Why Tiny Mistakes Trigger Big Reactions

Have you ever taught a pupil who produces excellent work most of the time, but becomes overwhelmed, angry or tearful after making one tiny mistake? Perfectionism can look like a positive quality from the outside, yet it may be hiding intense anxiety underneath.

In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, you’ll learn why some perfectionist pupils are more vulnerable to dysregulation and how to distinguish healthy high standards from a fear-driven need to avoid mistakes.

You’ll also discover the two different motivations behind perfectionism, what research tells us about anxious pupils’ responses to errors and practical ways to help them tolerate mistakes, recover and carry on.

Important links:

Get our FREE SEND Behaviour Handbook: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/send-handbook

Download other FREE behaviour resources for use in school: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources.php

Transcript

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Simon Currigan

Have you ever taught a pupil who produces excellent work most of the time, but then becomes overwhelmed, or angry, or tearful the moment they make one tiny mistake?

After more than 15 years working with schools, I've seen how easily anxiety-driven perfectionism can hide behind good behaviour and high achievement, right up until the pressure to succeed becomes a little too much, and then the pupil starts to crack.

In this episode, I'll explain why perfectionism can make pupils more vulnerable to dysregulation, and the two very different motivations that can drive it, and I'm going to give you three practical ways of supporting students that this affects.

Hi there, and welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. And yes, I am wearing my new pants, thank you for noticing. You can probably tell from my voice that they're already making me feel more confident. Anyway, I don't know what that's about.

Today's episode is going to be slightly different because I'm going to build it around a question from a listener—well, actually, that's a lie, because it's a composite question. I've taken several versions of a problem I've heard from both teachers over the years, plus a couple of emails I got at the end of last term, actually, and a couple of kids I personally taught in the classroom. So what I've done is kind of mash those queries together into one question, because I think it highlights something that's easy to miss about anxious pupils, which is how perfectionism—which can look like a really positive quality from the outside—can affect a pupil's risk of becoming overwhelmed.

But before we get into that, if you find the podcast useful, make sure you're subscribed so future episodes appear automatically when they're released. And if you work with someone who teaches a pupil like the one we're about to discuss, please share this episode with them to help them understand what might be going on, so they can support their students and hear about my new pants. Obviously, I want as many people as possible to hear about my new pants, so get sharing and get subscribing. Right, on with this week's episode and nerd alert as well as strategies, there is a lot of research included with this one because it's actually quite interesting.

So here's the mashed-together question: I teach Year 6 pupil called Sophie, who's very able and always wants her work to be perfect. Most of the time she's hardworking, achieves well, and never causes any problems. But if she gets something wrong, runs out of time, or finds the work hard for a change, she can become extremely upset. Sometimes she cries, sometimes she rips up the page, or just refuses to carry on. We've tried reassuring her that her work is good, but that doesn't seem to help. Why does one small mistake cause such a big reaction, and what should we do?

And I've said here that Sophie's in Year 6. Sophie could well be in Year 12 or Year 2. It doesn't really make a difference. So the short answer to helping Sophie is this: the size of Sophie's reaction isn't telling us how serious the mistake that she made was. It's telling us how worried or how threatening that mistake felt to Sophie at the time. It's about the size of her emotions more than the size of the error she made.

Because to the adult, it's one incorrect answer. Maybe it's a spelling mistake, or it's a piece of art that didn't turn out exactly as Sophie planned. But Sophie may not see it as one small error. She may be thinking of it as evidence that she isn't good enough, that she's not living up to her own standards. She's not living up to the identity that she's built for herself as the, in inverted commas, "clever" pupil who always gets things right. Maybe she's worried that people will judge her.

And this is where we need to distinguish healthy high standards from anxiety-driven perfectionism, because they're different things. A pupil with healthy high standards thinks, "I want to do this well," and then they might feel disappointed by a mistake, but they can use that mistake as information to help them make an adjustment and improve their work and then carry on. Whereas the perfectionist pupil thinks, "I have to get this right." So the mistake isn't just information or feedback about the work. It starts to feel like information or feedback about them as a person.

