This TED Talk features personality psychologist Thomas Curran, recorded live at TEDmed 2018.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Now, how many times have you heard that one?

Either drinks, maybe, with friends or perhaps with family at Thanksgiving. It's everyone's

favorite flaw. It's that now quite common response to the difficult final question at job

interviews. My biggest weakness? That's my perfectionism.

You see, for someone that supposedly holds us back,

it's quite remarkable how many of us are quite happy to hold a hands up

and say we're perfectionists.

But there's an interesting and serious point

because our begrudging admiration for perfection is so pervasive

that we never really stopped to question that concept in its own terms. What does it say

about us and our society that there is a kind of celebration, imperfection.

We tend to hold perfectionism up as an insignia of worth, the emblem of the successful.

Yet in my time studying perfectionism, I've seen limited evidence of perfectionists are more successful, quite the contrary.

They feel discontented and dissatisfied amid a lingering sense that they're never quite perfect enough.

We know from clinician case reports that perfectionism conceals a host of psychological difficulties,

including things like depression,

anxiety, anorexia, bulimia, and even suicide ideation. And what's more worrying is that

over the last 25 years, we have seen perfectionism rise at an alarming rate. And at the same time,

we see more mental illness among young people than ever before.

Rates of suicide in the US alone increased by 25% across the last two decades. And we're beginning

to see similar trends emerge across Canada and in my home country, the United Kingdom.

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