Thomas Curran

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, so my upbringing was one of love and support, but also material lack.

We didn't have a great deal of money.

And one of my earliest memories of that is going to school with the wrong backpack or the wrong pencil case, the wrong brand of sneakers.

I didn't have gadgets like a Game Boy or a PlayStation.

Phones were just coming in then.

I didn't have one of those either.

And when I compared myself with these two characters, Kevin and Ian, who had all of those things and were able to express, I guess, their personalities and their identities with these material goods, you kind of feel like even though this is all stupid stuff, right?

It's just stuff.

But it really matters to a kid, especially if you don't have it.

So as I grew older and things like cars started to come into the picture, this kind of shame really started to get really into my bones.

And that was huge actually.

Cars was a massive part of this because cars is kind of the ultimate status symbol, right?

You just look at how they're advertised.

All my friends were bought these really super sleek cars with modifications and all the rest of it.

And that was like really crushing for me.

That was really embarrassing not to be able to have one too.

I didn't have the freedom that they had.

I couldn't go anywhere.

I just tagged along really in the back seat.

And I suppose this is where I first learned about shame, what it meant to feel ashamed and embarrassed about where I am in life and what I have.

And I sort of learned that you kind of got to buy your way out of that shame in this world.

And that became, I guess, an early motivation.

So they had these what we call hot hatchbacks in the UK, you know, the really fast, exciting pieces of machinery, I suppose.

And everybody around the town would be asking, you know, what car are you going to get?

And you're going to get this one, you're going to get that one, you're going to get these plates.

And what about these trims and these wheels and everything?

I used to love looking at car magazines and craving for a car of my own.

And I would always say, well, I'm going to have this and I'm going to have that.

And when I get my car, it's going to have a silver trim and chrome wheels and all of these things that everybody else was talking about.

I would say that one day my dad's going to come back and he's going to buy me a car or it's not going to be long now, you know.

And I kind of wished, I hoped that that would happen.

But of course, unlike them, my family didn't have the means to be able to buy me these things.

And that wasn't my fault.

There was nothing that I could have done to change those circumstances.

But you feel in some way that you're inadequate, you're less than yourself.

Tell me about it, Thomas.

So I came through the education system, actually, a really unique time.

In the UK, Tony Blair was the prime minister and he had a great education push at that time.

This was the late 90s, early noughties.

And there was a lot of financing to go to university.

So I took that up and I managed to scrape my way to a local teaching college to study sport with every intention of being a PE teacher.

That was going to be my ambition.

And I guess you could say I was lucky, really, because at my time at that teaching college, I happened to intersect with a professor who was on his way to a more prestigious university.

I must have impressed him because he took me with him to do a PhD.

And that was when things started to really get quite crazy because I remember instantly being inside this hyper-competitive university environment, being surrounded by people who were just way smarter than me, more erudite, way more put together.

People were pumping out publications.

Some of them were even getting grant money at university.

And in that environment, those early feelings of shame and inferiority that I kind of brought with me started to come back again in mega doses.

And I think my response really looking back was to develop what I can only really describe as an urgent need to lift myself above other people through an excessive form of striving.

Like made sure I was the first in the office and the last to leave and made sure people saw that.

You know, I'd regularly do

80 hour weeks and I'd let everybody know in the office that I was doing that I sent these kind of weird conspicuous emails to my academic supervisors in the early hours of the morning and sometimes last thing at night just to let them know that I'm working and I can remember one Christmas doing a thousand words of my thesis on Christmas day and at that time

I felt really proud of it.

You know, these are incredibly unhealthy things to do, but nevertheless I believed if I didn't do these things, then there's no way I was going to succeed.

Yeah, so all that work did end up paying off and I was able to elevate myself through the academic ladder, up the academic ladder, I should say, into second tier and then elite institutions.

And that's when I did a very important TED talk at a resort in the US back in 2018 and

And I think going to that TED Talk was when I finally realised I'd sort of made something of myself here.

But nevertheless, I really felt out of place at that conference.

There's people there were paying thousands of pounds.

They were from, you know, you talk to them, they're from this mega firm or that mega firm or that big industry.

And it was kind of overwhelming a little bit.

And they sort of just carried themselves with confidence.

And again, this kind of really picked at my thoughts of inferiority.

And the weird thing was, I was the one on the stage.

Like, I was the one who they were there to see.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

Now, how many times have you heard that one?

So the talk itself was extremely nerve-wracking, but I'm not a natural speaker.

It's not something that I ever thought I would do.

