Thomas Curran

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.