One of the things that all those conditions has is in common is perfectionistic thinking.

And one of the kind of academic technical definitions of perfectionism is it's somebody that has unusually high expectations for success and it's kind of repeatedly fails to hit those markers for success.

So they continue anything like they're a loser and they're a failure.

And that's what our culture does these days.

It sets an unusually high market for success.

It presents us with this perfect self on TV, on radio, on the internet and social media and it says if you're not this person you have failed so if you're not

Beyoncé is the message if you're not Steve Jobs then you're doing something wrong.

And that is incredibly toxic.

It really, really is incredibly toxic because it's not true.

And what happens is that people blame themselves. think well I'm a failure and then

that's when you get this whole raft of terrible kind of psychological disorders and

actually between the first edition of Selfeet my book and book, and the second one, between the UK edition, and the US edition, there was published a study of 40,000 young people across the US, Canada, and UK since 1990 and it confirmed my kind of

hunch that levels of perfectionism are rising, have been rising significantly since the late 80s

early 90s. That is people are thinking more and more that they have to be

perfect in order to kind of be an acceptable human being.

I'm Sreni Rao and this is the unmistakable creative

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