Feeling you don’t deserve what you’ve achieved

Where the name comes from

In 1978 the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described, in a paper on high-achieving women, what they saw in many of their clients: they were convinced they were not as capable as others believed and that sooner or later they would be found out. They called it the impostor phenomenon.

Later studies have found it in men too, and in students, health workers and other professionals in very different fields.

What the research says

The most complete review so far, published in 2020 by Dena Bravata and her team, brought together 62 studies with more than fourteen thousand people. It found that how common it is varies enormously, between 9% and 82%, mainly depending on the questionnaire used and where the cut-off is set.

Of the studies that compared men and women, half found more impostor feelings in women and the other half found no difference. It appeared especially often in people from ethnic minorities, and frequently alongside anxiety, low mood and burnout at work.

It is not an illness

It is not a diagnosis but a very common experience. It does not appear as a disorder in the DSM or the ICD-10, the standard classifications. And it feeds on a loop: success is put down to luck or to other people’s help, so it never counts as proof.

It easily goes hand in hand with perfectionism, because if only perfect counts, almost nothing shows that you are good enough. We talk about it in the article on the fear of not doing it perfectly.

What helps

• Saying it. When you tell people, someone almost always replies “that happens to me too”.
• Keeping the facts: what you have done, what people have told you, in writing.
• Telling the difference between feeling incapable and being incapable. The feeling is not proof.
• Accepting praise with a “thank you”, without playing it down.
• Remembering that not knowing something yet is not the same as fooling anyone.

One concrete idea: keep a folder, on paper or on your phone, where you save thank-you messages, good appraisals and the problems you have solved. It means you have the facts to hand on the day the doubt bites, when your memory only recalls the mistakes.

It is worth knowing that the 2020 review found no studies that had tested a specific treatment. These ideas are sensible and easy to try, but there is no proven formula.

Measuring yourself by your own yardstick

The impostor feeling grows when you measure yourself against what you imagine about others, who always seem more confident. But with them you only see the outside, while you know everything about yourself, doubts included. The article on comparing yourself with others may help with this.

Talking about it with someone in your own line of work whom you trust can be eye-opening: you may find that the person who seemed most confident has the same doubt and carries it in silence, just like you.

When to ask for help

If the feeling of not being up to it keeps you awake, freezes you at work or in your studies, or comes with anxiety or a sadness that won’t lift, it may help to talk it over with your GP or a psychologist.

A professional can help you look calmly at those ideas about yourself and separate what you feel from what has actually happened. Asking for that help doesn’t prove you are an impostor: it shows you take your well-being seriously.

Other people feel the same

In A shared universe you can light a star with that doubt you don’t mention at work, without names and without anyone knowing who you are. And reading other people’s you will see that it is far more common than it seems.

If one day something goes well and you dare to believe it, you can come back to your star and say so.