Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #11. Perfectionism Keeps Women with Chronic Illness and Autoimmune Disease Flaring — You Need to Hear Why
Transcript
- 0:00[SPEAKER_00]: Chasing a standard you can never meet doesn't just exhaust the mind.
- 0:04[SPEAKER_00]: It keeps the body in a state of permanent activation, it was never designed to sustain.
- 0:10[SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
- 0:12[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Tecla de Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner, and certified holistic life coach.
- 0:18[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, IBS, chronic fatigue,
- 0:24[SPEAKER_00]: PCOS, endometriosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
- 0:33[SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
- 0:37[SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
- 0:41[SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
- 0:44[SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
- 0:50[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shares mind-body education.
- 0:52[SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to complement not replace your medical care.
- 0:57[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
- 1:00[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover why perfectionism in women with chronic illness is not a personality trait.
- 1:07[SPEAKER_00]: It is a survival response with a direct physiological cost.
- 1:12[SPEAKER_00]: How the impossible standard you are chasing keeps the body permanently activated.
- 1:16[SPEAKER_00]: And the one shift that begins to interrupt the perfectionism loop before it becomes physical.
- 1:23[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a perfectionist.
- 1:25[SPEAKER_00]: It's one of the first things women with chronic illness tell me when we start working together.
- 1:29[SPEAKER_00]: They say it almost as a disclaimer, like they're warning me, like it explained something about them that I should know upfront.
- 1:38[SPEAKER_00]: And they're right.
- 1:39[SPEAKER_00]: It does explain something, just not what they think it does.
- 1:44[SPEAKER_00]: Because most women who identify as perfectionists wear it with some sort of quiet pride.
- 1:50[SPEAKER_00]: I'm organized, I'm high performing, I'm the one that gets things done.
- 1:54[SPEAKER_00]: In a world that rewards output, perfectionism looks like an asset, and like an identity that's worth having.
- 2:03[SPEAKER_00]: but perfectionism is a control mechanism.
- 2:05[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason the mind grips control so tightly is because uncertainty is intolerable.
- 2:13[SPEAKER_00]: Not uncomfortable, intolerable.
- 2:15[SPEAKER_00]: If I do everything right, prepare thoroughly enough, leave no room for error.
- 2:20[SPEAKER_00]: I can manage what comes next.
- 2:22[SPEAKER_00]: I can say I had a failure.
- 2:24[SPEAKER_00]: I can keep myself safe.
- 2:26[SPEAKER_00]: So the perfectionist mind is constantly working, scanning for potential downfall, anticipating where things might go wrong.
- 2:35[SPEAKER_00]: Covering over the discomfort of not knowing with more preparation, more output, more control.
- 2:41[SPEAKER_00]: Accept the unknown cannot be covered over indefinitely.
- 2:44[SPEAKER_00]: The standard can always be higher.
- 2:47[SPEAKER_00]: The preparation can always be more thorough.
- 2:51[SPEAKER_00]: The gap
- 2:55[SPEAKER_00]: and a body living in an environment where there's always an unresolved threat does not get to rest ever.
- 3:03[SPEAKER_00]: So what does this actually look like in real life?
- 3:06[SPEAKER_00]: It looks like a woman who is always moving, always producing, always one step ahead of the next thing that needs to be done.
- 3:13[SPEAKER_00]: From the outside, her life looks impressively together, organized, high functioning on top of it.
- 3:21[SPEAKER_00]: But if you slow down, the movement is not coming from ambition.
- 3:25[SPEAKER_00]: It's coming from avoidance.
- 3:27[SPEAKER_00]: Because when the perfectionist mind stops, something surfaces.
- 3:31[SPEAKER_00]: The emotions that never got processed.
- 3:35[SPEAKER_00]: The experiences that got filed away because there was no tools to deal with them and no ability to feel them.
- 3:42[SPEAKER_00]: And rather than let those surface, the mind keeps generating the next task,
- 3:50[SPEAKER_00]: perfectionism becomes the architecture that keeps everything buried.
- 3:55[SPEAKER_00]: Before I reverse my own diagnoses, that was exactly my pattern.
- 4:00[SPEAKER_00]: I was a corporate director of product management, working with Fortune 500 companies to build solutions to their market research problems.
- 4:08[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of solutions companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for.
- 4:13[SPEAKER_00]: On the outside, I looked put together, high-performing, intelligent and successful, but underneath that was a dumpster fire of trapped emotion.
- 4:23[SPEAKER_00]: Things I had never emotionally digested, experiences I had buried because I had no idea how to process them and no safe space to do it.
- 4:33[SPEAKER_00]: Perfectionism kept me busy enough that I never had to stop and feel any of it.
- 4:38[SPEAKER_00]: It was a full-time job maintaining the appearance of someone who had it all together.
- 4:42[SPEAKER_00]: Right now, I'm working with a woman whose profession demands an almost inhuman level of precision.
- 4:48[SPEAKER_00]: Every detail matters.
- 4:51[SPEAKER_00]: Every outcome is visible.
- 4:53[SPEAKER_00]: Every imperfection is measurable, and she is exceptional of what she does.
- 4:58[SPEAKER_00]: But what started as professional standards had since crossed over into every corner of her life.
- 5:05[SPEAKER_00]: The need for control for certainty for everything to be exactly right, it became the only way she knew how to function.
- 5:12[SPEAKER_00]: And underneath all of it was a post that she never sat with, an emotion she never unpacked.
- 5:19[SPEAKER_00]: A version of herself she had kept moving fast enough that she never had to deal with any of that.
- 5:25[SPEAKER_00]: but eventually her body made her stop, it had no other way to get her attention.
- 5:29[SPEAKER_00]: So why does this become physical?
- 5:32[SPEAKER_00]: Because perfectionism keeps hand in control to the most primal part of your brain.
