It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

Hello everybody. How we doing? Perfectionism can really be the ultimate head fuck. You know it's driving you crazy, that feeling of always behind and never enough, but you tell yourself that you need this relentless self-criticism in order to get anything done, in order to succeed, that anything less would be an unacceptable,

even dangerous lowering of your standards.

All lies, according to my guest today, Ellen Hendrickson, who's a clinical psychologist

at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders.

She's got a new book.

It's called How to Be Enough, Self- Acceptance for Self Critics and Perfectionists.

This is Ellen's second appearance on the pod.

She actually came on several years ago to discuss her first book was about social anxiety.

It was called How to Be Yourself.

I'll drop a link to that in the show notes if you want to go check it out.

Anyway, in this conversation,

we talk about the relationship between perfectionism and anxiety, the definition of perfectionism,

and why that word may actually be a misnomer. We talk about Dr. Hendrickson's own struggles with

perfectionism and how those struggles manifested physically. The difference between healthy

perfectionism and unhealthy

perfectionism, changing your relationship with your inner critic, shifting from rigid, self-inflicted

rules to flexibility, how to keep high standards while making room for mistakes, overcoming

procrastination, navigating social comparison, and much more. Before we dive in and on a very

related note, I do want to tell you about something I'm doing over on Dan Harris.com all week,

starting today at 4 p.m. Eastern, I'm going to be doing live guided meditations where I focus

on specific forms of meditation that were designed by the Buddha as an antidote to anxiety.

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