I’m about to say something that’s going to make my fellow perfectionists set their lattes down very carefully.

Lowering your standards is sometimes the smartest emotional move you can make.

Still with me? Good. Sit down, I’m buying.

First, a confession…

We wear our high standards like a badge. The detail. The polish. The nobody-does-it-like-me.

And we call it excellence.

And guess what?  Somebody actually measured this. Curran and Hill conducted a meta-analysis of 41,641 college students over three decades and found that perfectionism has climbed steadily since the late 1980s. The dimension that spiked hardest (up 33%)  was socially prescribed perfectionism. That’s the flavor where you’re convinced everyone around you is holding you to an impossible bar.

Not “I want to be great.”

More like: “If I’m not great, I’m not safe.”

That’s not excellence. That’s social media standards running amok.

What your brain is actually doing.

Here’s the study that rearranged my thinking on this.

We assume the bar is what makes us feel better. Hit the standard, feel calm. Miss it, feel terrible. Simple.

But researchers at UCL went looking for where stress actually comes from, and the answer wasn’t pain. They had 45 people flip virtual rocks in a computer game. Some rocks had snakes underneath. A snake meant a mild electric shock. Cortisol, sweat, pupil dilation – all measured.

Guess when stress peaked.

Not at a 100% chance of being shocked. At 50%.

Knowing something bad was coming was less stressful than not knowing. Stress tracked uncertainty, not pain.

Read that one more time, because it explains your entire personality.

Your brain isn’t chasing excellence. It’s chasing predictability. Sky-high standards feel like a lever you can pull on a world that refuses to hold still. If I control the details, I control the outcome. If I control the outcome, I’m safe.

The problem is the lever isn’t attached to anything.

And now the invoice.

Hill and Curran conducted a second meta-analysis of 43 studies involving nearly 10,000 people on perfectionism and burnout.

Striving for high standards, on its own? Largely fine. Sometimes even protective.

But perfectionistic concerns, the dread of falling short, the fear of being judged for it, showed a medium-to-large relationship with burnout. And here’s the line that should get your attention if you’re reading this between two Zoom meetings: the effect was worse in the work domain than in sport or school.

Work is where this costs the most. Of course it is. Work is where the bar never moves, and the audience never leaves.

Okay. Now the part nobody wants to discuss over coffee.

We don’t only do this to our spreadsheets. We do it to people. Especially our life partners.

Northwestern’s Eli Finkel gave this a name, and it’s the most accurate thing I’ve read in years: the suffocation model. His argument is that over the last century we stopped asking marriage for food, shelter, and physical safety and started asking it for self-esteem, personal growth, and self-actualization.

He calls it climbing Mount Maslow. You’re going higher than any generation before you. On dramatically less oxygen. Less time, less margin, less village.

So we hand one human being the job description: best friend, therapist, cheerleader, adventure partner, career strategist, and the person who understands every unspoken part of us without being told.

That’s not a partnership. That’s pressure.

And do you know what we call it in my line of work when a single node carries every critical function with no redundancy?

A single point of failure.

We would never design a team this way. We’d flag it in the risk assessment. We’d escalate it to the executive committee. We’d build a succession plan by Friday.

Then we go home and run the most important relationship of our lives on exactly that architecture and feel quietly devastated when it buckles.

The fix is embarrassingly good news.

Cheung, Gardner, and Anderson studied what they called emotionships – the specific people we turn to for particular emotions. The sister who can make you laugh when you’re gutted. The friend who talks you down from anxiety. The mentor who knows what to do with your anger.

They compared people with specialized networks (different people, different needs) against people with generalized ones (one or two people carrying everything).

The specialized group had greater well-being.

Not more relationships. Better distributed ones.

And here’s my favorite part: Finkel, the man who diagnosed the suffocation, prescribes exactly this. Ask your personal partnership to shoulder less. Build the portfolio.

So lowering that one impossible standard isn’t settling. It’s load balancing. It’s letting the people you love off a hook they were never built to hang on.

The actual invitation.

Don’t lower every standard. Please don’t. Keep the ones that produce work you’re proud to sign.

Lower the ones that are secretly uncertainty management. You’ll know them by feel: the standard you can never quite satisfy. The one that produces relief instead of pride when you finally meet it. The one you’d be a little embarrassed to say out loud.

Then sit with the question I’ve been sitting with:

Where in my life have I handed one person an impossible job?

Sometimes it’s your partner.

Sometimes it’s your number two at work – the one who quietly became your strategist, your therapist, your culture committee, and your calendar.

And sometimes, if we’re being honest at this coffee, it’s yourself.

That’s not weakness. That’s an ecosystem redesign.

If you are interested in expanding your ecosystem, DM me, and we will talk,

Cristina “Load Balancing” Filippo