#149 – Tim LeBon on how altruistic perfectionism is self-defeating

Being a good and successful person is core to your identity. You place great importance on meeting the high moral, professional, or academic standards you set yourself.

But inevitably, something goes wrong and you fail to meet that high bar. Now you feel terrible about yourself, and worry others are judging you for your failure. Feeling low and reflecting constantly on whether you're doing as much as you think you should makes it hard to focus and get things done. So now you're performing below a normal level, making you feel even more ashamed of yourself. Rinse and repeat.

This is the disastrous cycle today's guest, Tim LeBon — registered psychotherapist, accredited CBT therapist, life coach, and author of 365 Ways to Be More Stoic — has observed in many clients with a perfectionist mindset.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

Tim has provided therapy to a number of 80,000 Hours readers — people who have found that the very high expectations they had set for themselves were holding them back. Because of our focus on “doing the most good you can,” Tim thinks 80,000 Hours both attracts people with this style of thinking and then exacerbates it.

But Tim, having studied and written on moral philosophy, is sympathetic to the idea of helping others as much as possible, and is excited to help clients pursue that — sustainably — if it's their goal.

Tim has treated hundreds of clients with all sorts of mental health challenges. But in today's conversation, he shares the lessons he has learned working with people who take helping others so seriously that it has become burdensome and self-defeating — in particular, how clients can approach this challenge using the treatment he's most enthusiastic about: cognitive behavioural therapy.

Untreated, perfectionism might not cause problems for many years — it might even seem positive providing a source of motivation to work hard. But it's hard to feel truly happy and secure, and free to take risks, when we’re just one failure away from our self-worth falling through the floor. And if someone slips into the positive feedback loop of shame described above, the end result can be depression and anxiety that's hard to shake.

But there's hope. Tim has seen clients make real progress on their perfectionism by using CBT techniques like exposure therapy. By doing things like experimenting with more flexible standards — for example, sending early drafts to your colleagues, even if it terrifies you — you can learn that things will be okay, even when you're not perfect.

In today's extensive conversation, Tim and Rob cover:

• How perfectionism is different from the pursuit of excellence, scrupulosity, or an OCD personality
• What leads people to adopt a perfectionist mindset
• How 80,000 Hours contributes to perfectionism among some readers and listeners, and what it might change about its advice to address this
• What happens in a session of cognitive behavioural therapy for someone struggling with perfectionism, and what factors are key to making progress
• Experiments to test whether one's core beliefs (‘I need to be perfect to be valued’) are true
• Using exposure therapy to treat phobias
• How low-self esteem and imposter syndrome are related to perfectionism
• Stoicism as an approach to life, and why Tim is enthusiastic about it
• What the Stoics do better than utilitarian philosophers and vice versa
• And how to decide which are the best virtues to live by

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Simon Monsour and Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore