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