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Imposter syndrome is the name given to those unpleasant thoughts that tell you that you’re not good enough, not doing enough, or not deserving enough. Whether you are a graduate student, an early career researcher, or an established professor, the academic arena, with its competitive environments full of stress, criticism, and comparison, makes these thoughts louder. This can have a significant impact on your mental well-being, academic performance, and ability to flourish within an academic community. This blog post shall illustrate the consequences of imposter syndrome in an academic environment and offer some tips on how you might assuage those thoughts.

Competition and confidence

In person or online, at an international conference or your departmental weekly seminar, negative feedback can sometimes feel relentless and vanquishing. Even when receiving a Revise & Resubmit from a journal, it is common to glance over any positive comments as glib and focus only on the negatives, not least the report of Reviewer #2. You might feel disappointed after reading someone’s criticism of a piece you worked hard to complete, and this has knocked your confidence. Even an occasionally disagreeable attitude from a particular colleague can be enough to make one feel inadequate when contributing to discussions.

These examples of imposter syndrome are all detrimental to your health and well-being. The resulting low self-esteem and lack of confidence can be difficult to overcome, potentially causing you to experience low mood, to neglect self-care, or to withdraw from social and related academic situations. But a sense of inferiority can equally cause one to accept too many invitations to participate at workshops or write book chapters for edited volumes, in fear that one may never be asked again. This is at best deeply counterproductive, since taking on too much work actually puts you at risk of producing inferior work, thereby re-enforcing the sense of being an imposter.

This can all result in your experiencing burnout. The constant thoughts of ‘I should be working now’ or ‘I need to read this new article’ often lead to long days and nights buried in books instead of cooking a decent meal, taking exercise, and enjoying time with friends or pursuing your hobbies. Even just attempting to relax with a little TV in the evening can be guilt-inducing because the work is overwhelming and never-ending. Yet it is vital to your physical and emotional wellbeing to be able to regularly switch off from academia and make time for the activities you enjoy. It will take longer for you to recover from the effects of long-term burnout than the time you use now to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

When imposter syndrome leaves you feeling inadequate and hesitant, you might isolate yourself from those around you. You might drift away from friends because you’re now spending more time working, trying to ensure you write betters papers that won’t garner heaps of criticism or filling in gaps in your reading so that you won’t be shown up at a conference as not knowing your field sufficiently well. At the extreme, you might experience jealousy towards successful peers, which can eat you up inside and destroy relationships. This is not easy when it feels like you and everyone you know are all applying for funding from the same competitive  research councils and other funding bodies.

Authenticity and self-compassion

If any of this sounds familiar, then you’ll be relieved to hear that there are ways to manage your experiences of imposter syndrome to lessen the impact it has on all aspects of your life.

Practising self-compassion is crucial for tackling imposter syndrome. Remind yourself of the brilliant reasons why you have managed to come as far as you already have. Your work is important, but work is not the most important thing in life. Being an academic, you’re likely a conscientious person who feels defined by their achievements and lives to add lines to their CV. By learning to detach your identity from your academic work, you will be more resilient in the face of criticism and you won’t feel like you’re falling apart when difficult feedback inevitably comes. By reminding yourself of this, you can paradoxically find both meaning and pleasure in the research that you actually want to be doing and fall (back) in love with your research project.

Remember that mistakes and feedback are a natural, integral part of the learning process and do not have to be feared nor taken personally. Within a supportive environment, both the giving and receiving of feedback can be rewarding to all parties. To fight the urge to compare yourself with others, you can instead turn your thoughts to prioritising and focusing on yourself, how you work best, and your objectives in relation to your personal life, your family, and broader values. Being your authentic self and putting your energy into achieving your own goals – regardless of the goals of others – will have a positive impact on your academic work and personal relationships. Everybody is on a different path in life and has had different experiences, so it is unlikely that your goals will align with those of your peers. In our experiences of collaborating with researchers at all career stages –  be they graduate students, independent researchers, or emeriti working on their twentieth book – at Lex Academic, we have learned that comparing yourself to others interferes with getting the help and support that you most need right now.

Talking to a professional, trusted friend, or relative about your imposter syndrome and self-doubt can also be beneficial. Sharing can help you to see your thoughts from a different perspective and seek out the validation you need to build back your self-esteem and confidence. You might also find that talking to someone about your experience of imposter syndrome can help them to open up about their own experiences, and you will quickly realise that you are not alone.

Dare to be average

Imposter syndrome is prevalent within academia because academics accord high social and professional status and those attracted to a career of knowledge and higher learning are naturally conscientious and likely to question whether they are ‘good enough’ to be among the students and faculty members who populate a university. Clever, conscientious individuals can often be rather competitive as well, so academic institutions can become places of intense professional and interpersonal toxicity if one isn’t well protected with strong boundaries and a sense of self that transcends one’s academic output.

Furthermore, it is difficult to feel adequate to the hallowed brand names of certain universities and one can spend one’s entire academic career not really feeling as if one is sufficiently intellectually qualified. Brands such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale enjoy such cultural clout because they approximate ideals that elude the grasp of normal humans, and the aspirant intellectuals who seek to call these institutions ‘home’ may never feel they deserve their peculiar kind of housing. One will look at one’s colleagues and fellows and get the impression that everybody else qualifies, copes, belongs, fits in, and is having an easy time of it. The truth is that most people, at least at some point, question their place in the system. Some will be better off at less impressive, smaller institutions and this will ultimately be easier on the nervous system than trying to cope in a more high-pressured environment that will impress your parents. These kinds of things are also true outside of academia: one can be a brilliant and very happy lawyer at a small, regional law firm but a truly miserable lawyer at a top firm in the city. You still get to call yourself a lawyer but it’s about finding the type of environment that will work with your dispositions and values.

In a forum of relentless high achievement, one might do well to dare to be average: ask the ‘dumb’ question, attend the seminar on a topic that isn’t among your strengths, ask colleagues for advice, share drafts that you haven’t edited to death. These qualities may even make you more likeable and you can begin to redefine the academic spaces you inhabit as safe for exploration and experimentation, which are the core tenets of research itself. It is this flexible, ‘growth’ mindset (which can be contrasted with a ‘fixed’ or rigid mindset) that makes space for feedback, safe ways of failing, and will ultimately make your research better as you will be in a better position to digest and assimilate feedback rather than seeing criticism as hard evidence of your being an imposter.

The pressure to be constantly researching and publishing, coupled with negative feedback, can cause you to lack confidence, burn out, and experience low mood. It is important to ensure that you are prioritising yourself and your personal goals and making time to relax away from research to prevent imposter syndrome from having a detrimental effect on your well-being and relationships with others.