Close Banner
What The Rise Of ‘Maxxing’ Culture Is Doing To Our Mental Health
Author:
June 11, 2026
Assistant Health Editor
Assistant Health Editor
Ava Durgin is the former Assistant Health Editor at mindbodygreen. She holds a B.A. in Global Health and Psychology from Duke University.
Image by Jacob Lund / Stocksy
June 11, 2026
Sleepmaxxing. Proteinmaxxing. Fibermaxxing. Looksmaxxing. Productivity-maxxing. Even “grandmamaxxing” or “nonnamaxxing,” the trend of adopting old-school habits in pursuit of a longer, healthier life.
At first glance, most of these trends seem harmless, maybe even helpful. After all, what’s wrong with wanting to sleep better, eat more protein, or take your health seriously?
But spend enough time online and a pattern starts to emerge. Every habit becomes something to optimize. Every meal becomes an opportunity to improve. Every workout, supplement, skincare routine, and morning ritual gets measured against the question: Could I be doing this better?
Somewhere along the way, self-improvement started to blur into self-surveillance.
A major new analysis1 suggests this shift may be taking a larger toll than we realize. Researchers found that perfectionism among young adults has steadily increased over the past 35 years, with fear of making mistakes, fear of judgment, and self-imposed pressure rising faster than achievement itself.
The findings raise an important question. What if one of the biggest threats to our health isn’t that we’re doing too little, but that we’re constantly feeling we’re not doing enough?
Researchers analyzed 35 years of perfectionism data
The new study, published in the Journal of Personality, examined data from more than 82,000 college students across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Researchers reviewed 307 separate samples collected between the late 1980s and today, allowing them to track how perfectionism has changed across generations.
What they found wasn’t simply that students were becoming more ambitious. Several specific forms of perfectionism increased over time, including self-oriented perfectionism (holding yourself to impossibly high standards), concern over mistakes, and doubts about actions.
The sharpest increase involved socially prescribed perfectionism, or the belief that other people expect perfection from you. That trend accelerated notably after the early 2000s.
This means young adults aren’t just holding themselves to higher standards. They’re also carrying a growing sense that everyone else is evaluating them, too. Whether that’s employers, professors, peers, family members, or the thousands of people they encounter online each day, there’s often a feeling that mistakes are more visible and success is more publicly measured than it once was.
Why perfectionism is more than a personality trait
Perfectionism often gets mistaken for conscientiousness or a strong work ethic. The problem is that healthy striving and perfectionism aren’t the same thing.
Healthy striving says, “I want to do my best.” Perfectionism says, “My best isn’t enough unless it’s flawless.”
That distinction matters because decades of research have linked perfectionism to anxiety, depression, chronic stress, burnout, eating disorders, sleep problems, and lower overall well-being. And those effects don’t stop at mental health.
When your brain constantly interprets mistakes, uncertainty, or falling short as threats, your body responds accordingly. Stress hormones rise. Recovery becomes harder. Sleep suffers. Your nervous system spends more time in a state of vigilance and less time in the restorative state where healing, recovery, and resilience happen.
We often talk about longevity through the lens of exercise, nutrition, protein intake, and supplements. Those factors matter. But psychological stress is also biological stress. The body doesn’t necessarily distinguish between a genuine threat and the pressure you place on yourself to optimize every aspect of your life.
The rise of optimization culture
It’s difficult to read these findings without thinking about the broader culture many young adults have grown up in.
Today’s self-improvement landscape can be incredibly helpful. There is more access to health information than ever before. People are strength training, prioritizing sleep, learning about metabolic health, and becoming active participants in their well-being.
But there’s also a point where self-improvement can start to feel a full-time job.
Open social media, and you’ll find endless advice on how to optimize nearly every aspect of your life.
It can feel there’s always another metric to improve or another habit to master. And because there’s no clear endpoint, the goalposts keep moving. As soon as you’ve optimized one area of your life, there’s another waiting for your attention.
That’s where optimization can drift into perfectionism. Not because you’re trying to be perfect, but because you’re constantly being reminded of how much better you could be. Over time, self-improvement stops feeling empowering and starts feeling a never-ending performance review.
The takeaway
The wellness world loves optimization. And to be fair, optimization can be useful. It can help us build better habits, understand our bodies, and make informed choices.
But every tool has a point where it stops helping.
When you’re spending more time worrying about your habits than actually benefiting from them, something has gone off course. When a missed workout ruins your day or a bad sleep score makes you anxious before you’ve even gotten out of bed, health starts becoming another source of stress.
The findings from this study suggest that perfectionism may be one of the most overlooked health risks of modern life. Not because it prevents us from succeeding, but because it convinces us that success is never enough.
A healthier future may not come from optimizing every corner of your life. It may come from trusting that “good enough” is often good enough.
1 Source
Sumber Artikel:
Mindbodygreen.com
