JANUARY 2015 90 REALSIMPLE.COM

IT’S THE THIRD FRIDAY of the school year at Vachel Lindsay Elementary School, in Springfield, Illinois, and Julie Padavic’s first-grade class is getting antsy for the weekend. One little boy zooms around making airplane noises; several girls pop up to use the pencil sharpener. But when Julie begins to count in a calm, quiet voice, all 24 of them scramble to settle themselves on a big square rug in the center of the room. Julie, 31, is small but commanding, with a trim black bob and eyes that are warm but that miss nothing. She sits on a chair in front of the class and begins to read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs,pausing every now and then to refocus her more wayward charges: “Emma, can I trust you to be still next to Sarah? OK, show me you can do it.” “Max, can you do your best learning there, or do you need to sit closer to me?”

When the story is finished, Julie guides the chil-dren, whom she calls her “friends,” back to their desks, where they industriously convert brown paper bags into homes for the aforementioned three pigs. As they work, she circles the room, pausing to admire a choice to use neon pink for the brick house or turquoise for straw. A sign over one bulletin board reads think big, have fun, be kind, show love, which is a kind of mantra for Julie’s philosophy of teaching. “I spend my whole day telling my students that it doesn’t have to be perfect and you’re wonderful the way you are,” she tells me later. “But for some reason I just can’t give that to myself.”

Written by Virginia Sole-Smith

“DEAR REAL SIMPLE,

I’M A CONTROLFREAK.

PLEASE HELP.” DOMESTIC

PERFECTION COMES

WITH A PRICE.JULIE PADAVIC

GOT TIRED OF PAYING IT.

Photographs by Chris Buck

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JANUARY 2015 92 REALSIMPLE.COM

IN FACT, UNDERNEATH that calm exterior, Julie is dangerously close to a breaking point. “My name is Julie Padavic, and I am a control freak,” she wrote in an e-mail to Real Simple this past July. “Other adjectives that have been thrown my way in jest or otherwise include anal, OCD, perfectionist.”

Looking around her bright and cheerful class-room, I start to see the problem. The space is surprisingly tidy for the end of a school week. Crayons, flash cards, and other supplies are impec-cably organized in a wall of buckets, and in the “Reading Reef” corner, dozens of picture books are sorted into plastic bins, each labeled by genre. By the time we leave, every student’s chair stands at attention on top of its desk, and I notice that Julie makes a point of correcting those that dare to face the wrong way. A little anal, but fair enough, you may be thinking; many of us have the urge to restore order at the end of the day. But as we talk further, I learn that Julie’s day rarely ends before the wee hours of the morning. And it’s not just that Julie is juggling a full-time job with coursework for a post-master’s certification and many volunteer commitments; it’s the extent to which she lets these responsibilities, and many more, monopolize her time. “Julie will answer a parent’s e-mail the second it comes in at 10 p.m.,” her husband, David, tells me. “Then she’ll be up for another three hours worrying about whether she used the right language.”

And if Julie is worrying, odds are she’s cleaning or organizing. At the Padavic home, every surface gleams and every carpet has been vacuumed in precise diagonals. There is not so much as a spoon in the sink or a sock peeking out of the hamper. “I’ve been known to go in and remake the bed after houseguests make it in the morning,” Julie admits. “One of our friends even cried, feeling that I found her bedmaking skills lacking.”

When she gives me a tour, Julie opens closets somewhat shamefacedly—not because they’re messy but because they’re perfect. Everywhere I look, hair products, cleaning supplies, and toilet paper are sorted into baskets, spaced precisely on shelves, and labeled in her flawless teacher’s cur-sive. Even the dog’s toys are neatly arranged on its bed. “Cleaning and organizing soothes me,” says Julie. “It’s hard for me to relax by reading a novel or something. I hate feeling unproductive.”

