Understanding Atelophobia: Unraveling the Fear of Imperfection

Perfection Paralysis: How Atelophobia Impacts Daily Life

Afshara
2 min readAug 5, 2023
Photo by Yan Krukau from Pexels

Everybody has moments of helplessness. This feeling is unusual and temporary for most of the people. Yet, some individuals struggle to enjoy their lives because of an overwhelming fear of imperfections. This is known as Atelophobia.

Atelophobia displays certain following traits:

i) Setting unreachable objectives for oneself:

You could hold yourself to unreasonably high expectations. Anything less than your perfect standard may feel undesirable to you.

ii) Self-criticism:

You could be too hard on yourself and criticize yourself for failing to achieve your goals.

iii) Sensitive toward criticism:

You might not be able to take even the smallest amount of criticism well. Even any helpful feedback that emphasizes that you are not perfect might seem like an attack on you.

iv) Feeling anxiety and stress:

You could experience anxiety or stress when you come across or merely consider any situation where you might not be at your best. Also, you…

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Afshara

Ph.D. (Management)| Educator | Content Writer | Writing about things that intrigue my curious mind | https://beacons.ai/afshara17