Perimenopause and Perfectionism: Why This Is the Time to Let Some Things Go
Perfectionism and perimenopause make a difficult combination. Learn how to ease the pressure and protect your energy during this demanding transition.
How Perimenopause Confronts the Perfectionist
If you have built your life around getting things right, perimenopause can feel like a sustained attack on everything you have relied on. Brain fog makes precision harder. Fatigue makes thoroughness more costly. Emotional volatility makes the controlled, composed image you have cultivated more difficult to maintain. For women with perfectionistic tendencies, the loss of reliable cognitive sharpness and emotional steadiness can be profoundly destabilising, not just frustrating, but threatening to their sense of identity.
Where Perfectionism Comes From
Perfectionism is rarely just about standards. It is usually about safety. Doing things perfectly is a way of avoiding criticism, earning approval, and maintaining a sense of control. Many women who identify as perfectionists learned early that their worth was conditional on their performance. Perimenopause, by making flawless performance harder to sustain, surfaces that old conditional equation. The work is not to perform better despite symptoms. It is to begin separating your worth from your output.
The Energy Cost You Cannot Afford
Perfectionism is expensive in normal circumstances. It takes more time, more mental energy, and more emotional investment to do everything perfectly than to do most things well. During perimenopause, when energy and cognitive bandwidth are genuinely reduced, that cost becomes unsustainable. Women who insist on maintaining perfectionistic standards through this transition often find themselves in a cycle of exhaustion, failure, shame, and redoubled effort that further depletes them. Something has to give. The healthier choice is to decide consciously what that is.
Good Enough Is a Real Standard
Accepting 'good enough' in lower-priority areas is not the same as doing poor work. It is a sensible allocation of limited resources. Ask yourself which tasks genuinely require your highest standard and which simply feel that way because of habit or anxiety. Most people around you cannot tell the difference between ninety percent and one hundred percent effort. You can. The question is whether that distinction is worth the extra cost to your health and wellbeing right now.
Redirecting the Perfectionistic Drive
Rather than trying to eliminate the drive toward excellence, some women find it more sustainable to redirect it. Channel high standards toward things that genuinely matter to you, a specific project, a relationship, a health goal. Let everything else be good enough. This is not defeat. It is intelligent prioritisation during a demanding season. The things that get your full effort will benefit from it. The things that do not will probably still be fine.
Building a Different Relationship With Mistakes
Perimenopause will produce mistakes. You will forget things, say things badly, misjudge situations, and occasionally fall short of your own standards. How you relate to those moments determines a great deal about how the whole transition feels. Women who can acknowledge a mistake, correct what needs correcting, and move on without extended self-punishment tend to navigate perimenopause with considerably less suffering. This is a learnable skill, and the years of midlife are a reasonable time to start practising it.
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