If you’re a perfectionist, you must meditate. You won’t get rid of perfectionism otherwise.
Perfectionism is an anxiety disorder. You’re afraid of making mistakes.
The only cure for an anxiety disorder is exposure therapy. That’s when you deliberately expose yourself to the thing you’re afraid of.
However, this is hard to do. When you expose yourself to something you’re afraid of, you’ll want to run and hide. Then, you’ll go your whole life saying, “yeah, yeah, I know I should just suck it up and deal with it.”
So, how do you get to the point where exposure therapy is possible?
You must learn to see the thing you’re afraid of as being only sensory experience.
For example, if you’re afraid to publish a blog post because you’re afraid of criticism, you can learn to see the fear of criticism as merely images and sounds in your head and sensations in your body. Once you see it this way, it’s much easier to be willing to expose yourself to it.
Rejection is hard to deal with. A “story about rejection” is easier to deal with. “Still frames from a movie about rejection” are even easier to deal with.
This is where meditation comes in.
Meditation teaches you how to view your experiences as sensory phenomena. Without meditation, you’ll be too attached to your stories and the exposure therapy won’t work and you’ll be stuck with perfectionism forever.
—Michael
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