The Midlife Mindset Blocking Your Health Goals

How much compromise is best? Dr. Ruth Machin advises:

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good

All-or-nothing thinking, also called black-and-white or dichotomous thinking, is a cognitive distortion where people think in extremes, ignoring the grey areas in between. It can derail health goals by fostering guilt, shame, burnout, perfectionism, and often as not, completely abandoning goals when setbacks occur.

It’s particularly common in diet culture, because food is unavoidable and often tied to generational messages about thinness and restriction. Restrictive diets invariably fail long-term because the brain rebels against deprivation and has a negativity bias, focusing on perceived failures and amplifying them.

Dr. Machin points out that perfectionism tied to black-and-white thinking has been linked to depression, anxiety, emotional eating, and can worsen mood changes, including those that are common in menopause.

Her advice: notice when it happens, challenge whether your thoughts are truly black or white, and reframe them with kinder, more realistic alternatives. Focus on balance rather than perfection; for example, walking 4 days per week is better than none, 7,000 steps per day is frankly as good as 10,000, and an “80%” rule when it comes to eating rarely goes far wrong.

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Take care!