Summer is here and the question of body image is again more and more dominant in our minds. But what makes some worry more about „beach body“? The answer could be in the trait of perfectionism.
While perfectionism may be a trait that employers cherish, mental health professionals and researchers are warning about its downsides. One of the downsides concerns body image dissatisfaction and disordered eating. That is precisely what Barnett and Sharp (2016) investigated in their research. In it, they took the division of perfectionism to maladaptive and adaptive, where both are characterized by high expectations of one's self, but the difference is that in adaptive the person is satisfied with his or her result, while in maladaptive that is not true. Barnett and Sharp (2016) wanted to see what the role of maladaptive perfectionism in problems with body image satisfaction and disordered eating is, and what part self-compassion play in this complicated relationship. In the first of the two studies they presented in the paper, Barnett and Sharp (2016) found that maladaptive perfectionism is negatively associated with both self-compassion and body image satisfaction, which means that those who are more maladaptively perfectionist have lower body image satisfaction and less self-compassion. The other interesting finding was that self-compassion could be a mediator through which maladaptive perfectionism has an expression in lower body image satisfaction. What does that mean? In short, people with higher levels of maladaptive perfectionism have less self-compassion, and because of the lower levels of self-compassion they have a lower body image satisfaction. In this case authors argue that self-compassion is serving as a soothing system, which causes us to feel more safe and secure, and not threatened (Barnett and Sharp, 2016). In this state of self-compassion security, we are less inclined to be self-judgmental and compare ourselves with others, which in turn has a more positive effect on our body image satisfaction. In the case of higher self-judgement (or lower self-compassion if you will), people feel more threatened and are more likely to compare themselves with others, which, in most cases, happens to be an unrealistic beauty standard shown in the media. This is exactly the case with those individuals with higher levels of maladaptive perfectionism.
In the second of the two studies that Barnett and Sharp (2016) have presented in the paper, they confirmed the results they got from the first one, but on top of that they investigated the same relationship of maladaptive perfectionism and self-compassion, but with regards to disordered eating. They found that those who are more maladaptively perfectionist are more prone to having a disordered eating behaviour with overly monitoring their calorie intake and such. Also, they found that in this case, self-judgment was a mediator in the relationship of maladaptive perfectionism and disordered eating behaviour. In other words, those individuals who are more maladaptively perfectionist are more self-judgmental which causes them to overly compare themselves with others, while being overly critical of their own body and because of that they develop disordered eating behaviours. (Barnett and Sharp, 2016)
In both studies, authors have shown that those who are more maladaptively perfectionist are less likely to be self compassionate and in turn more susceptible to unrealistic beauty standards propagated by the media. All of that causes issues with self-satisfaction and self-acceptance and can lead to damaging behaviour of eating in a physically and mentally dangerous way. But there is a practical guideline given by these studies, which is that there is a specific target of boosting one's self-compassion to help with self-acceptance and a more positive body image. It is worth noticing that in these studies women were the only participants, but there are indications that similar results could be found in men, but that remains for future research to determine.
References
Barnett, M. D., & Sharp, K. J. (2016). Maladaptive perfectionism, body image satisfaction, and disordered eating behaviors among US college women: The mediating role of self-compassion. Personality and Individual Differences, 99, 225-234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.05.004