How can You Recover from Perfectionism?

In the academia, you feel a lot of pressure to perform best that you start feeling stuck in the perfectionism. When you start writing your thesis to get feedback from your supervisor, you will find yourself tweaking sentences to make them sound right. 

When you send in your chapters to have them reviewed by your supervisor, you will see lots of comments and suggestions for changes. This can be overwhelming and threatening, although they are entirely right, and you start thinking that whatever you write can never be good enough. However, if you change your perspective that done is better than perfect, you can recuperate from perfectionism. 

Perfection does not exist on this planet. There is no such thing that you will use to write your thesis. Everyone has a different approach to produce results, and you should analyse your productive approach. You should discover what works for you and stick to it. Here are some steps that can help you with getting over perfectionism. 

Clarify questions you need to answer 

Don’t make a meal out of small details as chances are those details will not be worth to consider for your supervisor. To get your work done, you should have a clear idea of what questions your thesis want to answer. Your thesis id right as long as it contributes to your central argument. 

Put a sense of contribution

You will discover the need for improvement every time you revise your thesis. Bear in mind that your goal is not creating a perfect thesis. Your goal is to make a unique contribution. Instead of mulling over what you should consider to make a perfect thesis, you should ponder that what you need to add in your thesis to make a significant contribution to your research. Don’t let word choice, table formatting and other minor details keep you from reaching your goal as you can do it all at the time of revision. Each revision will demand improvements, but corrections will let up over time. 

Create a peripheral vision

Tunnel vision can lead to never-ending anxiety and perfectionism. However, this occurs when you spend too much time on your thesis writing. To maintain a peripheral vision for your thesis, you should follow a structured writing schedule consistently. Take short breaks if you are taking long hours for writing. Your full day should include various activities including writing to avoid monotony. 

Perfectionism is good to some extent; but over emphasizing it can be harmful and damaging to your research work. 

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