A common question often comes up for perfectionists. As they start to recognize and own up to the limitations of perfectionism, it becomes less clear what the alternatives are to live more fully, with less contempt and hostility towards themselves and others. Indeed, by the time someone shows up for therapy, they have most likely received plenty of advice (think: “cheer up!”). In the self-help genre – from ancient Greek and Roman stoic philosophy to today’s wellness TikTok reels – there has been no shortage of tips, hacks, top ten lists, epic stories on how to live your life.
Understanding why these pieces of advice do not stick is grist for the mill, as psychotherapists may invite this question with kindness and curiosity (Yalom, 2002). Maybe the problem with advice is less about what they tell us to do – its content, so to speak. Rather, there is something about the process of someone telling us how to live and what to do that seems problematic. Three recent books, however, offer nuanced takes on releasing us from the stifling compulsion to be perfect. Rather than pitching reassuring single-root-cause theories (we will be ok because all our problems are caused by X), these writers appreciate complexity and process: genuine growth is non-linear, messy, painful, and unpredictable.
The In-betweens of Growing Up, and Down
“Do I feel like an adult?” This personal question can be situational (when a crisis arises) and yet enduring. Perfectionists often feel deeply inadequate in their guts and bones, despite reaching conventional milestones of adulthood (e.g., a successful career, marriage, parenthood, home ownership, etc.). They wonder why they do not feel like a real grown-up and find themselves performing like an imposter, still trying to fake it ’til they make it.
Moya Sarner, a psychodynamic psychotherapist and freelance journalist in the U.K. (she recently concluded her regular column “How to Build a Better Life” for The Guardian newspaper in December 2025), attempts to search for a real, deeper meaning of adulthood in When I Grow Up: Conversations with Adults in Search for Adulthood (2022). The work of coming with answers involved talking to “ordinary” people (mostly in the U.K.; across diverse identities; aging from 18 to 90) about their lived experiences, and importantly, what Sarner calls their moments of grow-up – challenges that require psychological leaps that are never quite done once and for all. These conversations are often touching, poignant, and multi-layered, instead of being clichéd or idealized. Sarner also interviewed experts in the fields ranging from anthropology, evolutionary biology, history of adulthood, developmental psychology, social psychology, neuroscience, sociology, psychoanalysis, and even zoology. Broad trends in Western societies suggest younger generations are taking longer to grow up by conventional markers (e.g., when to leave home). Perhaps validating our insecurities about adulthood, we find often these experts themselves, despite their knowledge of the subject, admit that they, too, do not feel like grown-ups, at least not always.
At the time of writing her book, Sarner was also in the midst of training to become a psychotherapist and undergoing psychoanalysis. Married and in her thirties, Sarner shares her own struggles to find her own voice and desire. She found that ticking the checklist approach to adulthood, attaining certain markers like marriage and home ownership, felt superficial and performative. Her hope was that by writing this book, she might find a way to grow up and be a real grown-up in the process. Consider the important question of whether to have children: do I feel adult enough to have kids? Or does the process of becoming a parent somehow transform me into a real adult? There is suspense built into her own story, wandering and meandering at times, of whether she truly wants to become a mother or does it involve putting faith in a fantasy of living “happily-ever-after.” Sarner spoke with women who have chosen different paths about motherhood, each involving a sense of loss, of letting go of a part of themselves. Without spoiling the book’s ending, it is illuminating to see how Sarner’s own hope itself gets transformed in the process (a kind of growing up).
The chapters of the book proceed along the chronological stages of adulthood. Along this journey, we learn about liminal spaces such as the “emerging adulthood” (between adolescence and adulthood), “young-old” (between midlife and “old-old”), and “wildhood” (the period between adolescence and adulthood in non-human mammals). Evolutionary biologists, for instance, have observed that young animals (e.g., penguins) often return home to receive more extended parental care if they need to strengthen their skills to survive on their own. The struggle to cross the boundary between adolescence and adulthood growing up is not unique to human beings – across species, there is a universal coming and going across between these spaces of growth.
Sarner connects the lived experiences of her interviewees with psychodynamic ideas, some that are less well known in popular culture: Melanie Klein’s notion of positions and Wilfred Bion’s reverie. Klein’s innovation is that we never quite grow in a linear fashion, whereby we leave behind one stage once and for all, as if we are an adult, we are no longer a child. Instead, we move between them to keep us sane: sometimes we need to feel safe by splitting everything or everyone into good or bad categories (paranoid-schizoid position). At other times, we experience our desire (and guilt) to repair, accept, and tolerate ourselves and others as both good and bad simultaneously (Klein’s depressive position, which involves pain and mourning). Extending this idea of positions, we learn that feeling like a grown-up involves experiencing childhood and adulthood as different states rather than developmental stages, horizontal rather than hierarchical. Growing up also means the ability to grow down, to access the aliveness of childlike play and exploration, to connect with those who are experiencing their own struggles to grow up.
