How Do I Know If I'm Giving Myself Grace or Copping Out?

Aug 15

Written by: Janine Cheng

Published on July 15, 2026

What the research on perfectionism, self-compassion, and capacity has to say about the question high achievers keep asking

Some version of this conversation happens in my office most weeks. A client describes a week in which they did not do the thing they said they would do. They went to bed instead of finishing the deck. They skipped the workout. They let the email sit. And then the question that so many perfectionists ask themselves makes its way into the room: Was I being kind to myself or was I just taking the easy way out? How can I tell the difference between giving myself grace and a cop out?

The people who ask this question are usually the ones least at risk of genuine self-indulgence. They are the ones who have built lives on reliability. What they are actually asking is whether they can trust their own read on themselves, whether the voice suggesting rest is wisdom or sabotage.

I want to take that question seriously here, because the standard advice to "give yourself grace" tends to fail precisely the people who most need a workable answer.

What we are actually talking about when we say perfectionism

Perfectionism in the clinical literature is not a single trait and this matters for the question at hand. Hewitt and Flett (1991) described it as operating across self and social contexts: standards a person imposes on themselves, standards they impose on others, and standards they believe others impose on them. That last dimension — socially prescribed perfectionism — turns out to carry a great deal of the psychological weight.

Contemporary research generally organizes these into two broader dimensions: perfectionistic strivings, which involve high personal standards and the pursuit of them, and perfectionistic concerns, which involve doubt about actions, fear of mistakes, and the sense that one's worth is on the line with every outcome. Limburg and colleagues (2017) reviewed 284 studies and more than 2,000 effect sizes, finding both dimensions associated with psychopathology and identifying perfectionistic concerns in particular as a transdiagnostic factor — a mechanism that shows up across depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive presentations, and eating disorders rather than belonging to any one of them.

The prevalence is also moving. Curran and Hill (2019) analyzed 164 samples comprising 41,641 American, Canadian, and British college students between 1989 and 2016 and found linear increases across all three of Hewitt and Flett's dimensions. Young people report higher demands on themselves, higher demands on others, and a stronger sense that others demand perfection of them than their counterparts did three decades ago.

For clients who grew up as children of immigrants, that third dimension often has a specific texture. Wang (2010), developing a measure of family-level perfectionism, found meaningful differences between Asian American and European American students in perceived family standards. The internalized audience is frequently not abstract. It has faces, a history of sacrifice attached to it, and a set of expectations that were rarely stated as demands and are therefore difficult to argue with. A client can dismantle her own standards in therapy and still find the family standard fully intact underneath, because it was never hers to revise in the first place.

Why the grace question is genuinely difficult

The fear that self-compassion will lead to collapse deserves more respect than it usually gets. For someone whose standards have produced tangible results — the degrees, the career, the reputation for never dropping anything — those standards feel load-bearing. The suspicion is that pulling one out will bring down the structure.

Here the research offers something useful, because it suggests the fear is aimed at the wrong target. Sirois, Molnar, and Hirsch (2017) conducted a meta-analysis on perfectionism and procrastination and found the two dimensions pulling in opposite directions. Perfectionistic concerns were positively associated with procrastination (r = .23), while perfectionistic strivings were negatively associated with it (r = −.22), and both associations held after accounting for the shared variance between dimensions. The collapse that perfectionists fear is real and well documented. It is driven by the fear-of-mistakes dimension rather than by the high-standards dimension.

This is worth sitting with, because it reverses the usual logic. The part of perfectionism that most often produces avoidance, missed deadlines, and the bedtime doomscroll is the anxious, self-evaluative part. The standards themselves are not what generate the paralysis.

What the evidence says about self-compassion and motivation

Self-compassion, as Neff (2003) defined it, involves three components: kindness toward oneself in the face of difficulty, recognition that struggle is part of shared human experience, and a mindful rather than over-identified relationship to one's own painful thoughts. The clinical concern that this softens people has been tested directly, and reasonably well.

Breines and Chen (2012) ran four experiments on this question. Participants induced into a self-compassionate stance toward a personal weakness were more likely to believe the weakness was changeable. Those who wrote self-compassionately about a moral transgression reported greater motivation to make amends and to avoid repeating it. In the study most relevant to the clients I see, participants who failed a vocabulary test and then received a self-compassionate message spent more time studying for a subsequent test than those who received a self-esteem-boosting message, and study time predicted better performance. A fourth experiment found self-compassionate participants preferred upward social comparison, seeking out people who had overcome the same weakness.

Wohl, Pychyl, and Bennett (2010) found a parallel effect over time: students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before a first examination procrastinated less before the next one.

