At a young age, many become familiar with a reward system as praise for accomplishments. Parents handing out allowances or gifts for completing chores or getting good grades and schools giving awards or rewards for being an exemplary student or for doing well collectively as a class are a few examples. Personally, I’m not familiar with the allowance system. I am, however, familiar with the award and rewarding that schools often do with elementary and middle school students.

There were awards handed out for everything when I was in grade school. Awards for perfect attendance, for displaying one of The Six Pillars of Character, or even for participation in school events. Somewhere along the way, awards stopped being a recognition of an achievement. They stopped making you feel like you accomplished something, and they stopped making you feel proud of yourself. Instead, they became a thing to make no child feel left out.

Awards and rewards alike were given simply for participation at my school. In the elementary grades, we had a book reading contest every month. If you could read 100 or more books, a trophy would be presented to you. Couldn’t make it to 100 books? No worries, you’d still get a medal for reading 10 books. Rewards like this can often leave a child feeling two ways. Either they feel as though they don’t have to put in extra effort to succeed and be recognized or, they feel like they have to do better than their peers in order to be recognized explicitly.

It wasn’t until I got into high school that I realized I was the latter. A want to achieve perfection can form at a young age. If it does, as children get older, they start to feel they aren’t good enough. Without even being aware of it, they start to compete to ensure they come out on top next time. Pair this with the fact that parents who never minded getting “B’s” and “C’s” when they were in school want their children to succeed and get “A’s” and “B’s”, and you’re going to have someone who grows into an adult who is constantly trying to better themselves.

Now, trying to better yourself isn’t a bad thing. But it does become an issue when personal growth turns into setting too high standards in order to make yourself and others proud. People like this are often met with failure — and if you’re anything like me, that failure turns into a form of self-criticism as your mind obsesses over the mistakes made to lead you to where you are. The want to achieve becomes so ingrained that we set those impossibly high standards even if we know they can’t be met. When they aren’t, things like depression and anxiety can set in. For me, the anxiety is so bad that a grade on a test has me wondering what it will lead my life to be like in 20 years.

In this case, it’s no longer a matter of becoming successful, but a matter of becoming perfect. The stress of goals not achieved and the constant fixation on failure doesn’t just lead to serious mental concerns. It also causes burnout and can lead to workaholism. Perfectionism can even create some negative personality traits like moodiness, which in turn may cause the perfectionist to become defensive — even about the smallest things. There is even the chance that perfectionism may go hand-in-hand with procrastination if you have someone who is so fearful of failure they put off their work.

In society, perfection and success — or striving for excellence — seem synonymous, but there’s a distinct difference between the two. While perfectionism might seem like an appealing attribute for future employment, it can actually do more harm than good, both mentally and physically. Bad habits form when there is the obsessive need to be perfect, and sometimes perfectionists aren’t aware that there is more than one way to complete their tasks.

But what’s the most efficient way to fight the inner demons that plague perfectionists? Although easier said than done, the answer is simple: Accept the idea of “good enough.” For me, this is the most difficult thing to do. Reminding myself that shooting for 100 percent just isn’t reasonable, nor is it healthy, is important. I try to have myself aim for 80 percent, that way when I surpass that goal I have a little extra boost of pride for my achievement. Also, as cliché as it may sound — surround yourself with good company. Although perfectionism wins most of the time I battle it out, it’s nice to have supportive friends and family around who remind me that I’m trying my best, even if I feel like I’m not.