THE NEED FOR CONTROL TO BE CLEAR , Julie does not suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. (See sidebar, page 97, for the distinctions.) But David still thinks the problem is serious. “She says, ‘This is how I relax!’ But relaxing is when you take a nap or go for a nice, long walk,” he says. “You should feel energized afterward. Julie wears herself to the bone working on our house.” David is a laid-back 33-year-old with classic midwestern charm. (He and Julie met in 2005 and married in ’09.) But his frustration is palpable. Most of the couple’s weekends are swallowed up by house chores and projects. On a typical Sunday night, when David wants to relax and watch TV, Julie will decide to vacuum or start cleaning the windows. “She’ll say she doesn’t want any help, but then I feel like a jerk sitting there,” he says. “It’s like, Oh, here’s David drinking beer and watching football while his wife slaves away.” But Julie is quick to own her habits: “I don’t do it because David expects it—I do it because it puts me in control,” she says. After all, this is also a woman who rewrites e-mails on behalf of her colleagues, whether they’ve asked her to or not. And Julie not only planned every detail of her wedding—she choreo-graphed the proposal, too. “I told David that we’d get engaged at Christmas, when our families would all be in town, and I picked out the ring,” she admits. “There was no element of surprise. I had already planned out the whole wedding—and even booked the venue—the summer before.”

Julie knows that her type A habits are taking a toll on their life. “I’m exhausted all the time, and I get sick a lot because I expend so much energy micromanaging,” she says. “I also know that I’m being selfish. It’s not fair to David or the rest of my friends and family when I get so consumed with my to-do list and don’t make time for them.” Per-haps more important, she and David want to start a family. “But I can’t even think about the lack of control I’ll have over that entire 18-plus-year pro-cess,” says Julie. “I have to deal with this now.”

“I love this house, but I do believe it served as a catalyst. I feel so much pressure to keep it perfect. Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that we should be living in a Pottery Barn catalog.”

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LETTING GO AT HOMETHE PADAVICS AGREE that one of their biggest sources of tension is Julie’s desire to reorganize David’s belongings in addition to her own. “I leave a trail around the house,” David admits. “But the thing is, I know where I’ve left something.” Julie insists that mostly she’s trying to help but acknowledges that she also gets annoyed by David’s “piles and trails of things. They just look like clutter to me.” She’s also constantly reinventing the (already perfectly organized) wheel and finding new places for everyday items, so it can take David an extra 15 minutes to leave the house because he’s hunting for Julie’s new storage spot for his wallet, phone, and keys.

To help them sync up their housekeeping styles, I call Julie Morgenstern, the New York City–based author of Organizing From the Inside Out. Bring-ing in a professional organizer to help someone who is already compulsively organized seems counterintuitive, and when I first tell Morgenstern about Julie, she jokes, “Maybe I should just hire her!” But after their first meeting, Morgenstern changes her mind: “Julie is trying to force them both to be organized in ways that look good but don’t necessarily function well for the way they live and use their space.”

MORGENSTERN ASKS if there was ever a point in Julie’s life when she didn’t feel so compelled to organize. Thinking back, Julie recalls the house she shared with four roommates in college. The common spaces were pretty messy, but it didn’t bother her. “I could keep my room exactly the way I wanted, and that was all I was responsible for,” she says. But the house the Padavics share now feels like “the hugest responsibility.” For one thing, it represents a tremendous financial investment. David works long hours as an e-commerce entrepreneur, so Julie took on the role of home manager. “I love this house, but I do believe it served as a catalyst, because I feel so much pressure to keep it perfect. Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that we should be living in a Pottery Barn catalog at all times,” she says. “I think I also believe that if my house is in order, then my life must be in

order—even though, actually, my life is often in the most disarray when my house looks great!” Morgenstern agrees: “It’s time to take some of that pressure off.”

Morgenstern instructs the couple to sit down and discuss their house room by room, to decide who will be in charge of which areas and tasks. “They need a proper division of labor,” says Mor-genstern. “So if Julie knows David is in charge of the living room or of vacuuming—Julie likes the way David does the floors—she can cross that off her list. We can’t make the house smaller, but we can shrink the footprint of her responsibility.”

They also need to figure out what’s working and what isn’t about each space—like the coffee cup-board in the kitchen, which Julie has styled like a magazine photo but which requires David to reach past three things he never uses to find the mug he drinks from every morning. By Morgenstern’s

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second visit, Julie has had an epiphany: “David is actually pretty organized!” she says. “I always thought he was leaving things around on purpose to irritate me. But now I get that those scattered objects are actually his to-do list. It’s like how some of my students who have the messiest-looking desks are the quickest to find their markers, because they know exactly where they put them.”

