"Nothing I finish feels finished"

You might expect the polishing to end in satisfaction. Eventually the piece is as good as you can make it, and surely at that moment there's a reward. If you have this habit, you'll know that the reward mostly doesn't turn up. What you feel when you finally send the thing is closer to relief, and within a day you've thought of what you should have changed.

Roz Shafran, Zafra Cooper and Christopher Fairburn wrote an influential analysis of perfectionism as clinicians meet it. Their account explains why satisfaction keeps failing to arrive. They suggest that the core of the problem is that a person's view of their own worth depends too heavily on striving for, and meeting, demanding standards they've set for themselves. Then they describe what happens at each outcome. If the person fails to meet the standard, they criticise themselves. If they do meet it, they don't celebrate. They conclude that the standard can't have been demanding enough, and they raise it.

Their paper is a theory built from clinical experience, not an experiment, and it describes people whose perfectionism is severe enough to need treatment. You may well be some way short of that. But the mechanism is recognisable at ordinary strength. Fall short of the mark and you've failed. Hit it and it turns out to have been too easy, which means it didn't count. The system has two outcomes, and one is failure and the other is a harder test.

You can see it in how you treat praise. Someone tells you the presentation was excellent, and you say, "Oh, the middle section dragged." You got a first in your degree and remember it as the year you nearly didn't. A flawless month at work registers as nothing, because flawless is where the scale starts. Only departures from it get recorded, and there's no way for one to be upwards.

This matters for the argument of the book, because it removes the best defence of polishing. The defence is that the effort is worth it for the pride you'll take in the result. But the pride is what the mechanism withholds. You're paying in evenings for a feeling that the habit itself prevents you from having.

It also tells you something about the wince. The wince presents itself as information about the work. It seems to say that the sentence has a problem and the table is wrong. But a signal that goes off whatever the quality of the work isn't measuring the work. If you winced at the Sunday version and you wince at the Wednesday version, and you'd wince at a version produced by the best writer in the company, then the wince is about you and your fear, and it would fire at anything. A spelling checker that underlined every word would tell you nothing about your spelling. The wince is like that. It marks everything, so its marks can't be read as faults.

That has a practical use. When you're mid-pass and feel the wince, you can ask a plain question. Is there a specific fault here that a reader would notice and that would matter to them? If so, fix it. If you can't name one, the wince has nothing to report, and you're allowed to feel it and send the work anyway.

You can test this on yourself. Find something you finished a year or more ago and were unhappy with when it went out. It could be an old report, a piece of writing or something you made. Look at it again now. Most people find that it's better than they remembered, and that they can't locate the faults that kept them up. The work hasn't changed since then. The fear has worn off, and you're seeing it roughly as other people saw it at the time.

Satisfaction, when it comes to people with this habit, tends to come from a different direction. It comes from seeing the work used. A summary was read and led to a decision, the application got an interview, or a friend wrote back. Those are rewards that exist in the world, and they need the work to have left your hands.