You did well. By most measures, you did really well. But you can't quite let yourself feel it, because there's always something you could have done better. The presentation went smoothly — but that one stumble in the middle. The project was excellent — but it could have been more polished. The meal was delicious — but you overcooked the vegetables slightly.

You didn't mean to spend an hour reading about bushfires, global conflict, and economic collapse before bed. You just picked up your phone. And then, somehow, here you are: wide awake at midnight, heart slightly elevated, with a low-grade sense that everything is quietly unravelling.

It usually starts with a thought — quiet, then louder. 'Do I actually love them? What if I'm with the wrong person? What if I feel nothing? What if they feel nothing for me?' Most people have moments of doubt in relationships. But for some people, these thoughts don't pass. They loop.

You text your partner after a difficult conversation: 'We're okay, right?' They reassure you. Ten minutes later, the thought creeps back. You scroll through the message thread just to check. You bring it up again over dinner. Sound familiar?

You'd think that someone with high standards would be the most productive person in the room. The one who gets things done early, who never misses a deadline, who always delivers.

And sometimes that's true, for a while. But if you look closely at how perfectionism actually plays out in people's lives, there's a pattern that surprises almost everyone who recognises it in themselves: the higher the standard, the harder it becomes to start.

This is the perfectionism–procrastination loop, and it's one of the most common things we see in our therapy rooms. Not because the people sitting across from us are lazy or unmotivated, quite the opposite. They care so much about doing things well that the fear of falling short becomes paralysing.

You may have noticed your child redoing a task over and over. Shoes pulled on, then pulled off, then pulled on again until they feel “right.” A sock seam that needs to sit exactly so. A drawing rubbed out and redrawn until something invisible falls into place. Books on a shelf rearranged for the third time before bed.

For many parents, these moments feel small at first. They look like fussiness, perfectionism, or simply a quirky personality. But when the redoing starts taking longer, the upset grows louder, or your child becomes genuinely distressed when something can’t be made “just right,” it may be more than a habit or a temperament thing.

Today we’re looking at a less-recognised form of OCD that often hides in plain sight, especially in children. It doesn’t usually involve germ fears or worries about something terrible happening. Instead, it’s driven by an internal sense that things must feel exactly right. We’ll walk through what “Just Right” OCD looks like, what keeps it going, and what tends to help.