, you can get a reasonably good idea of where you sit on the spectrum.

• 6:45Kim Mills?

  Now, you've talked about different kinds of perfectionism. You said self-oriented, there's other oriented and socially prescribed. Have all of these been increasing?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Yes. It's important to bear in mind that when it comes to self-oriented perfectionism, that started from a high baseline. So in the late eighties, it was already quite high. It's a five-point scale. It was around four, the mean scores across, you know, many, many samples of college students. So that already started high. It went even higher over time. But what was really interesting is not necessarily the self-oriented perfectionism, although that was an interesting finding, but what was going on with socially prescribed is really interesting because that didn't start very high. That started around three, right? So around the midpoint scale. Obviously, most people said, yeah, kind of, kind of not

• 7:34Speaker 02

  to those items. However, we're seeing that now sharply accelerated. We've updated our 2009 paper with new data when we're seeing a sharp acceleration in recent years for socially prescribed pressures. And that's really worrying because it's those social pressures that most concern us when it comes to things like mental health. They have the strongest link with depression, anxiety, worry, rumination. And so that's why it concerns us because what we used to see perhaps in the past was high strivings or high self-oriented perfectionism, but kind of moderate levels of socially prescribed perfectionism. But now what we're seeing is a slightly different pattern in recent generations where you've got high self-oriented perfectionism, but fast accelerating socially prescribed perfectionism.

• 8:12Kim Mills?

  What do you think is driving these increases? I mean, what's changed in our society in the last couple of decades that would lead to this rise in perfectionism?

• 8:22Speaker 02

  That's a whole bucket in and of itself. I mean, first of all, it's not a causal analysis. So essentially, anything I say here would be speculative. But nevertheless, we can say with reasonable confidence that there are a number of factors, and one of which we have empirically tested. So one of the things we think is happening is parental behaviours are changing, the way in which we rear children is changing. There's a lot more pressure, a lot more surveillance, a lot more monitoring. Of young people, for for good reason. And also a lot more expectation as well has been placed on young people, particularly in the academic sphere. And there's a lot of evidence to to support those claims. But we've shown empirically that uh young people are perceiving that the parents are uh demanding more of them, particularly in the academic route.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  And those higher demands, those higher expectations are highly correlated with perfectionism. So you put those two things together and you begin to see that changing parental practices towards more expectant and controlling forms of rearing uh have a direct correlation with perfectionism. And that may be one of the reasons why perfectionism is rising among young people. But there are factors way beyond parents. And it's also important to recognise that this isn't something the parents are doing intentionally. They're just responding to pressures in the outside world, right? I mean, Ivy League acceptance rates are around five percent today. They were ten percent in two thousand and fourteen. That is an incredible amount of pressure that uh parents see, they feel.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  And they're going to naturally translate that downwards to to their kids in terms of higher academic expectation, because they know it's even harder to get into the elite colleges. And elite college education is really important if you want to get into the elite professions. So parents just responding to wider pressures that are going on in the wider environment. And that wasn't just in schools and colleges when it comes to standardised testing and more stringent entry criteria. It's also the broader economy, you know, we've slowed down. And that means less opportunities uh for young people, particularly in the workplace. So that's an added pressure that young people feel and also parents feel. So again, that ratchets up the pressure. Uh and there of course are other factors, social media among them,

• 10:30Speaker 02

  uh that has come on the scene in the last ten years that certainly hasn't helped when it's come to those social pressures and I those idealised images of how we should be looking and appearing and behaving. There's so many factors that we could point to, but in our work and in our fear raising, those are the main ones.

• 10:46Kim Mills?

  Now, your study looked at perfectionism in college students, but is it also increasing in other age groups? And you talked about parents kind of leading the way. Are they themselves perfectionists, or they're just foisting this on their kids?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  A bit of both. Parental perfectionism is very strongly correlated with child perfectionism. We have to be a bit careful there because disaggregating what is social modeling from genes is a tricky one. If we know about 30 to 40% of perfectionism is inherited, so a lot of it is genetic. But beyond that, there will be parent socialization that is at play. And there are many different pathways in which parents can transmit perfectionism to young people through expectations, as I've talked about, but also through something called conditional regard. So this conditionality of approval that can occur within parents, that teaches children that are only worth something when they've achieved or done something

• 11:42Speaker 02

  well. And so conditional regard is a big one. There's also anxious forms of rearing that come into play as well. When children see parents behaving anxiously, or fearing failure, or treating mistakes and failure as big deals, as big problems, that these children themselves, that those things are big problems and they want to avoid them. So there's all sorts of different pathways through which parenting can impact on perfectionism. But it is also important to remember that it is highly genetic, too.

