Healthy striving – a flexible wish to improve – accepts limits and understands that error is integral to mastery The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work New year’s resolutions are catnip for perfectionism. Each January we are invited to reinvent ourselves as fitter, more productive, more virtuous, with the rollover of the calendar offering us a clean slate and a chance to correct our flaws. While reasonable goals for modest self-improvement can be healthy, when these resolutions are perfectionistic, they become all-or-nothing tests of our self-worth. Make a mistake, miss a day at the gym, and the whole project collapses in a spiral of self-reproach. But the problem is not your willpower – it is perfectionism itself. Continue reading...