Your ADHD \"Perfectionism\" Isn't About High Standards

The project is technically done. The deck is built, the draft is written, the room is arranged. And it's 11 p.m. and you're still in there — moving one more slide, cutting one more sentence, nudging something two inches to the left that nobody but you will ever notice moved.

You call this perfectionism. Everyone does. The story goes: your bar is impossibly high, so nothing clears it, so you're stuck circling forever. It's a tidy explanation. It's also, for a lot of ADHD brains, wrong.

A 2023 study in the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science surveyed 3,720 undergraduates and measured ADHD symptoms against several dimensions of perfectionism — including two that usually get lumped together but aren't the same thing at all. One is your standards: how high you actually set the bar. The other is your discrepancy: how big the gap feels between what you did and what you think you should have done, regardless of where that bar sits.

Higher ADHD symptoms predicted a higher discrepancy score. They also predicted lower standards and lower orderliness. Read that twice, because it's the whole reframe: the people most convinced they've fallen short aren't the ones holding themselves to the highest bar. They're often holding a lower one — and still landing on "not good enough" anyway.

What ADHD Perfectionism Actually Measures

Discrepancy runs on its own clock, mostly unhooked from your actual standards. You can build something fine by any reasonable measure and still get hit with the exact verdict you'd get from something sloppy. The feeling doesn't check your work before it fires.

The study found discrepancy and standards partially explain why ADHD symptoms track with experiential avoidance — the broader tendency to dodge an uncomfortable internal state rather than sit with it. Applied to a stuck project, that avoidance doesn't always look like walking away. Sometimes it looks like the opposite: staying in the file forever, because closing it means facing the verdict as final instead of still-in-progress. Revision buys you another day before you have to accept the feeling as final.

So what's actually happening when you keep circling back? You're trying to edit your way out of a feeling that isn't tracking the edits at all.

Think about the last email you rewrote four times before sending — not a hard one, just a normal one, checking in on something. The third draft read about the same as the first. By then you'd stopped editing the message and started performing it for a feeling that had already made up its mind before you opened the laptop. The project on your desk right now is running the identical script, just stretched across days instead of twenty minutes.

Why More Checking Doesn't Help

This isn't unique to ADHD, and that's actually useful to know. Psychologist Barry Schwartz and colleagues studied "maximizers" — people who search hard for the objectively best option rather than a good-enough one — across a general population in a 2002 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Maximizers didn't end up happier with better outcomes. They ended up less satisfied, more prone to regret, and more likely to keep second-guessing a choice after it was already made, compared to people willing to settle for "good enough."

The mechanism lines up with the discrepancy finding: more searching, more checking, more revising just feeds the doubt — it was never downstream of the work's quality to begin with. Every pass you make gives the feeling one more chance to find something new to flag, and it will, because that's what it's built to do.

Which means the fix people usually reach for — try to feel more confident about the work before you release it — is aiming at the wrong target.

The Fix Is Outside the Feeling, Not Inside It

Your internal "is this ready" check is unreliable. It's tuned to fire on a harsh verdict, not an accurate read of the work. So stop consulting it at the finish line. Set the finish line somewhere it can't reach.

Before you start a project — not after — write down what "done" actually contains. Write an actual list: this document has these four sections, runs under two pages, and gets read by one other person before it ships. Hit the list. You're done. The feeling doesn't get a vote. The criteria live outside the part of you that's going to argue with the outcome no matter what the outcome is.

An outside deadline, a second person's sign-off, a pre-committed spec — any of these work for the same reason. They move the "is it finished" question to a place the discrepancy feeling can't quietly override at 11 p.m.

Nobody but you is asking for one more pass. That part of you was always going to ask, no matter how good the work got. Set the criteria before you start, hit them, and stop — whether or not it feels finished yet.

This is general information, not medical or psychological advice. If perfectionism, avoidance, or ADHD symptoms are affecting your life or work in ways that feel bigger than this post, a qualified professional can help you sort out what's actually going on.

References

• Bodalski, E. A., Abu-Ramadan, T. M., Hough, K., Lefler, E. K., Meinzer, M. C., & Antshel, K. M. (2023). ADHD symptoms and experiential avoidance in college students: The role of perfectionism. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212144723000388
• Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5). https://bschwartz.domains.swarthmore.edu/maximizing.pdf