• 12:09Kim Mills?

  Have you been able to follow college students over time? So when they leave school and they go into the workplace, do they continue to have that perfectionism?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Yes, they do. There's not much life course analysis when it comes to perfectionism. So it's very difficult to say whether this is something that ameliorates or doesn't ameliorate over time. We know neuroticism does ameliorate over time. And so there may be an argument that that's the same for perfectionism. We need to test that. There was a couple of studies that show perfectionism can perhaps be a little stickier than neuroticism. One study shows that perfectionism and perfectionistic irritability seems to be quite sticky across the lifespan. But that's an isolated study. We need to do more there. So it may be the case that perfectionism is a little bit more of a stable construct over time than something like neuroticism, or maybe it isn't. We just don't know.

• 13:04Kim Mills?

  What role do you think that this increase in perfectionism and in the achievement culture is playing in driving the youth mental health crisis?

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Well, it's not the whole picture, of course. We are very keen to highlight perfectionism as a public health concern. We think that these are trends that are telling us something about the way young people are perceiving themselves or viewing themselves in relation to other people, the way that they're perceiving the social environment and how demanding it is and what is expected of them. And we think these are very salient trends in those respects. And because perfectionism, particularly socially prescribed perfectionism, has such a strong correlation with things like depression, anxiety, self-presentational concerns and other psychologies. When I say big correlation, I mean for psychology research, you know, big correlations, we're talking about around 25%.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Very explained, depression and anxiety, you know, that's a lot when it comes to psychology research. And because they share such a large correlation, we do think that perfectionism might be a part of the youth mental health crisis that we're currently seeing, not the only part, but certainly a part.

• 14:12Speaker 00

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• 15:11Kim Mills?

  Well, when we think about stereotypes of achievement culture, like the pressure to get perfect grades and in the US, these high SAT scores, you know, to get into college or participating in the right extracurricular activities.

• 15:26Kim Mills?

  It feels like something that applies mostly to the top end of the socio-economic ladder. Is that correct? Or is this tendency cutting across the socio-economic spectrum?

• 15:38Speaker 02

  No, that would be correct to say. And Dr. Lefah has published some incredibly important research on this topic, showing that the more affluent teens are actually those that disproportionately suffer in terms of their mental health from the achievement pressures that they experience at school, because they're the ones that are most aggressively primed for elite and college. And they experience a lot of psychological difficulties, substance abuse issues, and behavioral issues, a lot of which is actually not as documented, I think, as perhaps it should be. Because we quite rightly focus on the more deprived end of the socio-economic spectrum.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely, we do, because there's a lot of suffering there for many, many reasons. But also, at the same time, I think it's important for us to highlight that there are teens at the higher end of the socio-economic spectrum who are suffering from an excessive need to achieve so much pressure they're putting on themselves, partly rooted in perfectionism, but having impacts more broadly on their mental health.

• 16:43Kim Mills?

  Is the educational system itself contributing to this? I mean, I know kids today come home with hours of homework. When I was a kid, you know, maybe I had a half an hour or max an hour's worth of homework every night. I don't know how kids do it today.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  It's an incredibly tough schooling process. I think, on average, there's about 130 standardized tests that young people will undertake from kindergarten to the 12th grade. I mean, that's an incredible amount of testing and, you know, and ranking and sifting and sorting. And so you can only imagine the ways in which young people begin to construe a sense of self and identity in those contexts, which is essentially self and identity that's pinned to how well we perform, where we sit in the rank. And of course, that's a very fragile sense of self-worth, because the moment things go wrong or the moment we get a bad test score, our self-esteem plummets and we start to experience a lot of... Ruminati, vergogna, vergogna, stress.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's, there's no doubt that it's, there's a lot of pressure in schooling and I understand the need for standardized testing. Of course, there, there is a place for it. But I think what we have at the moment is an excessive culture of standardized testing, which is creating a lot of worry, a lot of anxiety.

