What If Your Standards Are Too High – For Yourself?
Nothing you do ever feels quite good enough.
At Televero Health, we work with many people who set impossibly high standards for themselves. They strive for excellence in everything they do – from major work projects to how they fold laundry. They see this perfectionism as a virtue, a way to ensure quality and avoid mistakes. But privately, they’re exhausted by their own expectations.
Maybe you know this feeling. Maybe you’re harder on yourself than you would ever be on anyone else. Maybe you dismiss your accomplishments as “just doing what anyone would do” while fixating on your smallest mistakes. Maybe good enough never feels good enough – not for work, not for parenting, not for how you take care of your health or your home.
While high standards can drive achievement, they can also create a punishing inner landscape where nothing you do measures up to the impossible bar you’ve set.
How High Standards Become Harmful
High standards themselves aren’t the problem. Striving for excellence can be positive and motivating. The issue arises when those standards become:
Inflexible. Healthy standards adjust to circumstances – they account for limited time, competing priorities, and human limitations. When standards remain rigid regardless of context (“I must always be productive/organized/prepared”), they set you up for constant feelings of failure.
Unattainable. Some standards simply can’t be met consistently – perfectionism, never making mistakes, always pleasing everyone. When you measure yourself against impossible ideals, you’re guaranteeing disappointment.
Unbalanced. High standards applied selectively can create imbalance in your life. You might allow yourself no margin for error in work but neglect your health. You might hold yourself to perfect parenting standards while having no time for relationships or self-care.
Disconnected from values. Sometimes high standards come from genuine personal values. But often, they’re inherited from family expectations, social pressures, or defensive responses to past experiences – “If I’m perfect, I won’t be criticized/rejected/seen as incompetent.”
Many people develop these standards for understandable reasons. Perhaps you grew up with highly critical parents, and perfectionism became a way to avoid disapproval. Maybe early success led to expectations that you should always excel. Perhaps mistakes or failures had serious consequences in your past, making perfectionism feel like protection.
Whatever their origin, when high standards become extreme, they stop serving you and start constraining you.
The Hidden Costs of Being Your Own Harshest Critic
Holding yourself to impossibly high standards extracts real costs:
Constant stress and anxiety. When your internal bar is set at perfection, you live in a state of ongoing tension – always concerned about meeting expectations, always evaluating your performance, always on high alert for potential failures.
Diminished joy in success. High standards often come with “moving goalposts” – as soon as you reach one standard, you immediately set a higher one. This makes it nearly impossible to feel satisfaction in your achievements. Success becomes not a source of joy but merely a brief relief from potential failure.
Avoidance and procrastination. Ironically, extreme perfectionism often leads to avoidance. When the bar is so high that failure seems inevitable, you might put off tasks, miss opportunities, or abandon projects rather than risk falling short.
Strained relationships. Being hard on yourself frequently spills over into relationships. You might withdraw when you feel you’re not measuring up, become defensive when given feedback, or struggle to be vulnerable because you fear being judged as harshly by others as you judge yourself.
Physical and emotional exhaustion. Living under constant self-imposed pressure depletes your resources. Many perfectionists experience burnout, sleep problems, tension headaches, digestive issues, and other physical manifestations of ongoing stress.
Perhaps most significantly, extreme self-standards rob you of self-compassion – the ability to treat yourself with the same kindness and understanding you would offer a friend. Without this self-compassion, mistakes and setbacks become not just disappointing but evidence of your fundamental inadequacy.
Finding Balance: High Standards Without Self-Punishment
The goal isn’t to abandon standards entirely. It’s to develop standards that challenge and motivate you without crushing you – standards that account for your humanity and limitations.
This shift isn’t about lowering your standards as much as it is about making them more flexible, balanced, and aligned with your deeper values. It’s about distinguishing between striving for excellence (which allows for growth and learning) and demanding perfection (which sets you up for constant feelings of failure).
Here are some signs that your standards might be shifting from harmful to helpful:
- You can prioritize what truly matters instead of trying to excel at everything
- You can adjust your expectations based on circumstances and available resources
- You can appreciate your efforts and accomplishments, not just your results
- You can make mistakes without seeing them as character flaws
- You can take appropriate risks knowing that failure is part of growth
- You can rest without feeling you need to earn it or deserve it
This balance doesn’t develop overnight. After years of holding yourself to impossible standards, developing more flexible expectations takes practice and often requires challenging deeply held beliefs about your worth and what makes you valuable.
A More Compassionate Way Forward
Therapy can provide crucial support in this journey toward more balanced standards. It offers a space to explore where your expectations came from, how they’ve served or limited you, and how they might be adjusted to better support your wellbeing.
This work often involves:
Uncovering the roots of high standards. Understanding why you developed these expectations can help you discern which standards truly align with your values and which are reactions to past experiences or external pressures.
Developing self-compassion. Learning to respond to your struggles and failures with kindness rather than criticism doesn’t mean lowering your standards – research shows it actually supports greater motivation and resilience.
Practicing flexibility. Experimenting with adjusting standards in low-risk situations can build the skill of adapting expectations to circumstances – a crucial ability for sustainable high achievement.
Redefining success. Expanding your definition of success beyond perfect outcomes to include effort, learning, alignment with values, and well-being creates more opportunities for genuine satisfaction.
We’ve worked with many high-achievers who thought their unrelenting standards were the secret to their success, only to discover that more balanced expectations actually improved their performance, creativity, and quality of life.
The accountant who found she made fewer errors when she stopped working in a state of anxious perfectionism. The parent who became more present with their children when they stopped trying to execute every aspect of parenting flawlessly. The student who actually improved their grades when they started allowing themselves breaks instead of demanding constant studying.
You don’t have to choose between high standards and self-compassion. You don’t have to abandon achievement to find peace with yourself. You can pursue excellence without requiring perfection. You can value quality without devaluing yourself when you fall short.
The question isn’t whether to have standards – it’s whether your standards support a life you actually want to live.
Ready to find balance between high standards and self-compassion? Start here.