Bion’s reverie describes the loving conversation between a parent and their baby, which often does not involve using words. This formative experience creates a sense of being held for the child, as the parent attempts to organize and metabolize the child’s overwhelming experience: receiving openly their chaos of sensations, terror, and helplessness. This responsiveness contains us in a state of uncertainty: a state of mind in trying to make sense of our experience, making it more digestible so that we get closer to its truth, with attentive exploring through trial and error. If growing up involves the ability to “look after yourself,” an insight shared by one of the interviewees, Sarner reasons it means that we have internalized this capacity for reverie to contain ourselves as we bear suffering and pain, to make peace with ourselves, rather than avoid them. Getting to the truth of our own experience, the hidden parts of ourselves, becomes more conducive to growth than the perfectionist solution of running away from our true selves.
Systematic Curiosity
Perfectionists may find the subtitle of neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD’s book appealing, if only also a bit forbidden: how to live freely in a goal obsessed world. Sounds too good to be true: we can be free and we don’t have to obsess about goals? In Tiny Experiments (2025), Le Cunff begins with a compelling moment of existential awakening (I imagine Sarner might call this a “grow-up” moment).
At age twenty-seven, Le Cunff had seemingly enjoyed a successful, clearly mapped out career at Google working in their global digital health team. One day, she discovered her arm had turned mysteriously purple and it turned out to be a blood clot that would require surgery. Yet, Le Cunff prioritized her work project at the time and decided to postpone the operation. As she later recovered from treatment, she found herself changed from the experience: something did not feel right, mechanical and deadening, about going through the motions of climbing up the ladder at Google. Eventually, she resigned and took on another ambitious goal with her own healthcare start-up, which was successful, kept her busy, until it folded. Only after a period of feeling lost and free from another ambitious goal did she discover her own desire to become a neuroscientist. She credits this discovery to an old friend and ally: curiosity.
Ambition, Le Cunff observes, has become a dirty word today. A conventional understanding tells us it is about climbing a ladder step by step to reach goals (e.g., career success). Le Cunff attempts to redeem another aspect of ambition: the innate human desire for growth, a desire that is both universal and highly personal. A similar theme runs through her book and Sarner’s appreciation of what real growing up means: somehow along the way, the process of setting goals and following a linear path feels broken, superficial, performative. Linear goals often lead to fear, toxic productivity, competition, and isolation.
Le Cunff critiques the self-help literature of “finding your purpose” and “follow your passion” as too simplistic, limiting, and repeating the false hope of linear safety. She notes that in the start-up world, founders like to promote their self-starting success narrative, while neglecting complicating factors such as luck and foreclosing other unexplored paths to discover the unknown. She describes these just-so stories as the “tyranny of purpose” (more on this recurring idea of an occupying, punishing internal tyrant to describe a part of our minds).
The core insight in the book involves three mindset shifts based on the dimensions of ambition and curiosity. When we find ourselves in the liminal spaces (an in-between period of uncertainty), Le Cunff describes three types of reactions of abandoning ambition and curiosity: cynicism (e.g., doomscrolling), with low ambition and low curiosity; escapism (e.g., binge watching), with low ambition and high curiosity; perfectionism (e.g., toxic productivity), with high ambition and low curiosity. Each experience offers us a sense of temporary control while stunting our growth. For Le Cunff, the possibility of genuine growth involves both high ambition and high curiosity: an experimental mindset.
How does this take place? Le Cunff offers practical protocols for mindful observations of our day-to-day patterns: becoming an anthropologist of ourselves, by doing the fieldwork of tracking our own behavior. When do we notice the moments of insight, the shift in our energy, the change in our mood, and new social encounters? After noticing these patterns, we stay curious about them (e.g., I enjoy writing this blog post), formulate a question (e.g., how can I write more?) and form a hypothesis (e.g., writing blog posts regularly might give me more joy). The concept of tiny experiments (the emphasis is on iterative and tiny) involves turning our hypothesis into a pact: an actionable commitment we will fulfill for a set period of time. For example, I will write 250 words daily for 10 days. Note that the process is realistically tiny, repeatable, and yet provides enough data after 10 days to assess my hypothesis about joy. Le Cunff cautions against focusing on outcomes instead of simply the output of this commitment. The point is not to fixate so much on getting to a successful outcome (that would be a perfectionistic goal setting). Instead, it is about trusting the process of experimenting – we might learn that it might not bring us joy, but that too, is a part of our growth.
