"My standards are what make me good"

This is the belief that holds the whole habit in place, so I'll take it first. It goes like this. I do good work because I'm a perfectionist. The long evenings are the price of the quality. If I let go of the perfectionism, the quality goes with it.

The belief treats perfectionism as one thing. For about thirty years, researchers have found that it behaves like two.

Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto reviewed this research in 2006. They describe two dimensions that turn up across many different questionnaires. They call the first perfectionistic strivings. This is having very high personal standards and working hard to reach them. They call the second perfectionistic concerns. This is worry about mistakes, doubt about whether what you've done is good enough, fear of other people's criticism, and a constant sense of a gap between what you expected and what you produced.

The two go together often enough that ordinary speech uses one word for both. But they can be pulled apart statistically, and when they are, they point in different directions. Stoeber and Otto found that strivings were associated with positive things, such as conscientiousness, persistence and good results in exams. Concerns were associated with distress. Their conclusion was that striving for perfection is positive in itself, as long as the person isn't overly concerned about mistakes and about being judged badly by others.

Later work fits the same pattern. Andrew Hill and Thomas Curran pooled 43 studies of perfectionism and burnout, with 9,838 participants from work, sport and education. Strivings had small negative links with burnout, or none. Concerns had medium to large positive ones. When the overlap between the two was removed statistically, so that they were looking at strivings with the worry taken out, the protective link got stronger. People with high standards and little dread were the least burnt out of anyone.

I should be straight about the limits. These are correlations, mostly from questionnaires, and a questionnaire can't show what causes what. And not every finding flatters strivings. Karina Limburg and colleagues pooled 284 studies on perfectionism and mental health. Both dimensions were associated with psychological problems. When the researchers looked at what each contributed separately, concerns had the larger effect for most outcomes, and for some the effect of strivings was trivial. Eating disorders were the exception. There, high standards and dread contributed about equally, which is one reason for the caution at the front of this book. So I'm not going to tell you that high standards are harmless under all conditions. The fair summary is that concerns carry most of the cost, and that high standards do best when the dread is low.

Now go back to Tuesday night at the kitchen table and ask which of the two was doing the work. Your high standards operated on Sunday afternoon. They're why the summary was clear, accurate and well organised after two hours. They did their job and then they were finished, because the summary met them.

The four evenings came from somewhere else. Nobody changes "substantial" back to "significant" at twenty to midnight out of love of excellence. You did it because of the sentence someone might misread, the manager who might frown and the colleague who might think you'd been careless. That's the second dimension. It wears the first one's uniform, which is why it's been so hard to argue with.

This matters because it changes what you'd be giving up. You've been defending the polishing as though it were your standards. It isn't. Your standards did two hours of good work and stopped. If the dread were turned down, those two hours would be untouched. What would go is the ten hours after.

So here's the claim the rest of the book rests on, and it's my reading of the research and not a finding in itself. Keep the standards. They're yours, they're useful, and nobody here is asking you to lower them. The target is the fear that has attached itself to them.