And I've kind of just been thrust into a profession that kind of requires you to be pretty good at speaking.

So one of the things I do to combat the anxiety that's associated with that is to overthink things, over-prepare, because in my mind, that's the most fail-safe way to make sure things don't go wrong.

it's so important that you don't show an ounce of weakness or vulnerability because in that moment things can cascade they can spiral and when it's so public that's when you feel like your deficiencies or shortcomings are being exposed and in the end i was able to recite a 15-minute talk word for word without any mistakes which was incredibly important for me but at the same time

It wasn't the most charismatic of talks.

It wasn't the most inspirational, but I did it.

And people were very polite and they applauded and I'm sure they appreciated it.

But at the same time, you could tell that it wasn't quite the show-stopping talk that perhaps other people at the conference had been able to deliver.

And that, you know, you do think about that.

I was very aware that, you know, it wasn't a rousing speech that others had delivered.

And so I wondered, you know, okay, did it look stilted?

Was it very one-dimensional or monotonic?

You know, was I able to convey the ideas in a way that changed people or in some way made them think differently about the topic?

You know, these were the goals I had going in, but I wasn't sure in those moments where I'd actually achieved them.

It was a very messy breakup that happened in a really exposing way.

And it was something that made me feel very humiliating.

Humiliate, excuse me.

I worried about how it would look to other people.

I chastised myself about that breakup and what it said about me.

And that was turning itself into all sorts of negative beliefs about myself.

Why can't you snap out of it?

Why can't you just get through this?

So I felt a lot of self-loathing, a lot of shame, a lot of grief.

And I went into a really dark place in those moments.

And what I needed to do more than anything else was to just stop.

and deal with the emotional plunge that I was experiencing.

But my personality wouldn't let me do that.

And if anything, I was trying to push myself even harder to overcompensate for the things that are now starting to go wrong as a function of the breakup and how it impacted on my emotional well-being.

And the flashes started to get brighter.

They started to obscure what I could see.

I couldn't concentrate on the thing I was reading.

I had trouble breathing.

My throat became really tight.

And so I tried to get some water, but that was no use.

I ran out into the open road and tried to kind of suck the...

fresh air but none of it was really working and it just started to take over and this panic was starting to feed the panic and then you worry what on earth is going on?

Am I dying?

Is this it?

And then after a few minutes of complete meltdown I would say my body just started to come back to me, I was able to regulate my breathing, my heart rate came down and I was almost I suppose back in the world again

And at the time, I didn't know what on earth that was.

And I'm sure many of your listeners can resonate, but that was a panic attack that comes from the bursting of the dam of this kind of suppressed anxiety that we're just holding back.

And that panic attack was really the first of many, but it was an eye-opener for me and showed me that the way that I was approaching life, trying to achieve, trying to prove to everybody that I was good enough was actually coming at a great expense for mental health.

What I see in young people and students that come through the door is a lot of tension that's bound up in an intense need to excel.

And all of my students at some level feel this, but there was definitely a vivid case in John who I think was a very extreme case of that intense desire and need to do things perfectly, excellently, to excel at all times.

He would constantly come to me in meetings telling me that he

his grades weren't good enough, even though they were really high, that they weren't good enough, that he didn't feel like he was succeeding in the measure that he expected of himself.

And no matter really how I tried to reconcile those things and tell him that what he's doing is exceptional, he always recasted those successes as abject failures and how he'd let himself and other people down.

And this was...

It was so sad because John really found it difficult to see his successes in any other way.

And his justification really, at all times, was very simple.

How could he be a success when he was trying so much harder than other people just to get the same outcomes?

Well, that's the thing with being at LSE.

Everyone's exceptional.

And not being able to derive any lasting satisfaction from success is really a kind of signature of the way my students interpret their experience at university.

They find it difficult to deal with setbacks.

And I think sometimes we misunderstand this as being fragile or young people lacking resilience, but really it's just excessive self-imposed pressures and a deep and profound fear of failure.

So it became evident to me that myself, my students, and many, many people around me were struggling with something called perfectionism.

A need and desire to do things perfectly and nothing but perfectly that comes from a sense of lack, a sense of inferiority, a sense of deficiency, a sense that I'm not perfect and in order to gain approval and validation in this world that I'm worth something, that I matter, that I need to be perfect.

So we found recently that perfectionism is increasing among more recent generations of young people.

This was a study we did back now in 2016, 2017, essentially looking at college student data of perfectionism.

So we have about 30 years worth of perfectionism data looking at various indicators of perfectionism.

