Can you relate? (Credits: Getty Images)
It started before my earliest memory – my mum loves retelling the tale.
As a child in nursery, I would tell off the other children for misbehaving. A real-life Matilda Wormwood, I was apparently indignant one day when the teacher cancelled story time as punishment.
All I wanted was to be a good girl and to learn. Even then, I had Head Girl Energy.
Head Girl Energy, as I call it, is characterised by an innate need to please and achieve. It’s perfectionism personified, with more than a healthy dose of ambition.
If you’ve got Head Girl Energy, you’re probably a chronic overachiever. You were probably top of the class in school and have ticked off (almost) every metric of success society has set since.
But no, it is not a humble brag. Conscientiousness can come at the expense of fun, work-life balance and sometimes, your mental health.
And yet, you still can’t seem to give yourself a break. Why?
In our latest episode of Mentally Yours, Metro.co.uk’s mental health podcast, I invited Dr Tara Quinn-Cirillo to join us to find out where Head Girl Energy might come from – and how to resist it.
‘I think it’s very much that we get tied up in cognitions, around the need to be a certain way,’ she says. ‘So if I’m Head Girl, I’ve got to be this certain standard, and then maintain it as well.’
There’s some research to suggest that women are more prone to perfectionism than men, says Dr Tara, but it’s actually quite limited in its scope and quality.
‘But I know there are a lot of [therapists] out there who support high achieving women,’ she says. ‘So we do know that that is an area where people self-report that they struggle with perfectionism and higher rates of overwhelm and burnout, because those things are really closely linked.’
So, where does Head Girl Energy come from?
Dr Tara describes the brain as ‘like a computer between yours ears’ that soaks up experiences throughout life, right from the moment we’re born.
‘So if we’ve ever gone through experiences in childhood where we’ve been told we’re not good enough or that failure equates to something negative, for example, that’s the kind of stuff that we store up,’ she says.
‘[Maybe] you’ve had really strict teachers or they’ve had really rigid rules around how they see achievement, for example, but also your parenting.
‘If you have parents that are overly critical or perfectionist themselves or putting that on to you – “I’ve got a B in a test”, “It’s a shame, you didn’t get an A” – those things might seem quite small, but actually, they mount up and what our brain does is absorb them.’
It’s not all negative, though. The perceived need to achieve can also stem from positive reinforcement, where we’ve been praised for getting good grades or exceeding those work targets in the past, so we want to do it again.
Social media can also influence our ideas of success, says Dr Tara, because we’re constantly invited to compare ourselves to a carefully curated highlights reel.
‘It’s not just about your achievement academically or in careers,’ she adds. ‘It’s about whether you can parent and have it all and run a business, it’s about whether you can have side hustles as well as being at uni, there’s so many different examples of how that perfectionism can show up now.’
There’s nothing wrong with having goals, adds Dr Tara, but if chasing them isn’t making you happy, it’s time to adjust your Head Girl Energy accordingly.
To do this, she recommends focusing on your ‘values’, because coming back to what’s really important to you can help guide you.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be an achiever, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to have this certain career, but it’s just about what it costs you,’ she says.
‘So if your value is, “I really value being a journalist and I really want to be head of this department because I really value taking this particular publication in a certain direction,” that’s fantastic. So you need to look at what you value, rather than just your goals.
‘How do I want to be as a manager? How do I want people to treat me? What do I want my balance to be in terms of my home life versus my work life? So those are the things that will guide you.’
No matter what your goal or profession, keeping questions like this in mind will help moderate your behaviour when, say, you’re tempted to answer that quick work email instead of being fully present at home, or you’ve skipped another lunch break to go above and beyond.
Comparison only fuels Head Girl Energy, so Dr Tara recommends trying mindfulness techniques – such as pausing to take in your surrounding – to bring your attention back to your values and what you really want, rather than how a fellow Head Girl seems to be nailing it.
And if there is someone you admire who seems to have their finger on the pulse, all of the time? Chat to them about it! Ask for any career advice or organisational tips. You might just find they’re also looking for an invitation to be honest and press pause.
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That need to achieve might be doing more harm than good.