Two more recent studies bear directly on perfectionists specifically. Ferrari and colleagues (2018) examined 541 adolescents and 515 adults and found that self-compassion moderated the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression in both groups. Among adolescents high in self-compassion, the perfectionism–depression link was no longer statistically significant. The moderation effect was small in absolute terms, accounting for roughly two percent of variance, which is worth holding alongside the finding. With, Benoît, and Gaudreau (2024) found a comparable pattern in 583 university students: those low in self-compassion who pursued perfection reported significantly higher psychological distress than those pursuing excellence, and self-compassion attenuated that difference.

Both of those studies are cross-sectional, which limits what we can say about causal direction. The experimental work from Breines and Chen carries more causal weight, and it points the same way. Taken together, the evidence does not support the idea that treating oneself decently erodes performance.

A more useful target than lower standards

The advice perfectionists most resist is the advice to lower the bar, and I think they are right to resist it. Gaudreau (2019) proposed a distinction that gives them somewhere better to go. He argued that perfectionism research has conflated two separate pursuits: excellencism, the pursuit of very high but attainable standards held flexibly, and perfectionism, the pursuit of flawless and excessively high standards held relentlessly.

His subsequent empirical work with colleagues (Gaudreau et al., 2022) tested whether the added increment of perfectionism buys anything beyond excellencism. Broadly, it does not. People pursuing excellence show comparable achievement alongside better psychological outcomes, while those pursuing perfection show reduced capacity to savor good outcomes and enjoyment that depends on hitting the target.

The practical implication for a high achiever is that excellence remains fully available as a target. What changes is whether one's worth rides on the outcome.

The first question: what is this in service of?

Acceptance and commitment therapy offers a decision-making frame that I find particularly workable for this population. In the ACT model, values function as chosen life directions rather than goals to be completed, and psychological flexibility involves acting in the service of those directions while making room for the discomfort that shows up (Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda, & Lillis, 2006).

Applied to the grace question, this shifts what a client is evaluating. Instead of assessing whether she has earned rest — a question that will always be answered by the harshest voice available — she assesses direction. What is this choice in service of? Rest that allows her to show up steadily for work she cares about is pointed toward something. Withdrawal that reliably shrinks her life is pointed away from something.

The distinction becomes tractable when you look at what a choice moves toward rather than what it excuses.

The second question: what do I actually have?

The second question concerns capacity, and it is the one perfectionists are least practiced at asking.

Organizational psychology has a durable model here. Job demands–resources theory holds that strain emerges from the relationship between the demands placed on a person and the resources available to meet them, with demands depleting energy and resources supporting engagement and buffering strain (Bakker, Demerouti, & Sanz-Vergel, 2023). The model was built for workplaces, and it describes something clients recognize immediately: the same task costs a different amount depending on what else is running.

Perfectionistic standards tend to be set as though capacity were constant. The plan made on a rested Sunday is applied unchanged to a Thursday following three nights of poor sleep and a difficult family call. When the Thursday version of the person falls short, the shortfall is read as a character problem rather than an arithmetic one.

Capacity-oriented decision-making asks a plainer question: what is actually available right now? Answering it honestly supplies information the decision requires. A plan built on an accurate reading of Thursday will hold; a plan built on Sunday's reading of Thursday will not.

Putting the two together

When a client brings me the grace-or-cop-out question, we work it through both lenses, and the combination usually resolves it.

Adjusting looks like this: the value stays fixed and the plan flexes to fit real capacity. She still cares about her health, and this week that means a twenty-minute walk rather than the full session. She still intends to finish the project, and she has moved the deadline once, deliberately, having told the people affected.

Abandoning looks different: the value itself gets dropped in order to escape discomfort, usually without a decision being made at all. The walk disappears from the week without being discussed. The project stops being mentioned. Avoidance tends to be silent, and that silence is often the most reliable signal available.

Effort is a poor instrument for telling them apart, which is why the question resists willpower and self-interrogation. Direction and capacity are the two readings that actually distinguish them.

What this means for treatment

Perfectionism responds to treatment, which is worth stating plainly for anyone who has concluded that this is simply their personality. Galloway, Watson, Greene, Shafran, and Egan (2022) meta-analyzed 15 randomized controlled trials of cognitive behavioural therapy for perfectionism involving 912 participants. They found large effects on concern over mistakes (g = 0.89) and clinical perfectionism (g = 0.87), a medium effect on personal standards (g = 0.57), and meaningful reductions in depression (g = 0.60), anxiety (g = 0.42), and eating disorder symptoms (g = 0.61).

The pattern in those numbers is instructive. The largest movement occurs in the fear-of-mistakes dimension — the part carrying most of the distress and most of the avoidance. Treatment tends to reduce the cost of high standards more than it reduces the standards.

For the clients I work with, that is the outcome worth wanting. The capacity to pursue something demanding, to fall short of it on a given Thursday, and to make the next decision on the basis of what they care about and what they have — rather than on the basis of what they think they deserve.

Janine Cheng is the founder and clinical director of Atlas Therapy, a boutique practice in New York supporting perfectionists, high achievers, and children of immigrants. This article is educational and is not a substitute for individual clinical care.

Citations

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