And we found when we ran the numbers that perfectionism was increasing and increasing really rapidly.

It's up about 40% since 1989.

And that's concerning because it's associated most strongly with negative mental health outcomes like depression, anxiety, self-harm.

And this hard data is telling us something significant and something that we need to be paying attention to.

Perfectionism is something that I think in modern society is lionized, celebrated.

We know it carries self-sacrificial patterns of behavior.

It makes us feel a little bit miserable.

But nevertheless, we also think that perfectionism is what carries us forward and makes us successful.

A necessary evil, so to speak.

Something that if we want to get ahead, we might need a bit of perfectionism.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And recruiters, time after time, tell us that that's the most overused cliche in job interviews.

And I think it says something about what we consider to be socially desirable weaknesses, that if somehow we can communicate that we're willing to, you know, sacrifice ourselves in some way and push ourselves beyond comfort, that that is something they'll see as positive, something that they really want on their team or in their organization.

So that speaks really to the ubiquity of perfectionism at the moment.

So a lot of people associate perfectionism with really high standards, that's true.

But actually, perfectionism is far, far deeper than what we see on the surface.

Because what really matters is where it's coming from.

And where those excessive amounts of striving and high standards and go-getting attitudes that you see on the surface are coming from in the perfectionistic people is a place of lack.

a sense that i'm not good enough that i'm not perfect enough and i need to prove to other people all the time that i'm worth something that i matter in this world and the way that i do that is through being perfect because of course if i'm perfect i'll get their validation and that will make me feel better that will soothe those shame-based fears of not being good enough

So what we see in the lab is exactly what I experienced when I encountered that breakup in my own life.

When you put perfectionistic people in stressful situations, perfectionism will aggravate the stress.

So every time you go into the lab, you tell perfectionistic people to do stressful things, like maybe give a public talk or complete a competitive task against other people.

And in the end you say you didn't do very well or you failed.

What you'll see is perfectionistic people respond with intense amounts of self-conscious emotion, lots of shame, lots of guilt about having slipped up in some way, particularly if that slip up is public.

It validates in them a sense that that fear that they're not good enough.

Whereas people who score lower on the perfectionism scales, well, yes, of course, these things do have an impact on their emotional state, but it's a far less profound impact.

And they're able to bounce back quite quickly.

yeah perfectionistic people people who are higher in the perfectionism spectrum what you tend to see is they also score higher on what we would call self-sabotaging thought patterns so things like you you mentioned there worry rumination they're really hyper vigilant about where they sit relative to others how they're performing relative to others they find it very difficult to exist in the moment or be mindful or appreciate success's

And so perfectionistic people really find it difficult to thrive or flourish because they're constantly worried about what's going to go wrong or how other people are doing.

Yeah, so that's a really curious finding, actually, in the perfectionism literature.

We know perfectionists work really hard and they push themselves well beyond comfort into a zone of declining and diminishing returns for every little bit of effort that they put in.

Failure is very common among perfectionist people because the goals that they set themselves

are way too high.

And even if they do succeed, perfectionism really just turns those successes into dead ends because the better we do, the better we feel like we're expected to do.

And so we just continually keep ourselves on tiptoes, clinging for more and more.

I suppose it's like running on a treadmill that never slows down.

So it's really tough, the success equation for perfectionists because they really never feel like they've ever made it.

The second reason, I think, why we don't see very strong correlations between perfectionism and performance.

When things start to go wrong, perfectionists do something really, really interesting.

They withhold their effort in order to save face, to kind of preserve their image and their sense of self.

And we've done a lot of experiments looking at this phenomenon.

And one of the

most illuminating those experiments is when a colleague of mine, Andrew Hill, took people into the lab, gave them a cycling task and said, you've got to complete a certain distance in a certain amount of time.

And based on your fitness, you should be able to do X amount of distance.

So he got them going with the task and everybody worked really hard to meet the goal.

and at the end he told them no matter how well they did that you failed now what's really interesting here is that after telling people they failed he asked them to do it again and that's where something remarkable happened because people who didn't have a great deal of perfectionism on that second attempt after the first failure

It didn't really change the amount of effort they put in.

If anything, it went up slightly.

But the people who scored high on perfectionism did the exact opposite.

They withheld their effort on the second attempt because the thinking in their mind is you can't fail at something you didn't try.

And if I put all of myself into this first effort and still didn't make it, well, I'm not going to do that again because the feelings of shame and embarrassment were so intense that I just don't want to feel those things again.

