Are You Chasing a Finish Line That Keeps Moving?

I’ll be honest with you. I schedule these live conversations with Jud Brewer MD PhD partly so I can get free therapy. He’s a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Brown University, and I figure if we’re going to have a conversation about perfectionism, I might as well get something out of it too.So here’s my problem. My Substack is ranked number five in health and wellness. I started it about sixteen months ago from nothing. And I still lie awake some nights thinking I should be doing better. I should reach more people. I should write better articles. I could help more. It’s ridiculous when I say it out loud, and I know that, and it doesn’t stop the feeling.Dr. Jud had just published an article called “Perfectionism Is a Calibration Problem”, and I wanted to dig into it with him because I recognized myself in almost every paragraph.The Gambler Who Wasn’t GamblingOne of his patients described his own perfectionism this way. He said he felt like a gambler going deeper into debt, thinking the only thing he could do was gamble more, because stopping wouldn’t solve the debt.He wasn’t talking about money. He was talking about his work.Dr. Jud said he loved that description because it captured something he’d been seeing in patients for decades. The man knew he was never going to win. Perfectionism, for him, wasn’t about reaching a standard. It was about constantly moving the goalposts. He’d get close to whatever he was aiming for, and then he’d raise the bar on himself. Again and again and again.I told Dr. Jud that I do this too. I go back and revise articles I’ve already published. Articles that people have already read and commented on and liked. He looked at me and said, essentially, your articles are fine, Laurie. They’re working. The fact that you’re going back to change them is the loop in action.I know. I have a problem. Hence the free session.The Most Disturbing Love Story Ever ComposedDr. Jud brought up something unexpected during our conversation. He referenced a symphony by Hector Berlioz, the Symphonie Fantastique, which he had written about in his article. He played it in college, and the backstory is wild.Berlioz was a French composer who fell madly in love with an Irish actress named Harriet Smithson. She didn’t speak French. He didn’t speak English. He pursued her relentlessly anyway and wrote an entire symphony to woo her. The whole piece is built around a musical theme called the idée fixe, which translates to “fixed idea.” It represents total obsessive fixation.In the symphony, the main character descends into an opium dream. That theme keeps coming back in every movement, but each time it returns more distorted, more unrecognizable. By the fourth movement, the character has murdered his love interest and marches to the guillotine. You can hear the drumroll, the blade, and then the head bouncing into the basket. The fifth movement is a witch’s sabbath where the beloved dances over his grave.Dr. Jud pointed out that Berlioz likely borrowed the idée fixe concept from French psychiatry at the time. It was a term floating around in medical circles in the 1800s. So a symphony about romantic obsession has its roots in clinical descriptions of how the mind gets stuck.That’s the whole point of pairing these two things, Dr. Jud said. If you get too consumed by anything, it doesn’t end well.If you want to hear it, here’s a full documentary and concert performance. Fair warning, it’s dark, but the music is extraordinary, and understanding the story behind it changes how you hear every movement.An Uncalibrated GaugeSo what do you actually do about it? Dr. Jud didn’t go to the usual place of willpower or discipline. He went to measurement.He compared perfectionism to a blood glucose monitor that isn’t calibrated. If the device keeps shifting its readings, you’ll never get a number you can trust. That’s what happens when we rely on our own internal sense of “good enough” as the only standard. We keep changing what good enough means. On a bad day, nothing passes. On a good day, we might let something through, but we’ll second-guess it within the hour.His suggestion was to get external reference points. For his patient, that meant working with a coach. For me, it’s been reader feedback.I learned this the hard way. Early on, I used some attention-grabbing titles, the kind marketing courses teach you to write. One of my readers told me that a headline I’d written caused her so much anxiety that she didn’t even open the article. She said she loved my work but that title made her feel afraid.I could have taken that personally. For a second, I did. My heart rate went up. I felt defensive. But then I sat with it and thought about where she was coming from. And she was right. That wasn’t the kind of writer I wanted to be. So I changed how I write titles. That one piece of feedback has shaped hundreds of articles since.When Are You Spending Too Much Time?I asked Dr. Jud if there’s a way to tell when you’ve crossed from healthy effort into the perfectionism zone. He said to pay attention to two things.First, look at whether the time you’re investing is producing any real change. When you’re swapping individual words in an article, and none of those swaps would make any difference to a reader, you’ve passed the point of useful revision. You’re spending more and more time for less and less return.Second, ask yourself if you’re taking feedback personally. When we take things personally, Dr. Jud said, we close down. We get defensive. We can’t learn anything in that state. He connected this to Carol Dweck’s work on mindset. When we’re contracted and defensive, whether from internal self-judgment or from