So while high standards can pull a pupil towards success—and they often do, I'm not against that—anxiety-driven perfectionism, on the other hand, makes kids organise their behaviour around avoiding failure. I'm going to say that again, right? It makes them organise their behaviour around avoiding failure. And okay, those two things may sound similar, but emotionally they're very different motivators.

So there are two slightly different motivations that can drive perfectionism then, and they have different outcomes. The first motivation is the student saying, "I want to avoid a mistake." I think of it as if they met a mistake in the middle of the street, they'd try to run away from it in the opposite direction as far as possible. They're like on full retreat. When they look at their work, they tell themselves, "I must not get this wrong." That pupil is driven by fear—fear of embarrassment, or criticism, or disappointing an adult, or no longer being seen as the clever one. And when that sort of thinking clicks in, you might see them checking their work repeatedly or asking for lots of reassurance when normally they don't. Or they might start copying someone else when you know they're capable of doing the work themselves. They might procrastinate. They might avoid unfamiliar tasks or refuse to commit an answer to paper unless they're certain it's correct.

The second motivation is moving the student towards perfection. These are the kids that tell themselves, "I need to make this piece of work as perfect as possible," meaning that the pupil is chasing an ideal result. When they see that mistake monster on the street, instead of running away from it, they want to rugby tackle that monster to the ground. They want to run through it and get to the other side. They may spend far too long on tiny details. They may continually rewrite the same sentence. They may struggle to finish work. They might ignore time limits or become stressed or distressed when the lesson ends before the work feels complete to them.

So what we've got here is one pupil trying to escape the threat of failure. The other is chasing a standard that they may never quite reach. And of course, real pupils don't fit into tidy boxes. They might be chasing perfection in maths one day and then trying to avoid a mistake the next. Sophie might be pulled towards perfection and pushed by fear at the same time in some instances. But the distinction, which is a simplification, gives us a useful question to ask: is this pupil mainly frightened of getting it wrong, or are they unable to accept that their work is good enough?

Now, psychologists use slightly different language when it comes to this. They often distinguish between perfectionist strivings, which means setting very extremely, actually, high standards, and pushing towards them to reach an ideal outcome; and perfectionist concerns, which means worrying about mistakes, doubting your decisions, and fearing the consequences of not getting things right. Those aren't an exact match for my sort of simplified descriptions of towards and away from motivation, but there's a lot of overlap. And again, the truth is a bit more complicated.

So here's an example of some research that looked at this. In 2023, Jessica Lunn and her colleagues published a large meta-analysis where they brought together 121 studies of perfectionism and mental health in young people aged between 6 and 24. And what they found was that perfectionist concerns had a moderate association with anxiety. So just to underline that, perfectionist strivings on their own, very basically, these are the kids who are motivated towards achieving perfection rather than away from making mistakes. They had only a very small association with anxiety. So the research doesn't support the idea that wanting to do really well is automatically harmful. So we should put that idea to one side.

The much greater risk appears when those high standards become tangled up with the fear of mistakes, self-criticism, maybe constant doubt, asking yourself constantly whether your work is good enough or whether you're good enough. And something similar was shown in another study in 2017 by Lavinia Damian and colleagues who followed 489 adolescents over nine months. They found perfectionist concerns predicted increases in anxiety among the older adolescents who were aged 16 to 19, while perfectionist strivings did not. And just to be clear again, the ones that wanted to avoid mistakes had increases in anxiety. The ones who were drawn towards this sort of perfect goal did not.

That 16 to 19 age qualification matters because the same predictive effect was not found amongst the 12 to 15-year-olds. So we shouldn't take one adolescent study and pretend it proves exactly what happens inside the brain of every Year 6 pupil. But it adds to the wider picture. Fear of mistakes is more strongly and consistently connected with anxiety than simply having high ambitious standards. And they're two things that are very easily lumped together.

