Doubting yourself now and then is healthy. But when that doubt becomes permanent, when you have the stubborn feeling of usurping your place, despite all the evidence to the contrary, it slowly wears you down. And it often prepares the ground for burnout.
The good news: this mechanism is now well understood, and there are concrete ways to loosen its grip. You just have to start by recognising it.
1. Impostor syndrome: what are we talking about?
First described in 1978 by the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, impostor syndrome refers to that persistent feeling of illegitimacy: the impression of not deserving your success and of risking, at any moment, being "unmasked."
Two facts often come as a surprise. First, its frequency: an estimated 70% of people feel it at some point in their journey. Second, its target: it primarily affects competent, demanding people. Feeling like an impostor isn't a sign of incompetence, paradoxically, it's often the opposite.
2. The vicious circle that exhausts
The heart of the problem lies in one mechanism, the "impostor cycle." Faced with an assignment, anxiety rises. To contain it, you adopt one of two strategies: over-prepare excessively, or put it off then wrap everything up in a rush. The assignment succeeds. But instead of drawing confidence from it, you attribute the success to something else: luck, circumstances, other people's help, or "all the work I had to put in."
The dreaded consequence: success never counts as proof of competence. The doubt remains intact, ready to resurface at the next assignment. You can thus string together successes for years without confidence ever settling in, a bottomless well, exhausting to feed.
3. The link with burnout
This mechanism connects directly to several routes to professional exhaustion. So as not to be "found out," you work more, check everything, aim for perfection: doubt becomes an engine of permanent overinvestment.
Added to this is a difficulty in taking in recognition: compliments are systematically deflected ("they're just being polite"), so nothing recharges self-esteem. Chronic doubt, self-imposed overload and recognition that never reaches its target: this is exactly the breeding ground for the loss of a sense of accomplishment, one of the dimensions of burnout.
To take back control, it helps to set the voice of doubt against the reality of the facts:
| What the impostor voice says | What the facts say |
|---|---|
| "I just got lucky, that's all." | You were chosen because you were capable. Luck doesn't repeat ten times in a row. |
| "If they really knew, they'd see I don't master everything." | No one masters everything. Everyone learns as they go, it's normal. |
| "If I have to make this much effort, I mustn't be good enough." | Effort is the condition of competence, not proof of its absence. |
| "That compliment was just politeness." | And what if, for once, it were simply true? |
| "I must succeed at everything perfectly." | "Good enough" done and delivered beats perfect and never finished. |
4. Defusing doubt: concrete strategies
- ●Name the phenomenon: knowing it has a name, that it's very common and that it affects the most competent already reduces its grip. It isn't "me," it's a known mechanism.
- ●Keep an evidence file: write down the positive feedback, the successes, the thanks received, and reread it when the voice of doubt runs wild. Facts are more reliable than feelings.
- ●Rebalance your attributions: after a success, ask yourself concretely "what did I do to make this work?" Claiming your share is training, not arrogance.
- ●Accept compliments: reply "thank you" and stop there, without minimising. Every time you deflect praise, you reinforce the belief in your illegitimacy.
- ●Talk about it, especially with peers: discovering that admired colleagues feel the same thing deflates the doubt in minutes. Silence, on the other hand, feeds it.
Finally, when doubt comes with exhausting overinvestment, persistent fatigue or lasting loss of confidence, talking about it is valuable. A health check-up helps take stock and distinguish what stems from tiredness from what calls for more specific support.
Further reading
Related articles on the Iris Prévention blog:
- ●Understanding burnout: far more than a matter of overload
- ●When passion becomes a trap: the paradox of overinvestment
- ●Recognition, the invisible fuel
- ●Cynicism and withdrawal: the hidden dimension of burnout
- ●Clance P. R., Test and resources on the impostor phenomenon (paulineroseclance.com)
- ●INRS, Psychosocial risk factors: demands and perfectionism (inrs.fr)
- ●Santé publique France, Mental health and work (santepubliquefrance.fr)
💡 Key tips
- Impostor syndrome affects up to 70% of people at some point, and strikes the most competent above all. Feeling illegitimate has nothing to do with actually being so.
- The trap is the impostor cycle: each success is attributed to luck, circumstances or extra work, never to your abilities. Successes pile up without ever feeding confidence.
- That's what exhausts: so as not to be "unmasked," you always do more, over-prepare, aim for perfection. Doubt becomes an engine of overinvestment, heading straight for exhaustion.
- Keep an "evidence file": write down positive feedback and concrete successes, then reread it when doubt rises. Facts are a better judge than the inner voice.
- Accepting a compliment without deflecting it ("thank you," full stop) is powerful training: every time you bat it away ("oh, it was nothing"), you reinforce the belief in your illegitimacy.
Sources and references
Clance P. R., Imes S. A., The impostor phenomenon in high achieving women (1978)
Clance P. R., The Impostor Phenomenon: the impostor cycle (1985)
Young V., The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: types of competence (2011)
Bravata D. et al., Prevalence, predictors and treatment of impostor syndrome (Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2020)
Maslach C., Leiter M. P., Reduced personal accomplishment and burnout (2016)
INRS, Psychosocial risk factors: the essentials (2022)
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