IN FACT, THE PADAVICS are what Morgenstern considers a “classic mismatch” of organizational styles. “Julie thinks it’s organized when surfaces are clear and everything looks good; David thinks it’s organized when everything he needs is where he can reach it,” she says. Her strategy for promoting marital harmony as quickly as possible is to find a way to blend the two styles: “The Padavics need a ‘project bin’ with a lid in the corner of every room,” she says. “Then David can leave things out where he needs them, but if the piles drive Julie crazy, she can stash everything and he’ll know exactly where to look.”

Julie’s next epiphany comes when Morgenstern explains that organization isn’t supposed to be the end goal; it’s a tool that Julie can use to give herself more time to enjoy her life. “I’ve had this idea that I have to keep redoing every space in our home over and over—that this is what you’re supposed to do as a good homeowner,” she says. “To hear [from Morgenstern] that actually, no, you can organize a space and say, ‘It works—it’s done now!’ Wow, that’s a huge relief.”

But tackling the practical side of Julie’s orga-nizing is only the first step. “When someone is organizing and reorganizing to the degree Julie is, it’s not just about finding a better system,” Mor-genstern says. “At 2 a.m., Julie’s not doing these projects to make their home better. It’s almost an abuse of organization, the way someone might abuse drugs or alcohol.”

LETTING GO AT WORKTHE IDEA OF AN “organization addiction” sounds extreme, but to Julie it’s a relief to admit to this. “I organize to avoid my feelings,” she says. When she’s worried about a struggling student or a fight with David, the urge to organize comes on

strong, no matter what else she’s doing or how late it is at night. It seems easier to take apart the bathroom closet than to deal with the real source of her anxiety. Unlike most addictions, this one gets positive reinforcement. “Part of the reason it’s so hard for me to relax is that people notice when you keep an impeccable house,” says Julie. “I’m known for being super-organized, and that creates even more expectations.” Julie notes that she grew up using schoolwork to escape in a similar fashion. Diving into her studies resulted in academic success. The external validation this produced became a key to her sense of self. Says David, “It’s like no one ever told her that you don’t have to get a 4.0 all the time.” Julie now throws herself into work in much the same way, holding herself to high standards in terms of performance and parent evaluations while setting ambitious goals, like taking on a school leader-

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ship role in 10 years. “When I was a new teacher, I felt like I had to earn my keep, since I didn’t have as much experience as my colleagues. So I took on all the odd jobs, like cleaning out our supply closet and making all the photocopies,” says Julie. “Over the years, that’s turned into feeling like I have to keep doing everything, because I want to control every last detail, especially if it’s a project that feels ‘onstage,’ like orientation night or a letter going home to the parents.”

TO HELP JULIE ADDRESS what might be better termed “achievement addiction,” I call Pamela Mitchell, a coach and the founder of the Reinvention Institute, in Miami. Many of Mitchell’s clients are, like Julie, people who have become obsessed with achieving for achievement’s sake. Explains Mitchell: “Julie has been checking off boxes based on what looks good to the world. After you teach for a few years, you’re expected to want to move up to become a principal. But she has never asked herself what kind of emotional payoff she wants from accomplishing those goals. When you get caught in that trap, your successes are empty and it starts to feel like nothing will ever be enough.” This triggers what Mitchell calls “the anxiety-activity circle,” in which Julie becomes anxious because she feels as if she’s not doing enough, takes on more (at work and at home) to avoid dealing with that anxiety, then feels overwhelmed, which sparks more anxiety.

