Feeling like an imposter
This post is my opinion and is not an adequate replacement for professional medical advice. If you’re feeling down, please seek out a relevant medical practitioner.
Image Credit: Scott Young
What is it?
Imposter syndrome is that nagging internal voice that doubts you. It’s the voice that thinks your incompetitent and undeserving, it ignores your objective achievements.
Ironically, the moniker “imposter syndrome” is actually an imposter itself because it is not defined as a syndrome by the people who are qualified to do th defining. That includes the UN, WHO or the DSM-5. It doesn’t qualify because there isn’t a specific health related cause which leads to feeling like an imposter. Although just because the medical profession has not defined this as a medical syndrome, does not make it any less real. I think most doctors would agree, if something hurts you, then it’s real enough to deal with.
For the purposes of this article, I will take a leaf out of Gravois 2007 and refer to imposter syndrome as “the imposter phenomenon” (TIP). I think it’s important to rebrand away from a syndrome as it will give us a clearer path on how to work with and mitigate TIP.
There’s been a lot of research on TIP over the past few years, the Gravois paper mentioned above found that roughly 70% of people felt like they were an imposter at some point in their life. This meta-analysis found that between 8%-82% of the 14,000+ participants had felt like an imposter at some point. The research also found that TIP is often comorbid with depression and anxiety and is associated with impaired job performance, job satisfaction, and burnout among various employee populations.
Long story short, imposter syndrome definitely impacts lots of people in a negative way.
Where does it come from?
Unfortunately there is not one clear source for TIP, the current thinking is that your family, childhood, personality and mental health all play a part. These are all very individual experiences hence very hard to write about at a macro level. However one other factor plays a part in TIP and that is societal pressures. Again, this is not necessarily the same for everyone but some of the underlying factors are shared more globally.
One of the most pervasive and unacknowledged drivers of our emotions is advertising. Branding started in the 1500s and initially referred to the branding of cattle. I know this might not seem relevant but the branding of cattle in the 16th century has a lot of similarities to branding of today. Quite literally, it was about making your mark. The brands were all unique and used to identify the specific cattle ranch, very similar to how companies use logos today. As Aviva Cantor puts it “They were simple, distinctive and instantly identifiable—the tried and true pillars of any great brand. Think of these icons like the first product logos.”
This was the birth of branding but advertising really took a leap forward in the 1950s when companies started evoking emotional reactions to their brand. This worked so well that companies have only continued to tap into this further. Here’s an example of some ads from the 1950s and 2020s.
What this does, is create an invisible layer of expectation across our societies. If Coke is telling us to #choosehappiness but we’re having a flat week, this can lead us to feeling inadequate. Why can’t I feel happy, if it’s as simple as choosing it? Rather than happiness being a possibility, it becomes a responsibility. This is not just prominent in advertising. An analysis of the phrase “You Deserve” across various mainstream media sources found a dramatic increase in the phrase over the past 40 years.
Image Credit: Spill
This has been compounded further by the exponential growth of social media over the past ten years. Not only are we told we deserve to be happy, successful and perfect by the media, we are now also bombarded by these same messages across various social media platforms. This study by Holly Shakya looked at Facebook use compromising overall wellbeing. Dr Shakya’s study found “that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being”. A one standard deviation increase in using Facebook led to a 5-8% drop in self-reported mental health.
Tim Urban does a great job of capturing this cycle in this post Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy.
This image captures the sentiment of the article well, essentially we’re always viewing our external environment at it’s best and viewing ourselves internally at our worst. You can see how this creates a feeling of inadequacy. Which can quickly evolve into negative self-talk and a poor perception of yourself. Essentially the underlying drivers that can lead to the imposter phenomenon.
So what can you do?
As I mentioned earlier, there’s no one solution that will fit all. A lot of the underlying drivers for TIP are personal. So what we need to do is get more in touch with ourselves. Recognising if we are using negative self-talk as a “motivation tool” can help. One useful exercise I found for this is to talk to yourself in the same way you would talk to your best friend. Chances are, you are probably a lot kinder to your best friend than you are to yourself.
Understanding why we think a certain way can also help. Dr Pauline Clance was the first researcher to talk about TIP back in 1978. She designed this quiz which helps identify what [‘type’ of imposter you are. There are five main imposter types and the idea is that your way of thinking, personal story and situation will normally lead to you leaning towards one of these imposters. You can read more detail about the five imposter types here. Doing the quiz is obviously not the same as seeking professional medical assistance but it can help give you some context on your thinking patterns which in-turn will help you understand how to change those patterns.
There isn’t a quick fix for feeling like an imposter, but recognising the reasons you feel like one is a great first step.