Anxiety and Perfectionism

they say that beauty is in the eye of

the beholder

we sang along to hannah montana’s

nobody’s perfect with such trust and

idolization when we were younger

when we were in elementary school we

were told to be ourselves because

everybody else is taken

isn’t it ironic that society advises

everybody else to do these things

when we as a society persecute those who

are unapologetically themselves

we tell others that they need to lose

some weight or buy some makeup

when they aren’t what we deem as the

perfect person

how many selfies have you taken this

week i can say i’ve probably taken

hundreds did you spend hours on end

trying to take that perfect selfie

because if i’m being honest i did

growing up i never felt particularly

different to my peers

i played like them enjoyed the same

movies and tv shows as them

i even revamped my entire closet to be

strictly justice and claire’s like them

there were some instances however like

one i’d get weighed by the school nurse

or be doing something like the beep test

where i would get some uncanny looks

but i wasn’t old enough to understand

them it wasn’t until the second grade

where i’d been called something not very

nice by a classmate of mine

it was almost the end of our first

period and everybody was so eager to get

to snack to interact with our friends

from other classes

and more importantly to eat everybody

was complaining about their hunger

even though we’d eaten maybe an hour ago

as i was persistently grumbling about my

hunger

the boy next to me seemed to have had

enough of all the complaints

he turned to me and said stop

complaining all you care about is food

that’s probably why you’re so fat second

grade

me couldn’t believe what he just called

me i wanted to break down and cry right

then and there

11th grade me knows that he was really

young and probably didn’t know any

better

this moment though whilst very brief

opened a gateway for the withstanding

self-hatred

and insecurity i was going to harbor for

the many years to come

as i continued on with the journey of my

youth the weight-related comments also

continued

i was told by countless doctors that i

that i needed to lose weight

in order to prevent future health issues

middle school was probably when my

insecurities intensified even more

with the girls around me being skinny

size zeroes which i consider to be

perfect this only fueled me to go on a

number of unsuccessful crash diets

that only made me feel worse about

myself because they’d only worked for

two weeks but weren’t healthy enough to

make a long-term difference

it wasn’t until i got to the eighth

grade that i decided that i was finally

going to lose the weight

i started to eat nutritious foods rather

than find diets online

i went to the gym and continued all my

dance classes

and put my mind to it and eventually

lost 25 kilograms

the dream that i had been yearning for

for so many years had finally come true

and i was meant to be the happiest i

could ever be right

wrong even though i was happy with my

progress and felt healthier internally

i still felt like the girl i did before

i lost the weight

when i looked in the mirror i was still

insecure about my weight

so i started to lose even more weight

and even more

and even and even more until i quickly

went

from healthy to unhealthy according to

bdd.org

about 1 in 50 of the population have or

will develop a disorder

known as body dysmorphic disorder bdd

is essentially when an individual is

concerned about a flaw or many flaws in

the way they look

that most of the time can’t even be

perceived by others i know it’s crazy

that your brain is powerful enough to

make you see an image that’s not even

reality

a person with bdd will often go to

strenuous lengths in order to hide

or take away that flaw moreover of the

population that do have bdd

three percent are those who have

undergone major weight loss and still

believe they are as big

or even bigger than they were before for

example

on her bra on her blog chris get fit 28

twenty-eight-year-old woman sarah

dothran confessed that although she lost

a tremendous 70 pounds

in the past four years she still felt

like a plus-sized woman

mentally emotionally and physically

because of my bdd i still felt the need

to lose even more weight

which caused me to go into an unhealthy

cycle of under eating and over

exercising

this took a toll on my physical health

because i lost most of my hair due to

lack of nutrients

but it more importantly took a toll on

my mental health

i was constantly thinking about food yet

i felt guilty when it was something that

was

unhealthy i missed out on birthdays and

get-togethers because i knew that there

was going to be unhealthy food there

i was stressed frustrated and easily

agitated

a large amount of my time and effort was

spent on food and exercise

and not because i wanted to be healthy

which i wasn’t being

but because i wanted to look perfect

perfectionism comes in many forms

physical which i just spoke about is a

major one

but if you’re one of those people who’s

blessed with a metabolism as fast as a

ferrari

or clear skin a reminder that those

people deal with their own forms of

insecurity

then you’re probably dealing with one

that many students are troubled by