• 17:59Kim Mills?

  Given your knowledge of all this, do you go easy on your students? Do you give fewer tests?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't want to give them any tests if I can avoid it. I feel like they've done that enough at this point. Um, but no, the way that I try to assess is, is really to emphasize the feedback, to make sure that I, you know, especially in the first year. Cause in the UK system, the first year doesn't count anything as much. We try not to even give them a grade. It's all about what was, what was done well, what could be improved and those things to focus on as, as you know, as you develop your understanding, knowledge in a certain area. And, you know, that's difficult because it's really jarring for students to come into that different way of learning, to not have a grade and to not have something they can anchor their sense of self around. But ultimately it's a much healthier way to learn, I think.

• 18:45Kim Mills?

  Is there such a thing as healthy perfectionism? I mean, can you be a perfectionist in a way that's not detrimental to your wellbeing?

• 18:52Speaker 02

  I'm going to say no, but this is a contentious uh topic. And if you speak to other psychologists in the area, you may get different answers. It's all good fun, but it does hit on, I think, something really important. And that's the question of whether this is a construct that we need to find the positives in, or it's something that we need to find a completely different track to. And that there is nothing positive about perfectionism and we need to step onto a different pathway. Um, even the high standards, the excessive standards are themselves negative in my mind for two reasons. The first is because even if we do meet those high and excessive standards, the perfectionists can never enjoy them because there's always got to be something more. So we can't appreciate our successes, even if we get them.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  And also, of course, those problems and things don't go quite so well for those high and excessive standard perfectionists because that's a big hit to their self-esteem. And so what they tend to do is avoid and divert and iterate and procrastinate to try and avoid those feelings of shame and guilt from making a mistake or hitting a setback. So that actually blocks our progress in the end. It doesn't carry us forward. And so for my mind, I think that the the negatives far outweigh any positives that you might find from being a perfectionist. And it's much better to try to situate ourselves on a better track where we're focusing on our efforts, we're focusing on the process of of learning, we're we're trying to hit high goals, but we're maintaining the sense of perspective and that we're allowing ourselves to enjoy successes when we when they arrive.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Now, those are all markers of a high achiever, and it doesn't preclude high achievement by taking a slightly different track. But what it does mean is that we can enjoy the process. And as a consequence, we can find psychological well being, purpose and meaning through that process, which are things that we just simply can't do if perfectionism is in the driving scene.

• 20:39Kim Mills?

  Part of your story is that you were a perfectionist. Isn't that true? I mean, you recognize that in yourself and and it kind of changed the way that you approach life. Can you talk about that a little bit?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a lot of people these days who are trying to climb the career ladder, perfectionism really did take over in my own life, particularly in my early to mid twenties, when I was doing, working all sorts of hours to try to lift myself above other people, to try and get as many publications out there as I could, to try and win as many grants as I could, to looking around at how other people are doing and using that as my benchmark for how good I should be doing. And, you know, there's an argument to suggest that it was part of why I'm here, but also it came at a heavy cost. And I burnt out, I had to leave work for a number of months. It was a very difficult period in my personal

• 21:35Speaker 02

  life as well, because it created all sorts of overflows in terms of the way in my relationships with other people. And so, you know, there was a lot of collateral. And although ostensibly I looked like I was a high achiever, underneath I was really sinking. And and that that was an impetus for me to take a different direction, choose a different track, to try to remove those narcissistic self reference tendencies that I held within me, that contingent self esteem that I held within me based on my achievement and how I was appearing relative to other people, and actually just try to be more centered and focus on what it is that I want to leave in the world, what it is I want to learn and I want to share. And that flicking that switch really helped me because it gave me a bigger purpose.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  It made me look more holistically field. It made me want to ask bigger questions about what's happening at a societal level. And ultimately, that was the real reason why I think I'm here is because if I continued on that track, I'd have burnt out and I would be really struggling. But now I'm able to have good work-life balance and ask really interesting questions, which is one of the reasons I'm talking to you, I suppose.

• 22:46Kim Mills?