To break the cycle, Mitchell says, Julie needs to identify the emotions that she wants to feel when she attains a goal, then pare down her responsibility list to focus on the activities that truly elicit those rewards. “This will mean less micromanaging and more delegating. Julie can reframe what feels like ‘letting go’ as ‘creating space’ to pursue her true goals,” says Mitchell. To help identify what those goals might be, Mitchell asks Julie to dream up her ideal day. What would she do if there were no work deadlines or to-do lists to consider? “I would have breakfast and relax with David, and then we might go apple picking or just enjoy the fall day with family and friends,” Julie tells me a few weeks later, when we meet. “I would feel contentment, wholeness, and warmth.” I ask her how much time she would spend orga-nizing or cleaning, and we’re both surprised by her answer. “None,” she says, after thinking about it for a minute. After all, that’s what she does to numb

feelings. “There’s no emotional payoff there.”After working with Mitchell, Julie sets remind-

ers on her phone so the words “contentment, wholeness, and warmth” pop up several times a day. When she gets crazed at work (rewording a memo to parents that her colleague already did a perfectly fine job on, for instance) or at home (feeling compelled to buff fingerprints off every stainless-steel surface), Julie uses those pop-up reminders to evaluate each task. “If I can’t see how it will help me cultivate that sense of warmth, contentment, and wholeness, then maybe I don’t need to do it,” she says.

A few weeks into the school year, Julie spends a day at a work conference. On the drive home, she begins worrying about what might have happened in the classroom during her absence. In the past, this would have meant driving straight to school and spending several hours straightening up desks, organizing books, and preparing for the next day, even though she knew that her coworkers would have this covered. “Instead I asked myself what I really wanted to do,” Julie reports. “And I real-ized, actually, that it was a beautiful day and I just wanted to go home and take the dog for a walk. So I gave myself permission to do that instead.”

LEARNING TO RELAXAFTER A FEW WEEKS, Julie finds that going through the task-evaluation process can be exhausting, and sometimes she slips into old, familiar patterns. I call Michelle Segar, Ph.D., a motivation psychologist in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the author of the forthcoming No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness, to find out what Julie can do to keep herself on track. Segar studies what it takes to make a sustainable change in behavior: why most of us break those New Year’s resolutions or regain the weight after a diet, and why some manage to stay the course. Her research shows that we’re most likely to make a new habit stick if we’ve already ensured that our “foundational self-care needs” are being met. She explains: “We each have a slightly different hierarchy of foundational needs, but for many of us sleep is the most important. Every time Julie

Julie has spent her

whole adult life viewing

sleep as a waste of time:

“You can humble-brag

about how late you stayed

up finishing a project, but

nobody wants to hear how

you took good care of

yourself. There aren’t

any bragging rights

to sleep.”

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and stress levels the next day. “Julie needs hard data to show her how much better she can func-tion with sleep,” says Segar.

A NEW BEGINNINGI TOUCH BASE with Julie and David a few weeks after our first meeting to find out how they’re doing. “What I’m most excited about is having a better perspective,” says Julie. “I still get that pull to control, but I can use it to ask myself what I really need instead of pushing down my anxieties.” They’re both enthusiastic about what they did that past Sunday: Julie surprised David by booking a tee time and going with him to the golf course instead of staying home to clean. “I got to commandeer the cart and read

“David and I are being

gentler with each other. I still get that

pull to control, but I can use it

to ask myself what I really

need instead of pushing down my anxieties.”

confronts that urge to organize, she has to make a tough choice. And because she skimps on sleep, every one of those choices is even more difficult. She’s depleted, making it harder to change old habits.”

Through working with Segar, Julie begins to understand just how much she has devalued rest. “There aren’t any bragging rights to sleep,” she tells me. “You can humble-brag about how late you stayed up to finish some killer project, but nobody wants to hear how you took good care of yourself and got lots of rest.” In fact, Julie has spent her whole adult life viewing sleep as a waste of time. “David loves going to bed,” she says. “And in the past I’ve pooh-poohed that and even gotten angry when he didn’t stay up late with me to accomplish a task. Sleep feels like such an inefficient use of my time.”

Segar tells Julie to start keeping a log of how much she sleeps and how that affects her energy

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“Control freak” is not a medical term, so ask-ing a doctor to speak to it is tricky. What Real Simple learned talking with Helen Blair Simp-son, M.D., Ph.D., the director of the Center for Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders at Columbia University, in New York City, is that when something is in the range of normal behavior, it’s not OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Perhaps the behavior is even interfer-ing with some elements of life, but it’s not turn-ing someone’s world upside down. Simpson chalks some control-freak behavior up to soci-etal pressures. “I think women, particularly working women with kids, believe there are so many things we’re sup-posed to be doing,” says Simpson. “And there’s some problem with you if you can’t handle it all.” OCD is something else, and Simpson shared the red flags to help us understand it. She explains that if you expe-rience red flag No. 1 and/or No. 2 along with No. 3, you should ask your doc-tor for information.

CONTROL FREAK OR OCD SUFFERER?

half my book-club book while he golfed, so we were both happy!” she says. David is delighted they spent the time together and impressed that Julie left dishes in the sink while they did it. Other victories include Julie’s decision to stop making the bed on hurried weekday mornings and to respect the “David zones” in the house (for example, his bathroom drawer). David is being mindful of the trail of destruction that he can leave. “I’m trying to be more careful when I shave or brush my teeth so she doesn’t freak out about the bathroom,” he says. “And I’ll mow the grass in the diagonal stripes she likes, even though it’s a pain with the shape of our yard. I know these things are important to her. If I help in certain areas, it might stave off one of those five-hour cleaning binges.” Julie is grateful for those small changes. “We’re being gentler with each other,” she notes.

At work, Julie has found herself saying no a little more often and asking for help when she needs it. She’s also focusing on the wealth of talent her colleagues bring to the table instead of dwelling on tiny details that she would handle differently.

THE ELEMENT OF THIS whole experience that has resonated most for Julie was an assignment from Mitchell to keep a daily “success journal.” Every night before bed, Julie jots down four triumphs from her day; big, small, at work, at home. (“Played ball with the dog instead of loading the dishwasher”; “enjoyed the look of the fall leaves on the yard instead of feeling compelled to rake them up.”) Explains Mitchell, “Part of the reason Julie had gotten so hard-charging and goal-oriented is that she wasn’t taking the time to appreciate everything she was already doing so well.” Julie likes that the journal lets her end the day feeling accomplished, instead of spiraling about all the things she has to do the next day.

Sleep is still a work in progress. When David turns on the morning news, he often finds the TV on a channel that broadcasts CSI reruns all night long. But the couple are optimistic about how even the small changes they made are adding up to something bigger. “The baby conversation has become a when, not an if!” Julie reports. “We both feel ready for the challenge. And even if having a child throws me back into a tizzy, I know I have the tools to deal with it.” n

OCD RED FLAG NO. 1: INTRUSIVE THOUGHTSRuminating over a question or a concern is not unusual. “We all get intrusive thoughts from time to time,” says Simpson. “But in OCD these thoughts impair functioning and last for at least an hour a day—often much longer.” The topic of these worries can vary. Contamina-tion and cleanliness are classic OCD obsessions, but OCD patients also struggle with intrusive thoughts, images, or urges related to causing harm; achieving symme-try or making things “just so”; or “taboo” topics, such as violence and sex.

OCD RED FLAG NO. 2:REPETITIVE BEHAVIORS OR RITUAL SPeople with OCD will compulsively repeat certain behaviors or rituals, such as wash-ing the kitchen counter in a very particular way, touching doorknobs a certain number of times, or unplugging appli-ances. “Checking twice that you have your ID or passport before going to the airport is not OCD,” says Simpson. “Distress around repetitive behav-iors is a key component.”

OCD RED FLAG NO. 3:DISTRESS THAT INTERFERES WITH FUNCTIONINGUp to 89 percent of us will experience intrusive thoughts and compul-sive behaviors at some point. “It’s normal if you find yourself standing on the roof of a tall building to have an urge to jump,” says Simpson. “It can be unsettling. You might think, Whoa, where did that thought come from?But this is normal.” The difference in people with OCD is that these thoughts or compulsions are recurrent and persis-tent—and cause intense anxiety or distress. Peo-ple with OCD may also believe that they have to follow through on their compulsive behaviors to keep themselves from doing something “bad” or to prevent a disaster. “They wrestle with these issues constantly and struggle to get through the day,” says Simpson.

If you find yourself fraught with anxiety as a result of intrusive thoughts or compulsive behaviors for an hour a day or more, your doctor can help. Says Simpson, “We have great treatments now, both in terms of cognitive behavioral therapy and medications.”