- 5:37[SPEAKER_00]: The part that existed long before rational thought.
- 5:41[SPEAKER_00]: The part whose only job is to keep you alive.
- 5:44[SPEAKER_00]: This part of the brain is concerned with one thing only, survival.
- 5:49[SPEAKER_00]: It reacts instantly, and it reads the feeling that what you have done is not good enough exactly the same way it reads a tiger chasing you down the street.
- 5:59[SPEAKER_00]: To that part of the brain, both are life-threatening emergencies.
- 6:04[SPEAKER_00]: So every time the perfectionist mind scans for the next possible downfall, the primal brain response as if your survival depends on fixing it.
- 6:12[SPEAKER_00]: Right now, immediately, and the body follows, stress hormone spike, muscles tense, the system mobilizes.
- 6:21[SPEAKER_00]: and then the perfectionist mind finds the next possible downfall, and the primal brain reacts again, and the body mobilizes again.
- 6:28[SPEAKER_00]: For many women with chronic illness, this looks like the fight response, pushing harder, working longer, raising the standard higher, or the flight response.
- 6:39[SPEAKER_00]: over explaining yourself before anyone questions you.
- 6:42[SPEAKER_00]: Over delivering so there is no room for criticism.
- 6:46[SPEAKER_00]: Pre-emptively correcting and adjusting so the possible downfall never comes.
- 6:52[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is that safety also never comes because the perfectionists will always find something that isn't quite right, which means the primal brain never gets to stand down and the body never gets to rest.
- 7:05[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a mindset issue.
- 7:07[SPEAKER_00]: This is a biological loop that has been running on repeat.
- 7:11[SPEAKER_00]: So what interrupts this?
- 7:14[SPEAKER_00]: One question at the start of the day.
- 7:16[SPEAKER_00]: What is actually an emergency today?
- 7:19[SPEAKER_00]: Because most women running this pattern move through their entire day at the pace of a crisis that isn't happening.
- 7:26[SPEAKER_00]: The laundry, the emails, the lists that never ends.
- 7:30[SPEAKER_00]: The primal brain has filed it all under survival.
- 7:33[SPEAKER_00]: And so the body moves accordingly.
- 7:35[SPEAKER_00]: Rushed, tense, activated from the moment the day starts.
- 7:39[SPEAKER_00]: When you ask that question and you answer it honestly, something shifts.
- 7:44[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the list doesn't qualify.
- 7:47[SPEAKER_00]: Most of what felt like it needed to happen right now perfectly and immediately isn't an emergency at all.
- 7:54[SPEAKER_00]: And that moment of recognition is important, because you're doing something the primal brain cannot do on its own.
- 8:01[SPEAKER_00]: You're reasoning, you're evaluating, you're taking back the steering wheel from the part of the brain that has been running the day like a survival exercise.
- 8:11[SPEAKER_00]: And from that recognition, you do one thing, just slow down by five to ten minutes, across everything, every task.
- 8:20[SPEAKER_00]: The morning routine, the commute, the way you move between tasks, the pace at which you eat and respond and transition from one thing to the next.
- 8:30[SPEAKER_00]: That is a direct message to the primal brain that there is no tiger, that the body is not
- 8:39[SPEAKER_00]: Because here's what most women discover when they try this.
- 8:43[SPEAKER_00]: The five minutes they were afraid to lose, cost them nothing.
- 8:47[SPEAKER_00]: The email still got answered.
- 8:49[SPEAKER_00]: The work still got done.
- 8:50[SPEAKER_00]: The world did not fall apart because they moved through it at a human pace instead of a crisis pace.
- 8:57[SPEAKER_00]: and the primal brain registers that.
- 8:59[SPEAKER_00]: Every time you slow down and nothing catastrophic happens, it receives new information, new evidence.
- 9:06[SPEAKER_00]: The possible downfall did not arrive.
- 9:09[SPEAKER_00]: Slowing down did not cost you everything.
- 9:11[SPEAKER_00]: That is how you begin to rewire the loop.
- 9:15[SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, deliberately with evidence, one unharried morning at a time.
- 9:21[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what we covered today.
- 9:22[SPEAKER_00]: Perfectionism is the mind's attempt to outrun uncertainty by controlling every possible outcome.
- 9:29[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a personality trait.
- 9:30[SPEAKER_00]: It's a survival strategy.
- 9:32[SPEAKER_00]: That strategy keeps the most ancient part of your brain in charge.
- 9:37[SPEAKER_00]: The part that treats an imperfect day, the same way it treats a predator coming to eat you alive.
- 9:43[SPEAKER_00]: And a body receiving that signal on repeat cannot recover the way it needs to.
- 9:47[SPEAKER_00]: The way out starts small.
- 9:50[SPEAKER_00]: One question each morning that separates genuine urgency from the pace your nervous system has mistaken for normal.
- 9:57[SPEAKER_00]: Perfectionism is one emotional pattern connected to chronic illness, and it rarely shows up alone.
- 10:03[SPEAKER_00]: The patterns underneath it, the uncertainty and tolerance, their survival responses, the emotions that never got processed.
- 10:11[SPEAKER_00]: Those are worth identifying specifically.
- 10:13[SPEAKER_00]: That's exactly why I developed the free chat GPT prompt in the show notes.
- 10:19[SPEAKER_00]: It connects your specific physical symptoms to emotional patterns that may be underneath them in under 30 seconds.
- 10:26[SPEAKER_00]: Personal to you and not a generic list.
- 10:29[SPEAKER_00]: The link is in the show notes.
- 10:31[SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you in the next episode.
- 10:33[SPEAKER_00]: It's a mini one short practical shift in just a couple of minutes.
- 10:37[SPEAKER_00]: Goodbye for now.