The pressure to be perfect can encourage procrastination if even a first attempt is judged as a final result. In such cases, avoidance serves as a defense mechanism to prevent seeing or having something imperfect evaluated. High standards alone do not explain this reaction. EMDR self-coaching can address manageable everyday stress at the specific moment of suppression or rejection: the anticipated devaluation, the associated feelings, and the physical tension. Professional quality standards remain in place.
You want to write a short piece about your hobby. You’ve written the first sentence. Before you even have a chance to develop your thought further, you read it as if it were already public. “I can’t show this to anyone.” You delete it. The next opening doesn’t last much longer.
After several attempts, you set the work aside. From the outside, it looks as if you haven’t even started yet. In fact, you have started—and undone every beginning. This is exactly where the pressure to be perfect and procrastination can intertwine.
The final version determines the draft too early
A first attempt serves a different purpose than a finished product. It brings an idea to light that you can continue to develop. If you already expect it to be convincing, complete, and presentable, it must meet conditions for which the subsequent work process is actually intended.
This creates a contradiction: To develop a good draft, you need material. But for material to emerge, it has to be good to begin with. Every unresolved issue then seems to argue against the attempt, even though it would actually be a normal task for the revision process.
The crucial turning point, then, is not simply “I want to do a good job.” It lies in the point where an unfinished state can no longer be tolerated. High standards can spur one on to work. In this context, however, they contribute to procrastination when they prevent any workable interim results from being achieved.
What else is deleted besides the sentence
Perhaps the wording is indeed unclear. Changing it would be a matter of technical revision. When you think, “I can’t show this to anyone,” there may be something else at play: You can already picture someone laughing at your attempt. The sentence seems to you like proof that you can’t produce anything worthwhile.
If your face gets hot or your shoulders tense up while doing this, deleting the text can also help you let go of shame and tension. For a moment, you no longer have to look at the unfinished draft. At the same time, the text you wanted to keep working on is now gone again.
In his book, Thomas Buhl explains how avoidance reactions serve to protect against distressing experiences and yet can limit one’s scope for action. In light of this process, rejection can be understood as a possible protective reaction. This explains the specific link between the pressure to evaluate and procrastination, without attributing every instance of perfectionism to the same cause.
Extensive preparation can also serve a similar purpose in this context: as long as you’re still gathering material, there’s no need to reveal your own attempt just yet. Whether this applies to you depends on whether your preparation is answering a specific open-ended question or, more importantly, delaying your engagement with your design.
Not every revision is avoidance
The difference doesn’t lie in a specific number of changes. A difficult idea may require several attempts. A factual error must be corrected. And sometimes it turns out that information is missing, without which the text cannot be accurate.
What is more revealing is what the change makes possible. Does it clarify the content and help the work move forward? Or does the entire attempt regularly fall apart as soon as you imagine an evaluation? In the latter case, the discomfort with the current state of affairs may have become more important than its actual shortcomings.
This distinction also prevents a misguided solution: Simply abandoning every quality requirement would miss the point. The text should still serve its purpose. It’s just that its first sentence doesn’t have to anticipate what can only emerge through elaboration and revision.
The Moment of Displacement as a Starting Point for Inner Work
If you understand this on a rational level but still find the exercise almost unbearable, you can break the scene down further: You read the first sentence, anticipate criticism, feel shame, and want to remove it immediately. This is a limited point of reference for self-administered EMDR. “My entire perfectionism,” on the other hand, would be a very broad task.
Thomas Buhl, an EMDR and trauma therapist, uses his self-developed six-step model to explore the connection between the issue, emotion, bodily sensation, and bilateral stimulation. The inner work here addresses the distressing significance of the unfinished attempt. It provides neither the missing sentence nor a judgment about its quality.
If you want to use EMDR at home, learn the complete procedure from a book or tutorial and be aware of its limitations. This refers to non-pathological, manageable everyday issues. You can stop the session at any time. Severe limitations, overwhelming stress, or traumatic memories require professional help.
A preliminary result doesn’t have to convince anyone yet
The causal connection becomes clear when we make a slight shift: “This sentence can be improved” becomes “This sentence should not exist in its current form.” In the first case, there is still room for work. In the second case, eliminating the discomfort may become more important than developing the text.
Finding inner relief and the actual work on the text remain two distinct tasks. Even after that, a phrase may still fall flat. What matters is whether it can be allowed to stand as a work-in-progress. The unfinished sentence doesn’t have to convince a reader just yet; first, it must allow you to continue developing your thought.