And there's also some fascinating research into what happens when anxious young people make an error. Alexandria Meyer and her research team have studied something called error-related negativity, or ERN. This is a very fast burst of electrical activity in the brain that happens immediately after anyone makes a mistake. Everyone produces it because, from your brain's perspective, noticing errors is very useful. If I put my car into reverse instead of first at a busy junction, I would very much like my brain to notice, ideally before I ram the vehicle behind me, experience a big shock, and yes, ruin my nice new pants.

But interestingly, studies show that this error response is often larger in anxious children and adolescents. In a 2018 study, Meyer and her colleagues found that a larger response to errors predicted the first onset of generalised anxiety disorder over the following year and a half in a sample of adolescent girls. That doesn't mean we can say Sophie's brain literally treats every spelling mistake like a tiger leaping into the classroom, setting off an immediate fight-or-flight reaction. That's saying too much. The research doesn't prove that, but it does suggest that anxious young people can be more neurologically sensitive to errors, and their brains respond more strongly when something goes wrong.

And another study, one more, published by Rueppel and colleagues in 2022, that I want to talk about when I was doing research for this episode because I just found this one really interesting. That study found that children and adolescents with anxiety disorders slow down more after making mistakes than comparison groups. In other words, the error had a bigger impact on what they did next. And that maps onto something teachers see all the time. I've certainly seen it in the classroom. Sophie gets an answer wrong, and then she just can't move on. Her attention sort of sticks to that error.

So she checks the next answer in a question much more cautiously, and then she checks it again. Her pace slows right down, and as the end of the lesson gets closer, she's dealing with the original mistake, plus the growing threat that she won't be able to finish her work because now she's working more slowly. It's like the reverse snowball effect. Instead of gaining momentum through the work, she loses it. And I could have probably picked a better metaphor there, but you get the idea. Sophie making mistakes slows her down, question after question.

So what do we actually do? Well, first, we need to work out which motivation is driving our people. Is Sophie mainly moving away from mistakes or towards an impossible standard? Watch what happens before she becomes upset. Does she ask, "Is this right?" over and over? Does she avoid difficult questions? That points towards more of a fear of getting it wrong. Or does she keep adding details? Does she resist stopping? Does she insist the work isn't finished yet? And that points more towards the pursuit of perfection.

We're not diagnosing her. We're not trying to decide whether she's got psychological striving tendencies or not. We're simply trying to understand what her behaviour is achieving for her because the support that we give her needs to match that motivation. So secondly, define what finished looks like for Sophie before the work begins. Tell Sophie how much work is expected, how long she has, and how many times she can check or redraft her work.

Now, I read lots of books on entrepreneurship because I co-own a business. And one sentence I read when we were getting going with Beacon was, "Done is better than perfect." And recently, I read the same thing phrased in another way, which was, "90% done is out there and getting results, while 100% is still thinking about it." So help Sophie understand what good enough for this task looks like in concrete terms. That phrase matters for this task. A quick retrieval activity does not need the same high standard, potentially, as a final piece of extended writing.

If the goal is to generate ideas, spelling doesn't need to be perfect. If the goal is to practice using commas, the handwriting doesn't need to resemble an illuminated medieval manuscript produced by a monk with excellent fine motor skills, but has nowhere else to be for the next 10 years. And by the way, that's not an argument for low standards. It's a way to help a student cope with paralyzingly high standards that they present to themselves.

Thirdly, help Sophie practice recovering from small mistakes while she's regulated. Don't wait until she's at the point of ripping up her work. Give her low-stakes opportunities to attempt to question before she is certain. Share a draft rather than a finished piece of work, or leave one minor error uncorrected for a short period and see how it feels. Model your own mistakes naturally for her as well and show what recovery looks like.

So you might be writing something on the board and you put the wrong date on there in inverted commas accidentally, and then show your response. Show your thinking out loud. Say, "Oh, that's irritating, but it's not the end of the world. I'll change it and carry on." The aim is not to deliberately humiliate Sophie or engineer some enormous public failure for you or her. It's to give her repeated evidence that she can see and hear in context that a mistake might feel uncomfortable, but she can cope with the feeling, that she can repair the error and continue. It is not the end of the world. The most likely outcome when she makes a mistake, no one notices. Not the teacher, not the other students, not her parents. She was okay.