Without giving too much away, the chapters on procrastination and embracing mindful imperfections maybe particularly illuminating for perfectionists. For instance, rather than describing procrastination as an enemy (e.g., it is a moral failure or a lack of willpower), we might be better off to treat it as an ally and listen to what it is trying to tell us (perhaps this listening is similar to our internal reverie). Rather than insisting on achieving perfectionistic standards in everything we do, learn to grow by accepting our own limitations and deciding with intention where we might have to drop the ball in parts of our life and work.
In many ways, Tiny Experiments shares a kindred sensibility with how psychoanalyst Karen Horney described genuine human growth more than 75 years ago: beware of obeying in advance to the tyranny of the shoulds, with its search for conventional glory and sado-masochistic repetition of self-hate (e.g., from the point of view of my ideal perfect self, I will have always failed and submitted to humiliation; Horney, 1950). Answering why we suffer repeatedly is unique and personal: maybe repeating the drama of cruelty to ourselves at least offers a more predictable life (Phillips, 2002). Discovering our genuine desire does not happen instantaneously or easily, mythical eureka moments of insight notwithstanding. Similar to the sustained inner work in a therapeutic relationship, tiny experimenting with curiosity offers perfectionists a promising iterative process towards living freely, truly, and unpredictably.
Befriending Sleep
Given that we spend almost a third of our lives in a state of sleep as human beings, it is somewhat surprising that we either neglect it or try to turn it into another type of work with maximized efficiency. Perhaps sleep psychologist Jade Wu, PhD was onto something when she encouraged us to shift our mindset about sleep in her book Hello Sleep (2023) – please don’t treat sleep like an engineering problem that we can control. It is not a worker bee, servant, or worse, enemy.
Similar to Sarner and Le Cunff, Wu shares her experience of discovering her own passion to treat chronic insomnia. She notes that she has a short attention span with a strong sense of empathy, and the therapy that she finds gratifying is one that works within a short period of time. The book serves as more than a step-by-step guide with practical and clinical insights drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-i), mindfulness and acceptance-based practice, chronotherapy, and behavioral activation. What sets it apart from other books on sleep is this relational focus with sleep: how we do treat our friends and what if we try to relate to sleep as a friend instead of someone to serve us.
The themes of power and control are just below the surface when we pay attention to how we relate to our own sleep. We might ask what kind of relationship is a genuine friendship? Is it hierarchical (i.e., one person’s needs dominate), transactional (i.e., each person gives something in return), or mutual (i.e., connection and discovery of each other)? (Shedler, 2025). We learn about the problem of sleep effort: how sleep is an involuntary process that takes place without our effort. By learning to listen to our friend, to be more accepting (holding both the good and bad of sleep), we learn to get ourselves out of the way of this process, which we can learn as skills to let sleep happen.
Reading alongside the reflections from Sarner about listening to ourselves to allow ourselves to grow up and Le Cunff about systematic curiosity to discover our true voice, Wu’s book is similarly thought-provoking and creates a helpful shift in our mindset. For instance, those who suffer from chronic insomnia tend to underestimate how much sleep they have experienced. By using the sleep diary approach, we learn to be curious and more attuned to own sleep and our body (perhaps a process that parallels Le Cunff’s systematic curiosity) – what can be more intimate than how we relate to ourselves? A similar grow-up lesson: the closer we are to reality, the freer we become.
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (2002) once asked whether the aim of treatment is for our clients to become kinder (less cruel) or more unpredictable. Clinical experience might sensibly suggest where we fall on the balance is unique and personal. The thoughtful works by Sarner, Le Cunff, and Wu point to the inextricable bond between kindness and curiosity as conducive to discovering our own voice, desire, and growth.
Self-Reflection
- How do you understand adulthood? When do you feel like a real grown-up and when do you not? How concerned are you about reaching milestones of adulthood?
- What are you curious about your own personal growth so far? What have you noticed about your own reactions to uncertainty: where do you find yourself on cynicism, escapism, and perfectionism?
- What tiny experiments can you run to discover fulfilling experiences for yourself?
- What is your relationship like with your body and sleep?
