Anita Shimmins
speaker
415 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Anita Shimmins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So that's in the relationship realm. Yeah, that's really good. Okay, so that's relationship. Yeah. How about work? How does it look like at work? At work, it does really create intense, intense pressure. So it might be that you're just going above and beyond to the point where it's taking such a toll on you that not only your mental health suffers, but eventually even your work suffers. So we know that those high expectations and high standards can kind of get you so far.
But then as of a certain point, it actually becomes more of a hindrance than a help. So it can actually really get in the way of you doing work. So if you're going to spend two hours perfecting an email, it's going to, you know, create a long to do list of things that you haven't gotten to that day because you, you know, you filed something.
the wording for that long. Other directed, so if you've got, for instance, people working under you and you're just cracking the whip and you expect perfection, you can have a really disharmonious team and high turnover and things like that. So yeah, it can impact work as well.
More of my conversation with Anita after this short break. Like what I'm curious about is like, what are we getting out of being perfect? You know, because there's so much going on. It's difficult to let go of the perfectionism if I feel that's the only thing that's keeping me safe, that makes things predictable, and that keeps me accepted by others.
if I attach all of that to perfectionism, I'm going to be really reluctant to let that go. Yeah. When we do, though, we learn that a lot of different things happen than we would expect. So we actually start becoming more creative, more free, more authentic, and lots of positive things kind of knock on effects of that. So yeah, holding on to it.
in reality, doesn't give us a whole lot of positives. But first, we need to try and start disentangling how much meaning we're attaching to perfectionism before we can let it go. I think it's really interesting because I think the reality of the world that we're in, there is so much uncertainty. Like, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And I think...
I know for me, it's this constant battle because I'm like, oh, I need to learn to let go, but this is what feels safe and comfy. And I know this so well, but I think it's just, it's a constant letting go, which is hard. Yeah, and you raise such an important point with so much uncertainty, you know, COVID definitely brought that up now, you know, wars and who knows the world order's changing and it's scary. And so when there's a lot of unpredictability,
we can kind of, you know, find escape in trying to control what we can control very perfectly. And so that kind of links to another factor in childhood that can really create a vulnerability to become a perfectionist, which is trauma and chaotic upbringing. So when there's chaos around us and when there's unpredictability, we're going to try and perfect the little bit that we have some control over. Wow. Yeah.
I know that you were starting to unpack this a little bit, but what are the pros and cons of remaining a perfectionist? I would say the pros are really limited of remaining a perfectionist because of, just because of the really intense toll it takes and it's not a sustainable strategy. And so the pros could be that, you know, there is a level of drive that it creates. The myth is that we need that to have that drive because we can replace that with...
value-driven drive and suddenly the journey becomes enjoyable instead of kind of I have this feared outcome that I need to get to. So, yeah, the pros and cons. The cons outweigh the pros by a lot and it's arguable if there are even any pros to holding on to that kind of extreme perfectionism, yeah. And the cons are, you know, there's all kinds of cons but there's serious cons as well where they can take a big toll on our mental health.
There are many mental health disorders that are closely linked to perfectionism. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. It can take a toll on our physical health as well, on our relationships. There's, yeah, a big cost. Wow. What are some of those mental health and physical health, like what does that look like? With mental health conditions, a lot that are associated strongly with perfectionism, so the most common ones are sort of anxiety. You can imagine if I have this massive fear of failure and therefore I need to be perfect,
pressure that creates so a lot of anxiety low mood if I'm constantly feeling not good enough and um I feel like I can't ever reach those unrelenting standards because you because nobody can and you're constantly falling short you're going to start feeling really more and more um
reinforced in that belief that you're not enough so it can really fuel that kind of low sense of self-worth and depression eating disorders and anorexia is another one that um specifically anorexia is one that's very closely linked to perfectionism to you
there's really rigid standards and very over-controlled and it has to be exactly that way. So it does create quite a big vulnerability for other disorders, even OCD. We have to get it just right and you can't really tolerate a lot of uncertainty and you have to try and get everything under control. OCD has a strong link to it as well.
And on an even sadder side, unfortunately, a lot of suicidality as well. Again, I want to flag that with not every perfectionist has any mental health issues, but there are mental health issues that have a link to perfectionism. And yeah, perfectionism is a predictor of suicidality apart from the depression and hopelessness. So yeah, especially because if I don't want to show you any weakness, am I likely to seek help?
No, definitely not. Yeah. So perfectionists don't often seek help. And so it's sort of that double whammy of first of all, the intense pressure and then second of all, not allowing myself to reach out and delegate or ask for help. Yeah. Does that mean like a lot of the time when clients come to see you in the clinic,
It's more of like another issue. They're not coming in for perfectionism. Yeah, they're usually coming in for things like I'm just really anxious or I'm having panic attacks or I'm stressed at work. Sometimes it's reframed. But then we see that actually there's these unrelenting standards that
And, yeah, sometimes clients with hyperfectionism actually feel really ambivalent about coming into therapy at all because it is kind of having to relinquish a little bit of that control, having to have somebody want to dive underneath and see what's going on underneath. Yeah. And that's really confronting for somebody who wants to appear a certain way. Yeah. Yeah.
Is it also like, is there a lot of shame and embarrassment there too, to like not wanting to get that help? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Because if I have to admit that I can't manage it by myself, for instance, it kind of reinforces that deep underlying feeling of not being enough. And that's definitely related or can be very much related to shame and defectiveness. Yeah.
And I know before you were saying that there's links to mental health, but you also said physical health too. Can you share more about that? Yeah. I mean, if you've got that constant pressure cooker in you, we know that's associated with high cortisol levels. We know that high cortisol levels associated with
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