When a perfectionist slips up, they criticise themselves too much and can experience burnout and depression.
Being self-compassionate is one of the best remedies for a perfectionist personality, research finds.
Learning self-acceptance helps protect the type of perfectionists who are highly self-critical from depression.
Some perfectionists are very worried about making mistakes and push themselves too hard to succeed.
When a perfectionist slips up, they criticise themselves too much and can experience burnout and depression.
However, perfectionists who are self-compassionate and self-accepting are less likely to get depressed.
The conclusion comes from a study of 541 adolescents and 515 adults.
All were given tests of perfectionism, depression and self-compassion.
Dr Madeleine Ferrari, the study’s first author, explained the results:
“Self-compassion, the practice of self-kindness, consistently reduces the strength of the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression for both adolescents and adults.”
The study’s authors explain how self-compassion is helpful:
“…self-compassion is ‘a useful emotion regulation strategy, in which painful or distressing feelings are not avoided but are instead held in awareness with kindness, understanding, and a sense of shared humanity’.
Thus, instead of avoiding social comparisons or overcompensating for negative feelings about the self through futile attempts to attain a higher social rank, the cultivation of self-compassion might help individuals to unconditionally accept ones’ failings.”
The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE (Ferrari et al., 2018).
