Perfectionist Self-Care: Being Present

By Gabbi Figueroa

I invite you to take a deep breath with me. I hereby give you arbitrary permission to take a few minutes as you read this blog to relax your body and take time to be present with me. Specifically, we are going to ponder what it means to be present as a recovering perfectionist.

Although the idea of being mentally present and being a perfectionist may not feel mutually exclusive, something clicked last week as I was exhaustively searching for another YouTube video to fill the silence before falling asleep. I realized how much time I was wasting carving out major portions of my day to connect with people on YouTube who will never know who I am. More importantly, I was not taking time to be present with how I was feeling, what I needed, or even what I wanted to do for fun. I was allowing reruns of my favorite videos to distract me from thoughts and emotions that felt too big and heavy to ponder.

Decreasing the time I spend engaging with mind-numbing videos, and increasing the time I spend with my own thoughts was my next venture in this perfectionist self-care series. In an attempt to feel more present throughout daily life, and hopefully create more opportunities to engage with my hobbies, I deleted YouTube off of my phone two weeks ago to my journey without my main coping mechanism. Additionally, I did this in an attempt to share how this personal experiment has impacted my recovery from perfectionism.

What does it mean to be present in my own mind with my own unique thoughts? As a recovering perfectionist, the longer I sit present in my mind the more amplified my inner critic and anxious worries become. Having just deleted YouTube only 2 weeks ago, I am already struggling to focus on being present as I move throughout my day. There are many triggers of social anxiety and worries about how others will perceive me. This forced me to learn how to cope without the dopamine hit of a funny video. I needed to sit with the physical discomfort until I could calm my mind and body back to homeostasis.

Despite having read multiple articles detailing the importance of moving through emotions and not pushing them down, to my surprise, I was actually getting better at sitting with my anxiety every day. My perfectionism often holds me back from doing things I want to do. My inner critic wants to maintain my internal “perfect” reputation and avoid the physical and emotional discomfort that comes from feeling the self-critical thoughts and the increased heart rate. However, by sitting with my emotions and being present while working through them I was able to feel anxious, see what was causing the anxiety, and then do the scary thing anyway. I believe this is because I had the presence of mind to consciously choose what I wanted to do. For so long I have allowed my anxiety to guide my decisions driven by my perfectionist fear of failure. By trusting my mind to consciously feel the emotions without the numbing of social media, I can sense my agency and self-confidence growing. Further, I can sense my perfectionism fears losing credibility with every task I accomplish without

Now, I set out on this perfectionist self-care experiment of deleting YouTube to show the succinct benefits being present with my thoughts has reaped and describe how my productivity has increased exponentially. These were not my results, but I can still say that being present with my mind and sitting with my emotions has helped me to grow and heal as I more fully encounter myself each day. Even though my personal experiment did not go as planned, I believe being vulnerable about my struggles with anxiety and perfectionism can shed a more realistic light on the difficult aspects that come from recovering from perfectionism while moving through graduate school

By sharing the tangible steps, I am discovering and attempting along the way, I hope to help others who might want to foster an inner cheerleader in place of an inner-critic. The fact that my experiment did not go perfectly almost kept me from writing this post, which is exactly why you are reading it right now. The main takeaway I hope you remember from my small experiment is the importance of being completely present to remember the joys and the struggles in every uncomfortable and beautiful way.