  Given that experience and also the research that you've done, do you have advice, you know, really specific advice for people who recognize the harmful perfectionist tendencies that they have? And they want to change, what can they do?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Oh, there's loads of things to bear in mind. And again, that's also probably another book. But there's a few things that I've found really useful in my experience and also to have some evidence behind them. The first is that self-compassion is a big part of combating perfectionism. And self-compassion is really about recognizing that we are a fallible, exhaustible human being and that we're going to make mistakes and we're going to hit setbacks. And that's just part and parcel of what it means to be human. And so, you know, recognizing that and actually internalizing that. And then making sure that we check in on ourselves when things go wrong and we go in on ourselves. And maybe we're harshly self-critical about how could you be so stupid? What were you thinking?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  And making sure we actively step in and intervene in those moments and find constructive and compassionate ways to move forward is really, really important. And because silencing that inner critic is a big part of combating perfectionism. I think also, you know, on a work basis, one of the things I've found really useful is to try to prioritize, you know, put my. Um. Priorities into buckets, you know, there are things that require high level diligence. There are things that require the activities to be, you know, good enough. And then there are things that just need to get done, you know, not everything has to be done. At a hundred miles an hour, not everything has to be done to the minute D to absolutely perfectly. Maybe some things require require a little bit of conscientiousness, but actually most things no work done.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  And to be an efficient worker, if that prioritise efficiently too. And we have to recognise that there are some tasks where good enough is good enough. And actually making progress is more important, getting things absolutely perfect first time round. So it definitely helped me in terms of prioritising and putting my tasks into buckets. And allowing myself, giving myself permission for things not quite to be of a certain standard. Um. For tasks that don't need to be of that certain standard. Um. And and finally, I also like to journal. Um. I think this this is a lot of evidence for journaling for all sorts of um psychological uh ailments. But particularly for perfectionism, just writing down our fears can be so important. Because one of the things that blocks perfectionist people is the fear that things might go wrong.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  They catastrophise a lot. And so writing down your fears, like not ignoring them or suppressing them, but actually writing them down. Like, what is it you're worried about? What's stopping you making progress in this moment? And write it down, journal it, and then ask yourself, well, what steps, practical steps can I put in place? To avoid that worst case scenario happening? And then draw it through to its conclusion if it were to happen. So let's say it did happen. What can we do to bring ourselves back to square one, right? And just putting those fears under the microscope and putting practical ways forward in the case to avoid it in the first case. But then in the case of actually happening, how do we move ourselves back? Is a really, really good way to um break down those fears.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  And it allows us to have a roadmap to move forward. And then we could just get on and do it without that fear holding us back.

• 26:02Kim Mills?

  What about parents and other caregivers? What can they do to encourage their kids while buffering them from the pressures that lead to perfectionism? I mean, you know, you want your kid to get into the best school, but how can you keep your child from becoming overly anxious and suffering?

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a few things I would recommend to parents. First thing is don't put too much pressure on yourself because parenting is one of the hardest jobs in the world. You can go into it the best intentions and you can find very quickly that you're reduced to a helpless spectator. And that's just normal and natural and part of the process. So that I think is the first thing, don't put too much pressure on yourself to get things just right. And Winnicott's idea of the good enough parent is something that springs to mind when I think about parenting. It's, you know, you can't perfect everything and that's good for kids because life is not perfect. So a couple of okay, practical things.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, don't hitch your approval to achievement or, you know, how much effort kids are putting in, particularly when it comes to sports or academic activities. It's good to have standards, it's good to, you know, want children to do the best they can. But you have to be really careful as parents not to subtly qualify your approval based on the expectation that young people do more. Because it's very easy to slip into that trap when young people have done well. They've come home, they've got an A in their test and you go, that's great. Okay, keep working, right? Because that full approval, full validation and recognition of parents is subtly withheld under the understanding of more. So essentially what we're doing is we're holding young people on tiptoes under the expectation that keep working.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  And that teaches them that they're only really worth something in this world if they strive and strive and strive and if they achieve and achieve and achieve. And the moment they don't, then the implication is that other people value them less. So conditional forms of acceptance are really problematic when it comes to development of perfectionism. So it's really important that you give your kids full unqualified approval when they've done well, but also when things haven't gone quite so well, you give them. Them a hug, you tell them it's okay. It's just one test of many other tests, right? It's not an indictment on you or your self-esteem. It doesn't say anything about whether your teacher likes you or whether you're good at this particular subject. It's just one test. And the most important thing is to immerse yourself in the, in the, in the learning process.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  And things will turn around if, if, um, if you keep doing the, you know, the revision and, and the reading and all the rest of it. Uh, I think it's really important to put our arms around our children in those moments. Make sure that we just give just as much acceptance when they've done well, when they haven't done quite so well. Uh, and the second thing I'd say is also just normalize mistakes, failures, um, setbacks. Uh, if you've had a bad day at work, it's okay to communicate that with young people. It's okay to sit around the dinner table and laugh about it. It lets them know that these things happen as part and parcel of the real world. And that if their parents can laugh about it, if their parents can share it openly, then that gives them permission to do it too. Um, and so those are the two, those are the two main ones. But a, as I said at the beginning, it's really, really hard. And to any parent out there, you're doing a great job.