And so this is the perfectionism paradox, I suppose.

This is that they really are so intensely fearful of that failure that when it looks like it's going to be a very likely outcome of anything that we're doing, then they take themselves away from those situations.

That's incredibly self-sabotaging.

It doesn't just look like complete withdrawal, by the way.

It can also come in the form of procrastination.

So we'll remove ourselves from doing activities that are really difficult in the moment because the anxiety is so intense.

All of those things are not at all conducive to performance.

There's no way you would want someone like me flying your plane.

Because if an engine suddenly craps out at 35,000 feet, you're going to need somebody who's able to think very clearly about the procedures.

There's going to be, by the way, no perfect way to get out of that situation

There's gonna be many, many good enough ways to get out of that situation.

And what a perfectionist will do, will search for the perfect outcome.

Whereas somebody who is more conscientious, meticulous or diligent, they'll be able to know that there are many different options that we can take.

And the most important thing is to take the option that lands the plane safely.

And that's the same with a surgeon, that's the same with working in a nuclear plant, any of these kind of very high risk activities

conscientiousness, diligence, really important qualities, but not perfection.

Yeah, absolutely.

I saw that point, actually.

I remember it well.

And it was at the end of a very long rally in which, really, the shot that was missed was one of the easiest shots.

And...

that intense emotion and outburst that came from a place of just complete self-loathing for the fact that having made all of these really tough shots you couldn't make the easy one and these are the intense expectations that self-oriented perfectionistic people hold themselves to and the moment they fall short of it particularly in very important situations the self-loathing

the sense of how on earth could you have been so stupid?

What on earth are you thinking?

How could you have let yourself make that mistake?

It can be really so intense that in the extreme cases like this one, they can engage in some really quite aggressive self-castigation.

And that's a signature of a self-oriented perfectionist.

There is just simply a lack of self-compassion and a strong sense of self-loathing.

Yeah, other-oriented perfectionism is when we turn perfectionism outwards onto other people and we expect them to be perfect and nothing but perfect and we'll certainly let them know.

You'll know other-oriented perfectionists when you meet one.

They tend to be quite brash.

They will let you know when things haven't gone quite to plan.

And it's what we call, I suppose, what Freud would call projection, the sense that my intense desire to be perfect is projected outwards onto you two.

Well, the line is really the inability to accept at any time that things are good enough.

Whereas someone that's demanding yes, wants high standards, yes, is also somebody who can accept and appreciate when things have gone well, when there's been a success, and can give praise and appreciation for that.

And I think that's the difference.

Socially prescribed perfectionism is the...

most extreme form of perfectionism and it's a perfectionism that comes from outside, a sense that everybody and all around me expects me to be perfect and they're watching and waiting to pounce if I show any form of weakness.

And carrying that around with you all the time is really tough.

You need to be perfect at all times.

You need to make sure that your life is curated to show other people, you know, there are no weaknesses.

And that is really tough to live under that microscope and to think that everybody in all times is watching.

Essentially what we're seeing today is a rise of about 40% in socially prescribed perfectionism from the late 1980s to the present day.

That's a really, really big rise which continues to increase.

And it's most concerning because it's most strongly correlated with really quite negative mental health outcomes like anxiety, depression, low mood, a sense of hopelessness and helplessness, things that are really quite significant when it comes to our mental health.

And I think it's indicative, perhaps, of what I've called a hidden epidemic of unrelenting expectations for perfection, which are kind of taking over among young people.

And why do you think this might be the case?

obviously the one that most people point to is social media and the comparative lens that social media offers us 24 7 and without escape but it's not just images of perfection in social media it's unrelenting pressures to excel in schools and colleges it's the modern workplace and the intense pressures to hustle and grind it's changing parenting practices

They're responding to pressures in schools and colleges and the more competitive landscape to get into elite college by pushing young people in the realm of education.

So there's all sorts of different pressures now that are weighing on young people and they're being internalized as pressures to be perfect.

Well, clearly my perfectionism has pushed me forward in moments where I've needed it to.

But the reason why I'm here is because I was very, very fortunate to come through at a time where people like me were supported to go to university, where it just so happened to meet the right professor at the right time.

It took me to the right university.

But without those remarkable moments of luck.

I wouldn't be here.

The second thing to say is that I look, I guess, on the surface, like a very successful individual.

And in many ways, I suppose I am.

But I can't afford to live in the city that I work.

I don't have a house.

I've had to put off things like

having a family and relationships.

I've lived in countless different homes.