And think carefully about any reassurance you give her and how you phrase it. When Sophie asks, "Is this work right?" sometimes our instinct is to reply, "Yeah, it's brilliant. Don't worry. You always do excellent work." And that might reduce her anxiety for about 30 seconds. But if we do it constantly, she learns that she needs an adult to remove the uncertainty for her before she can continue with her work. She's learned dependence rather than independence. And we want to move her gradually from, "Don't worry, you haven't failed," towards praise like, "I can see this feels uncomfortable, but you can cope with not being certain with your work. What do you think the next step is?" That's connection before correction. We name the feeling, we maintain expectations, but then we help her build the skill that she needs to get through this situation for herself. So this is about skill building rather than taking away the anxiety so she can learn independence in the future.

It also helps to praise recovery rather than praising her identity. If Sophie constantly hears, "You're so clever," or, "You're my brilliant writer," then mistakes start to look scary to her because they threaten her identity. Instead, when you see her being flexible about her work, jump on that instead. Say something like, "Oh, you found that correction difficult, but you stayed the course and you got through it. You didn't let it bother you too much, or you managed that worry." And then notice when she recovers from a mistake, say, "Sophie, you made an error, but you changed your approach and you carried on." We're just naming her behaviours. We're not blowing what she's done out of proportion, but we're showing her that success isn't never getting things wrong. Success is knowing what to do when things go wrong so you can achieve a desired outcome.

If Sophie were older in secondary, that might involve her being given time to engage in some reflective journaling rather than have an adult constantly providing that feedback. She records the challenges she experienced during the day and how she responded to those challenges for herself. And then maybe she reviews it once a week with a mentor who talks through those difficulties. And of course, if Sophie's reaction to mistakes is part of a wider pattern, perhaps alongside rigid thinking, anxiety about change, sensory needs, or difficulties regulating her emotions, whatever they are, it might be worth stepping back and building a fuller picture of what's going on underneath Sophie's behaviour. And our free SEND Behaviour Handbook can help you connect classroom behaviours with possible underlying needs and identify areas that may require further support.

Now, the SEND Behaviour Handbook, it's not a diagnostic medical tool, but it can help prompt your own thinking and staff thinking and to ask better questions about why you are seeing the behaviours you are in the classroom. You can download your copy for free. Over 100,000 teachers from around the world have done it. I'll put a link in the episode description. But if you want to go there directly from listening to the podcast, you go to beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the free resources tab at the top and you will see the SEND Handbook at the top of the page. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the free resources tab and you'll see it there. But again, I'll also put a copy of the link in the episode description so you can just open your podcast app and tap straight through.

So to recap, because we've covered a lot of things today, high standards and anxiety-driven perfectionism are not the same thing. Some people are attracted or pulled towards an ideal result, while others are pushed away from or repelled by the fear of making a mistake. And many students can experience both at the same time. The research tells us that perfectionistic concerns, so that's fear of errors, self-doubt, worry about judgment, they have a much stronger relationship with anxiety and regulation difficulties than just having high standards by themselves. To help your student, don't make assumptions about what's driving their behaviour. Try to identify which motivation is driving the people. Agree with them what looks okay for a finished piece of work that might give them problems in advance and give them manageable opportunities to make a mistake, to recover from that mistake, and carry on. And potentially model that for them in class because I'll tell you something, it might be helpful for Sophie, but it will also be helpful for a lot of other kids in the room.

And perhaps take these three questions back into school this week. What does this pupil believe a mistake says about them as a person? Is my praise and reassurance accidentally increasing the pressure for her to perform? And what small, manageable imperfection can we help Sophie experience and successfully recover from? If you found today's episode helpful, if it helped you think differently about a pupil, please subscribe and leave us a review. Five stars would obviously be perfect. Although in the spirit of today's episode, I am working very hard to accept that four stars would not make me a fundamentally bad person. I think if there's one thing you can't accuse me of, it's applying the tyranny of high standards to any of these podcast episodes. Anyway, I hope you have a brilliant week. Why not treat yourself to a nice new pair of pants? And I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.