• 29:15Kim Mills?

  Is there something we can be doing on a societal level to, to stop this rise in perfectionism?

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Yes. And one of the things that I write about the final part of the book is how society might need to change to provide less pressure or provide a context of less pressure, particularly on young people. And there are many things that I've recommended, uh, none of which I've, I think necessarily going to be implemented, but they're almost quite utopic in some ways. But I do think that if they were, we would see less pressure, one of which is an expansion of, uh, participation in higher education. Um, I think it's scandalous, actually, that universities have an expanded participation. Because all we're really doing is excluding more and more kids as colleges become more and more competitive. And that's not the way forward. Um, and it needs to be vast investment in education.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Education has so many benefits, um, at a societal level, not just for young people, but for society at large. And the, the more that we don't increase the pie of universities, the more that's going to become, uh, more competitive and the more pressure is going to be on young people to. To get to gain access. I think that's one thing we could do to help. Another thing is, I think at a broader level, I'm a really big advocate of UBI. And the universal basic income is something that we're probably going to see anyway as AI comes in to capture a lot of productivity and jobs. I think it's going to be needed as an emergency measure to bridge the gap between that world now and the new world where AI does a lot of the

• 30:48Speaker 02

  of the work that we used to do. But I think that will have many, many benefits. And in particular, it will take away the sort of scarcity that that often is the fire for perfectionism. This idea that if we take a risk, but it doesn't pay off, that we're going to be destitute is a lot of fear, it's a lot of worries, a lot of precarity. And that creates a lot of perfectionism at a societal level. And UBI has been advocated across the board from left to right on its ability to spur creativity, to spur innovation, to to give almost a safety net that allows us to try new things and be innovative. And without it,

• 31:27Speaker 02

  it stifles that innovation because perfectionism holds us back. And there are other things I advocate in the book, but I think those are the two big ones.

• 31:35Kim Mills?

  So what's next for you? What are you working on? What's your next book?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  At the moment, I'm just going to take a little bit of time off to recover from what's been a grueling year or two. Yeah, I've loved writing the book. I've loved getting out there. I've loved speaking to people. I've loved talking about perfectionism. It's really, it's really, you know, one of the reasons I did it was to spread the message. But at the same time, it's quite exhausting as well. And I have a young family now, and I think it's time for me to switch gears a little bit and focus on my family. And then maybe in a few years' time, I'll write another book. I have some ideas on what might come next, but I think for now, I'm just going to listen to my own advice and get a bit of work-life balance.

• 32:16Kim Mills?

  Well, Dr. Curran, I want to thank you for joining me today.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  It's been fantastic to talk. Thank you for having me.

• 32:23Kim Mills?

  To read more about Dr. Kearns and other psychologists' research on perfectionism, visit the October issue of APA's magazine Monitor on Psychology. Go to www.apa.org/monitor. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. And for those of you who want to know more about psychology and the work of APA, you can join us as a supporter. You don't have to be a psychologist. The benefits include a subscription to our award-winning magazine, which I just mentioned, The Monitor on Psychology, as well as discounts on our books and other publications.

• 33:07Kim Mills?

  So if psychology is your passion, or if you just want to know more about the science, you can become a supporter by visiting at.apa.org/speaking. That's at.apa.org/speaking. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

• 34:22Speaker 04

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