I can't set root in communities or build a long and lasting friendship group because my life has just been essentially one long period of flux.

So, yes, it looks like success, but it doesn't feel like success.

And when I look and reflect on this journey and how difficult it's been and the sacrifices I've had to make, I sometimes question whether I might have been better off back in my working class community with a job that gives me some sense of purpose, with a family and a house and a community.

Maybe I would be happier.

No, I don't think we get to speak for Steve Jobs at all.

If somebody carries perfectionism around with them and they're really successful and they, yes, they go through all of the things that I've experienced and for them it's worth it, then who am I to tell them that that isn't the case?

All I can say...

from what I understand about the work that I've done and my own experiences, is that perfectionism carries a really heavy cost and that actually there's plenty of evidence that we can be just as successful, if not more successful, and not carrying around the emotional baggage that we carry around with perfectionism.

I think Margaret Atwood is a great example of someone who can combine a desire, a joy, a real sense of purpose and vocation in what she does, i.e.

writing.

And being able to do that in a way that doesn't carry with it this kind of constant self-worry and self-doubt about it being perfect or exceptional.

And really, perfectionism is the thief of creativity in many ways.

It stops us from putting things out there when they're not quite right because we worry about how that's going to be received.

And I can tell you that firsthand from having written a book.

My editor, I think, was ready to throttle me at the end of the process because I was still tinkering, iterating right to the end.

And it was so intensely difficult to get this one out.

And Atwood has almost the opposite perspective

there seems to be a joy and an embrace of the process in her writing and that really comes through in her pages and it really comes through in her self-analysis of how she writes and why she writes and the motivations behind it.

So I think she's a really good example actually of how you can be incredibly successful.

You can contribute so much to the world and not be a perfectionist.

Donald Winnicott was an English pediatrician, and he wrote extensively on parenting in the 1950s.

And his idea of the good enough mother was something that was of a

bombshell i suppose to mothers of the day who who were holding themselves up to really impossible standards that were being placed on them in terms of the way they parent and the way they raise their children and the idea of the good enough mother wasn't simply that perfect mothering or perfect parenting is not possible of course it's not possible but it was also it's not even desirable

for the mother themselves, but also for the child, because the child needs to learn about setback, difficulties, things not going quite to plan.

And they need to know how to handle and deal with the frustrations and disappointments of those moments, because the world is going to present those things to us all the time.

And I think those were the key lessons that Winnicott really wanted to instill in mothers, that the good enough mother can help to raise children

that are well-adjusted and happy and have a zest and purpose for life.

What do you do?

Yeah, so perfectionism indeed involves those really intrusive patterns of thinking.

I must do this.

I have to do that.

Why can't you be this?

Why can't you do that?

And I think the most important thing to do when those feelings are starting to make themselves known to you is to write them down, think about them, reflect on them, and ask yourself, maybe on a scale of 1 to 10, how...

realistic is this how achievable is this and importantly do i actually need to do this right now what if i don't what would happen and again often the consequences when we actually sit down reflect and not as catastrophic as your perfectionism would have you think that they might be

My late grandfather was a master craftsman and I used to watch him for hours as he would fashion everyday things like banisters, chairs, window frames in his workshop and they were immaculate.

From the vantage point of a child they just seemed magical, you know, how on earth were you able to create these wonderful pieces of furniture?

And of course, his meticulousness, his diligence, his conscientiousness, his high standards were unquestionably the traits of somebody who worked really hard and wanted to do things well, but they weren't the traits of a perfectionist.

you know, when I reflected on his way of striving versus mine, it became evident to me really that the big difference was that when he had created the things that he created in his workshop, he just took them to where they were going to live and left them there.

He didn't loiter for validation.

He didn't need that five-star review.

And as far as he was concerned, they just needed to exist way more than he needed to be loved or recognized or appreciated.

And

And that is the thing about high standards, I think.

They really don't have to come with insecurity.

Only perfectionism grafts the two together.

And that's why perfectionism isn't about perfecting things or tasks.

It's about perfecting our imperfect selves and going through life trying to conceal every lash, blemish and shortcoming from those around us.

So whenever I'm back home

I visit the places where my grandfather's carpentry is still installed because all those banisters and stairs and window frames that he brought into the world are really evidence of a man who had a vocation way bigger than himself and of course none of those things bear his name but they're used and enjoyed by hundreds of people every single day and I think just knowing that gave him an incredible sense of pride and accomplishment

And that's a wonderful way to live and one in which I'm hoping in myself that I can also find that.