perfectionism in terms of academics i

know it sounds great to say that you

have a 4.0 gpa

because well that’s perfect

a 2017 study made by johns hopkins

university

found that 47 almost half of american

teens are graduating with grades

in the a minus to a plus range it’s fair

to say that high school students have

gradually started working harder

but in frequent cases this persistence

came to be due to pressure to excel from

outside

factors like family especially if you

come from a culture like mine that

doesn’t tend to accept lower grades

another pressure factor is top

universities

like harvard stanford oxford we all know

them

schools like that require very high

grades to attend

and a number of extracurricular

activities you must be doing whilst

maintaining those grades

because of this pressure students can

get very stressed which can result

in them developing things like anxiety

disorders students may also turn to

alcohol and drugs in order to cope with

that stress

one student told christian carter the

author of the article

high gpa’s low happiness that when he

feels especially stressed out

intoxication is the best way out

sometimes though

these pressures may actually come from

the person themselves

thomas curran a researcher with a phd

from the university of bath

and andrew hill a phd from york st john

university

studied get data from 41 461

american canadian and british college

students

from the multi-dimensional perfectionism

scale study

this study looked at how the idea of

perfectionism has changed

between the years 1989 and 2016.

they measured three different types of

perfectionism self-oriented

socially prescribed and other oriented

the study showed that the pressure

perfectionism has substantially

increased

between 1989 and 2016 and that the

self-oriented perfectionism

which usually comes in the form of

grades or performance and

activities or hobbies increased by 10

percent

the same study also found that over 20

percent of youth who committed suicide

had a habit of creating exceedingly high

expectations of himself

i asked five of my friends if they ever

put pressure on themselves to be perfect

in their grades or

performance and extracurricular

activities and all five said yes

their reasoning which is similar to mine

is that they know that they have a

higher potential than what they are

reaching at that moment

but when does it stop when do you

finally reach that potential and

de-stress

the truth is you never do i didn’t

i still felt the need to lose even more

weight and this only makes me wonder

what the point of all that stress is i

mean it’s a good thing

working hard to achieve your goals but

sometimes we take away from our

happiness to do that

we as humans have adapted to be perfect

in every aspect of our lives

and it’s probable that a main reason for

this is societal influences

okay i know we can’t just blame society

because well

we are society but that also means that

because we introduce these standards

we have the power to get rid of them

over the years

societal standards of beauty

intelligence gender

etc have become exceptionally harder to

attain

and this spans across all age groups

genders and ethnicities

returning back to the multi-dimensional

perfectionism scale study

the study also showed that the socially

prescribed perfectionism was the highest

to have increased

rising up 33 since 1989.

it’s probable that a main reason for

this is the emergence of social media

where people now have a platform where

they can edit things to look certain

to look a certain way in front of the

eyes of others and to look

perfect in the eyes of others i know

some people like to say that they aren’t

insecure about the way

that they look but come on think about a

time you so

wanted to post a photo on social media

but you thought you looked ugly in it

or fat or that it wasn’t going to get a

lot of likes as great as social media

is because we get to interact with

people across the world

it’s also made society obsessed with the

way that others see you

and really has equated your self-worth

with the amount of likes or followers

that you have

as bad as it sounds i’ll sometimes go on

a person’s instagram page

and make subconscious opinions about

them based on the number of likes they

have

or a pic that they posted on instagram

and i can make negative and positive

feelings about someone

in just one swipe because they’re

showing off what is

or isn’t considered perfect by society

overall after all of these years of

trying to look perfect

i can’t say i will never not post a

photo on instagram because

i don’t like the way they that i look

but what i’ve come to realize is

perfectionism will never exist

we as humans are made to have flaws if

we excel in one thing we might not in

another

but that’s okay because these flaws they

make up who we are

our experiences and memories i can’t

remember how many times my friends and i

laughed at an embarrassing or ugly photo

i mean what would life be without double

chin pics

our memories with our families and

friends that’s what makes us the

happiest

we shouldn’t strive to look a certain

way or act a certain way

or put impossible standards on ourselves

because

honestly there’s so much more to life

than striving for perfection