That Feeling of "Always-Behind and Never-Enough"—Here's the Antidote | Ellen Hendriksen

**Dan Harris** (0:04)
Hey, hey, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Perfectionism really can be the ultimate head fuck. You know it's driving you crazy, that feeling of always behind and never enough, but you tell yourself you need this relentless self-criticism in order to succeed.
That anything less would be an unacceptable, even dangerous lowering of your standards.
All lies, according to my guest today, Ellen Hendriksen is a clinical psychologist at Boston University Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Her latest book is called How to Be Enough, Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics. She first appeared on this podcast to discuss said book back in 2025, but we're bringing the episode back because it was a staff favorite. I should also add that this was her second appearance on the podcast. She had come on several years earlier to discuss her first book about social anxiety called How to Be Yourself. You can find more from Ellen on Substack. Her newsletter is called How to Be Good to Yourself When You're Hard on Yourself. In this conversation, we talk about the relationship between perfectionism and anxiety, the definition of perfectionism and why the word itself is actually a misnomer, Dr. Hendriksen's own struggles with perfectionism and how they manifested physically quite significantly actually, the difference between adaptive or healthy perfectionism and maladaptive perfectionism, how to change your relationship to your inner critic, how to shift from rigid rules to flexibility, how to keep high standards while making room for mistakes, how to overcome procrastination, navigating social comparison and much more. It's a rich conversation. A few things before we hear from our sponsors, I highly recommend that you head on over to danharris.com to check out my newish meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. Right now, we're in the middle of this really cool series where every Sunday, the legendary dharma teacher Sharon Salzberg is leading a live session where she does some teachings on the Buddha's Eightfold Path. You can think of the Eightfold Path as the Buddha's foundational list. It's his cookbook for leading a happy life. Sharon does some teaching on one aspect of the path. She guides a meditation and then she takes your questions. We're in the middle of it right now, but it's not too late to join. You can sign up at danharris.com and you can watch the first few sessions on video replay and then join the rest of them live. It's really cool. One of the keys, I believe, and this is an evidence-based assertion, one of the keys to starting a habit or maintaining a habit like meditation is doing it with other people. And that's what we're doing over on 10% with Dan Harris. Life is better in the carpool lane. Join the party. We'll get started with Ellen Hendriksen right after this.
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, welcome back to the show.

**Ellen Hendriksen** (2:52)
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be back.

**Dan Harris** (2:54)
Excited to have you back. All right. So tell me how this latest book came about, because the last time you're on the show, we're talking about social anxiety. This book is related but quite distinct, related in some ways to anxiety, but quite distinct from social anxiety.
I suspect this, and I'd love to hear this story if you're comfortable telling it. I suspect this book has its roots in your own struggles with perfectionism.

**Ellen Hendriksen** (3:18)
How did you guess? Yes, I read about my own problems.
Yeah. Well, there are enough people out there, I've realized, with the exact same problems, that it forms an audience and therefore a community. So yeah, for sure. You're absolutely right. Yeah, social anxiety and perfectionism are at the very least siblings, or to change the metaphor, if we drill down on social anxiety, we find a foundation of perfectionism. Because they're both based on the same flawed perception of self, the felt sense of inadequacy that keeps us separated from others. And in both, we have to work, or we think, we have to work hard to avoid fighting ourselves in a situation that would reveal that inadequacy to others. So we need to either hide or avoid or overcompensate. But regardless of whether it's social anxiety and perfectionism, that hiding and concealing and overcompensating backfires because that steals the credit for keeping us safe.
And in both, we think we have to perform as superbly as possible for people to like us. So that's the connection. And then you asked personally about perfectionism. And yeah, for sure. So let me back up and give a definition of perfectionism. I find it highly ironic that perfectionism researchers can't agree on a perfect definition of perfectionism. So the one that I like is that it's demanding of ourselves a level of performance higher than is required for the situation. And I like that because you can look at it two ways. You can look at it as like, that's quite healthy. Please keep doing that. Shoot for the stars. Do more than the bare minimum. You know, research shows that setting goals and striving to achieve them confers all sorts of cool things like mastery and purpose. So like, yeah, please demand of yourself a level of performance higher than what is required for the situation. However, where it tips over into less healthy mindsets and behaviors is when we start to equate our performance with our character. We look to answer that universal, very human question of like, am I okay? Am I good enough? By looking at how well we do things, like looking at our performance.