Some years ago, the writer Neil Gaiman was invited to a meeting of famous artists, scientists and explorers. He felt completely out of place. He was sure that someone would soon notice the mistake and ask him to leave. One evening he stood at the back of the hall and started talking to a polite old man. The man looked at the crowd and said that he also wondered what he was doing there. All these people had made amazing things, he said, while he had only gone where he was sent.
The old man was Neil Armstrong, the first human being to walk on the Moon. Gaiman shared this story on his blog in 2017, and later confirmed that it really happened. It became one of the most shared stories on the internet about a feeling that millions of people know very well: the feeling that you do not really deserve your own success.
Two psychologists and 150 successful women
The feeling finally got a name in 1978. Two American psychologists, Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, published a paper called “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women”. They had worked with more than 150 successful women — university teachers, students and professionals. Many of these women had excellent results, awards and degrees. Yet they secretly believed that they were not intelligent at all, and that other people had simply been fooled.
Clance and Imes chose their words carefully. They wrote about an “impostor phenomenon”, not an “impostor syndrome”. Clance later explained that she did not want it to look like one more illness that women have. This detail still matters today. Impostor syndrome is not a medical diagnosis. It is not in the DSM‑5 or in the ICD‑11, the two main lists of mental health conditions that doctors use. It is an experience, not a disease.
At first the two psychologists thought that this experience was typical of women. Later research showed something different, as we will see.
The trick scale in your head
The centre of impostor feelings is not low self‑esteem. It is a strange way of explaining results. When something goes well, the person says: I was lucky, the task was easy, the teacher liked me, I worked twenty hours instead of five. When something goes badly, the person says: this is the truth about me, I am simply not good enough.
Valerie Young, an expert who gives workshops on the topic, compares it to a broken kitchen scale. Criticism and mistakes are put on the scale and weigh a lot. Praise and good results are put on the same scale and weigh almost nothing. Nothing that other people say can change the number.
Clance also described a loop that repeats again and again. It usually starts with a new task: a new job, an exam, a first presentation. First comes anxiety and self‑doubt. Then the person reacts in one of two ways: they either prepare far too much, or they put everything off until the last night. The result is usually good. But there is no pride — only relief. And the success is explained away: it happened because of the crazy amount of work, or because of luck, not because of ability. So the next task starts from the same place, and the loop begins again.
How many people feel this way?
You have probably seen the number “70 per cent” in an article about impostor syndrome. It comes from a survey that Clance made in the mid‑1980s with the psychologist Gail Matthews. They found that about 70 per cent of people from very different jobs had felt like impostors at some point in their career. Matthews also noticed when it happens most often: when people start a new job, or when they do something that nobody around them has done before.
That number is popular, but it is not very exact. In 2020, a team led by Dr Dena Bravata at Stanford published the first large review of the evidence in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. They collected 62 studies with 14,161 participants. The results were surprisingly wide: between 9 and 82 per cent of people in a group had impostor feelings, depending on which questionnaire the researchers used and where they put the line between “normal doubt” and “impostor”.
The review also destroyed a few myths. Impostor feelings were common among both men and women. They appeared at every age, from teenagers to experienced professionals near the end of their careers. They were especially strong among people from ethnic minorities. And they were often connected with anxiety, depression, low job satisfaction and burnout. So the exact percentage is unclear, but one thing is certain: if you feel like this, you are in very large company.
Five masks of the impostor
Valerie Young noticed that impostor feelings do not look the same in everyone. In her 2011 book she described five types. The Perfectionist thinks that 99 points out of 100 is a failure. The Superhuman works longer hours than everybody else to prove that they belong. The Natural Genius believes that real talent means doing things easily, so any struggle feels like proof of stupidity. The Soloist refuses to ask for help, because asking would show weakness. The Expert collects one more course, one more certificate, and still does not feel ready to start.
These types are not just a nice idea from a book. In a series of workshops for American medical students, doctors and university staff between 2019 and 2021, 198 people were asked about them. Fifty‑seven per cent had impostor feelings. Among them, 42 per cent recognised themselves as the Expert, 34 per cent as the Soloist, 31 per cent as the Super‑person and 25 per cent as the Perfectionist. When they were asked where these feelings came from, 72 per cent named the expectations of their parents.
The surprising good news
Almost everything written about impostor syndrome says that it is bad for you. Basima Tewfik, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, decided to check this idea. She separated the thought itself — “other people think I am better than I really am” — from the painful emotions around it. Then she tested what happens at work, in four studies with 3,603 people.
The results, published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2022, were unexpected. Employees who often had these thoughts were rated by others as more effective with people. The reason was simple: because they were not sure about themselves, they paid more attention to everyone else. Among young doctors in training, those with more impostor thoughts made better eye contact, nodded more and asked better questions. Patients described them as better listeners. And their work results did not get worse.
Tewfik warns against the wrong conclusion. She says clearly that this does not make impostor thoughts a good thing, because they still reduce self‑esteem and positive feelings. There are much healthier ways to become a good listener. But the research does change the story a little. The feeling is not proof that something is broken inside you.
So what actually helps?
Here is an honest fact: when Bravata’s team looked for studies that tested treatments for impostor syndrome, they found none. Nobody has proved yet that one particular method works better than another. What we have are strategies that come from psychology practice and from the research on how these feelings work.
- Say it out loud. Clance and Imes worked with groups for a reason. Their patients were shocked to hear successful people describe exactly the same secret. The belief “I am the only fake here” cannot survive that conversation.
- Collect evidence. Keep a file with specific feedback, finished projects and problems you have solved. Feelings do not remember well. A file does.
- Check your explanation. After a success, ask yourself what a good friend would say about it. If you always answer “luck”, try to write down which skills were actually needed.
- Expect it at the start. A new job or a first big project is exactly when these feelings arrive. If you know this in advance, it is easier to read the feeling as normal, not as a warning.
- Ask for help on purpose. If you recognise the Soloist in yourself, asking one question is a small experiment. Nobody loses respect for you, and you get your answer faster.
- Let things be difficult. Talent is not the ability to do everything immediately. Struggling with a hard task is not evidence against you — it is what learning looks like.
One more thing is important. Impostor feelings often come together with anxiety and depression, and the Stanford review showed that these problems make each other worse. If the self‑doubt lasts for months, stops you from sleeping or keeps you away from opportunities, it is worth talking to a psychologist or doctor. That is not a sign of weakness; it is the same logic as going to a dentist with toothache.
Maybe there are no grown‑ups
At the end of his story, Gaiman writes about the moment when he understood something about Armstrong.
Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did.
Perhaps that is the most useful idea in this whole topic. The people who seem completely confident are often just better at hiding the same doubt. Nobody has a certificate that proves they deserve their place. There are only people who work, who are sometimes lucky, and who feel slightly out of their depth — which is usually a sign that they are doing something new.
So the question is not how to make the feeling disappear for ever. It is smaller and more practical: what will you do the next time it visits you — believe it, or go on with the work anyway?