someone else’s comment, we’re in a fixed mindset. Learning requires the opposite. It requires being open enough to wonder what you might not know yet.I had a great example of this from my own Substack. One of my very first articles that went viral, the one about habits of people who age well, got two negative comments out of hundreds of positive ones. Two people felt offended by it. I could have fired back. I could have pointed out that hundreds of other people loved it and these two were outliers. Instead, I responded with questions. I asked, gently, what about the piece had landed that way for them. Their second responses softened. It turned into a real conversation. We both grew from it.Dr. Jud called that a growth mindset in action. Curiosity instead of defensiveness. You can feel the difference in your body when you shift from one to the other.The Valley of DisappointmentI see a version of perfectionism in my clinic all the time, though it doesn’t always look like perfectionism. It looks like impatience.Patients with blood sugar challenges come in motivated. They change their diet, they start exercising, and they expect their numbers to transform right away. When the labs don’t budge after a week or two, they get discouraged. I call this the valley of disappointment, and it swallows a lot of people.What I try to explain is that a hemoglobin A1C reflects your blood sugar trend over three months. Not three days. Your cells are already responding to the changes you’ve made. Your metabolism is already shifting. But those changes take time to show up in lab results, and we live in a world that has trained us to expect instant feedback on everything.That’s perfectionism applied to your body. You’ve decided what the timeline should be, and when your biology doesn’t cooperate, you assume the effort was wasted. But the effort is working. Your body just hasn’t had time to show you yet.My early Substack articles were not as good as the ones I write now. They weren’t. And the only reason the newer ones are better is that I kept hitting publish on the ones that were good enough. If I’d waited until I thought something was perfect, I would have published nothing.Fear Is the Cheapest Room in the HouseWe spent a good chunk of our conversation talking about fear as a motivator, because this comes up constantly in my practice. In primary care, we’re short on time. So we go to the thing that feels logical. Your blood pressure is high. Your labs are getting worse. You need to make changes or you’re shortening your life.I had a patient not long ago who was diagnosed with diabetes. The diagnosis scared her, and she did well for about six months. Then something stressful happened in her family and she went back to her old habits. After that, the worsening lab numbers didn’t faze her at all. She’d become immune to the fear. What finally got through to her was when she physically couldn’t do the things she wanted to do. That had nothing to do with a number on a lab report. It was about her actual life.Dr. Jud mentioned a colleague at Yale who studied tobacco packaging. All those graphic images of diseased lungs that Congress required on cigarette packs? His research showed they didn’t actually change behavior. You can scare someone into paying attention for a moment, but the effect wears off fast. Then you need a bigger scare, and a bigger one after that, and eventually there’s nowhere left to go.He quoted a 14th-century poet named Hafiz. Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I want to see you in better quarters.That line has stuck with me. I made a decision early on not to use fear or rage bait to grow this newsletter. Every marketing course I’ve taken says that’s the fastest path. Common enemy, polarizing takes, urgency that borders on panic. I refuse to do it. Growth has been slower. But my readers are here because something about this work feels right to them, not because they’re running from something.You can apply the same idea to parenting, by the way. You can scare your kids into compliance for about ten seconds. After that, you’ve just damaged the relationship.What You Get From Letting GoDr. Jud’s final point was the most practical one. He said the way out of these loops, whether it’s perfectionism or the fear trap, is to actually pay attention to how it feels when you do things differently. Not in some forced positive-thinking way. Through actual lived experience.What does it feel like to hit publish and move on to the next thing instead of agonizing for another hour? What does it feel like when someone gives you tough feedback and you get curious about it instead of defensive?It feels better. Your brain can learn from that, the same way it learned the old pattern.And if you catch yourself beating yourself up for being a perfectionist? Dr. Jud laughed at that one. That’s just another loop, he said. Same approach. Notice it. Ask yourself what you’re getting from it. See if kindness works better than the beating.I’ll add my own practical note. I’ve learned that I’m more vulnerable to my inner critic when I’m tired or hungry or trying to work late at night. So I write first thing in the morning, after my walk, when I’m rested and fed. I exercise early because I know I won’t do it later, and I know that skipping it gives the critic more to work with. That’s not some grand strategy. It’s just knowing myself well enough to stay out of my own way.You’re worth that kind of honesty with yourself. And your good enough is probably a lot better than you think.To read Dr. Jud Brewer’s full article, visit “Perfectionism Is a Calibration Problem” on his Substack, Inside the Curious Mind. Get full access to The Habit Healers at drlauriemarbas.substack.com/subscribe