I haven't looked at it specifically from the perfectionism vs conscientiousness perspective, but this jives with what I've been doing to reduce my overall anxie

I haven't looked at it specifically from the perfectionism vs conscientiousness perspective, but this jives with what I've been doing to reduce my overall anxiety levels. I used to perceive various small failures, often just things like not doing chores on time, as a big deal and a sign that I'm failing as a person. This, of course, is not productive at all, saps my energy, and often results in me failing even more. But when you truly believe that it does make you a worse person, you feel as if you deserve these side effects... It's a long story of how I got there but at one point I decided that I'm not going to give any non-major failures much credit and advance from them as soon as possible. It's really nice to be able to look at a small error, say "whoops", and move on to fixing it. I sometimes still relapse to the old way of thinking but it's a huge weight off one's shoulders. But it is also so weird to just say "Yes I was really wrong about that, and I really shouldn't have done this. But that's OK, moving on." What I've found, though, is that this is not really the kind of philosophy the average person I talk to actually has. The implication that one is a failure if they do not complete certain chores efficiently, or don't do certain things, or don't know a given technology, or don't lose weight, is common. So is giving people a very limited amount of chances before they're marked in some negative way. Perhaps I am simply imagining it because it's something I'm used to, but we may just be living in a fairly perfectionist environment. The article appears to confirm this. I think ultimately it comes down to the idea that people make mistakes naturally (i.e., automatically) and might end up in unfavorable situations through no fault of their own. From here, you can accept errors as a fact of reality that happen _to_ you, as opposed to _from_ you, which makes them much easier to rectify. If you don't believe this, all those minor mistakes are then your sole responsibility, so it makes more sense to feel guilty for them.