18 Jan Would we be happier and healthier if we embraced being average?
This is a really interesting article; quite thought provoking because for so many of us, so much of our lives centres around striving for accomplishment and achievement.
Which is all good; because there’s lots of research supporting the benefits of accomplishment and achievement.
But what of the benefits of … not!?!? Of not doing quite so much or of not striving quite so hard?
Check out this article by Lucy Douglas via Positive News …
The pursuit of perfection is damaging to our health, researchers claim. We’re better off embracing being ordinary
In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, researcher and author Brené Brown describes herself as “a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring good-enoughist”. Perfection, Brown writes, is not about self-improvement. “Perfectionism is self-destructive simply because there is no such thing as perfect. [It] is an unattainable goal.”
The bestseller is to be re-released this year as a 10th anniversary edition, but a decade on perfectionism is just as much a scourge on mental and physical health as it was then. Research has found links between perfectionistic behaviour and mental health conditions ranging from depression and anxiety through to eating disorders, chronic fatigue and posttraumatic stress disorder.
A landmark study of 40,000 university students in the UK, US and Canada between 1989 and 2017 found that perfectionistic traits are more prevalent in young people today than 30 years ago. According to the research, the perception among young people that they need to appear perfect to secure approval has increased by a third. Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill, the researchers leading the study, attributed the rise to a society that puts young people in competition with each other…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE