The Imposter Syndrome, Stress, and Burnout
Strategies for tumultuous times.
Check out the TechLead Journal podcast where Chris explores this topic.
Uncertain times, whether they are personal or external, can lead to serious self-doubt, stress, and eventually burnout. No one is alone at this and strategies for coping exist, without marginalizing the feelings you have.
“Everyone is OK, but I am not.”
— Everyone.
You probably have heard the Billy Ocean song, When the going get tough, the tough get going!. Well, that is a catchy song, but just getting tough is not a strategy for handling stressful situations. What works better is to realize that at the same time when we have empathy for others, we should not forget to have similar empathy for ourselves and handle our stress in effective ways.
I have been very lucky in my life and career. I have had my ups and downs and I am grateful for the experiences that I had on both ends of my own personal rollercoaster. We should all be grateful for the good things that happen to us. Many of the good things happening to us appear to depend mostly on one aspect and this is… luck. Maybe it is not just luck that defines us. But, more about that later.
Before we talk about the Imposter Syndrome, let’s set some context…
Being Normal
Let’s settle this. There is no such thing as a “normal” person. Neither is there such a thing as an “abnormal” person. Actually, if you could find a fully normal person, they would be quite average, and very boring on all dimensions.
If you think of abnormality as a medical condition, be aware that over our lifespan, half of all human beings can be qualified as having had some form of mental disorder. Finally, even these medically “abnormal” people are not alone. In 2018, one in five of all US residents were affected by mental disorders. That is a lot of people.
The reality is that we all move back and forth between being normal and abnormal, where normal is just the middle point on an imaginary scale. It is not right, it is not good, it is not a goal to aim for, but “normal” is just the middle point of a wide, multi-dimensional spectrum.
Perception
We like to think of ourselves as a highly evolved species. Reality is that physiologically speaking, little has changed to us in the last 100,000 years. Edsger Dijkstra referred to this already in 1972 in his Turing Award speech named The Humble Programmer, where he impressed upon the reader to realize that humans have small brains and that computers are going to overwhelm us.
Just a few random Google stats will confirm this. Google indexes 20 billion pages each day. There are 100 trillion unique URLs in the Google index. One out of every seven queries Google has never seen before. Users make over 3.5 billion Google queries each day. These numbers are mind-boggling.
“Every two days we create as much information as we did up to 2003.”
— Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), 2010
Moore’s Law, proposed in 1965, observes that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. There seems to be no end to this law.
At the same time information is growing around us at breakneck pace, our brains have not been doubling in size every two years. Neither has our memory or reading and speaking speed grown at the same exponential rate. We still have the same simple, slow brains as we had in the stone ages, but we are exposed to an enormously larger amount of input from online materials, news, books, television, and other highly distracting data sources.
Moving At The Speed Of Life
Both mental and physical health issues are closely correlated with the “speed of life”. Environments such as Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and the entire tech industry by extension, with their high pace of life, tend not to produce happier people than, say, those working on a rural farm in Nepal. Weird?
“A fast pace of life is associated with higher rates of death from coronary heart disease, higher smoking rates, and lower subjective well-being”
— Robert Levine
The main reason for the occurrence of stress-induced disorders we are exposed to in our current societies is that our biology fundamentally is not equipped to deal with life that is changing around us so rapidly.
What Makes Us Tick?
Our behavior is based on personal factors, but also strongly affected by environmental factors, such as the situation in which we grow up and operate in. For example, honest people can do dishonest things in certain situations. Similarly, dishonest people can do quite honest things in other situations. There is always an interaction between the person and the situation, leading to a given behavior.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
— Oscar Wilde
What is important is to learn how to change the situation. By changing the situation, we have a chance to change our intended behavior and cause goodness for ourselves.
Most of our life we execute unconscious habits, moving on autopilot for many tasks such as driving through traffic. This allows us to cope with complexities of life. Leveraging our autopilot, we can see the bigger picture and control our environment to get the behavior we want from ourselves.
Be honest with yourself. Be kind to yourself. Understand yourself.
The Imposter Syndrome
Impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual has doubts about their own accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. One aspect of imposter syndrome is to overly attribute success to luck. Another one is the pending doom of being “found out soon”. People tend to think that others are more intelligent than they are.
“It takes three things to be successful in silicon valley: talent, hard work, and luck. Most successful people forget about the luck part”
— David Shen (Yahoo employee #17)
Luck is a big part of life. Most people working in engineering think they were lucky to have gotten their job. In case of layoffs, they consider themselves the lucky ones who were spared. This can even result in survivor guilt.
The trick is what to do with this luck. If we are able to and allow ourselves to minimize the contribution of luck to our success, we emphasize our hard work and talent. In contrast, if we maximize the luck component, we are talking ourselves into self-doubt. We think “Everyone is OK. But somehow, I am not. I got lucky to be here and I just “snuck in” through the hiring process”.
Most of us have imposter syndrome. When asked a few years ago, 70% of Google engineers worried about being fired in the last six months. That was at a time when Google hardly fired anyone. Still the majority of engineers at Google had enough of an imposter syndrome to actually fear for their own jobs. If most engineers at Google have imposter syndrome, everyone can have imposter syndrome.
You should realize what is “normal” is to actually feel “abnormal”.
What to do about Imposter Syndrome
Step one is to realize we all move from situation to situation. We are not just our true self all the time, but at times we are also parents, colleagues, teachers, friends, etc. All of these experiences pull us into different directions. We all move through life in different ways. We are all travelers. We do different things over time. And this is all normal. We need to realize that in this game, we are not imposters any more than anyone else. We are all playing roles. We are all imposters.
Fake it to you make it. If life is a stage and we are all actors, all of us just have to play our roles from time to time. The more we do it, the better we get at it, until at some point, we are no longer acting, we are actually doing.
“To be happy, you need to do things that make you happy.”
— Johan Cruyff, the world’s best football player ever.
Luck is not the sole reason for your success. Your hard work and talent have a major contribution. You earned your place. You deserve to be where you are. Luck is great. By being grateful for that luck, we can turn our gratitude into great mental health. We are not imposters. We are just thankful to be lucky.
It is OK to be lucky. Be grateful for it. Work hard to get more luck. Be happy.
Stress
Stress is good. It is helpful in survival situations. Stress hormones help us deal with psychological and physiological threats, challenges, and problems. Without stress, we get bored. With too much stress, we get mood changes, memory issues, sleep problems, heart disease and ulcers, compromised immune systems, an increased risk of depression, and burnout.
When we get too much stress, our body stops doing things that are long-term focused. Children that are under continued stress can actually stop growing. Stress has a lot of impact on our body. Stress makes us fight short term challenges and focus less on long term benefits. This leads to eating away our stress and exercise less, for instance.
Handling Stress
When I was younger, before the time of Internet, I used to go on vacation with my wife by loading up our car in Holland with a tent and drive south until the weather got nice. One year we ended up in the middle of France. Another year along the Mediterranean sea. The third year in Spain. Each vacation was no less than four or five weeks. We explored some sites, but a lot of the time we just did nothing. In the last few decades of my life I have not been able to do that even once. This is mainly a matter of choice, but current times make this harder.
Simply relaxing is not enough to handle stress. Our brain is way too complex for that. To understand how our brains handles stress, let’s take a simplified look at how our brain works.
- Stress starts in the Hypothalamus, producing cortisol, also known as the stress hormone.
- This activates the Hippocampus, that manages memory and that aims to control the stress and slow it down.
- Too much stress leads to an overloaded Hippocampus…
- …and damages your Frontal Lobe, that is supposed to slow down your Amygdala, to control negative emotions.
- An uncontrolled Amygdala leads to a waterfall of negative emotions.
- Finally, the Hypothalamus gets triggered again.
Chronic stress has the side effect of damaging the Hippocampus. As a result, it may lead to concentration issues or memory problems. At the same time, the Hippocampus stops slowing down the production of stress hormones, further accelerating the stress we experience.
Now, what can we do to trigger the Hippocampus again? One trick is to sleep well. Another trick is to move, bike, or walk around. Any activity that makes you be active. Even the simple act of walking activates the Hippocampus. As a result it will start suppressing the generation of cortisol, effectively reducing stress.
Physical activity has other benefits. It triggers the frontal lobe, which is responsible among other things for empathy, self-reflection, social interaction, and control of impulsive actions. The same way as exercise, listening to music also triggers the frontal lobe. Finally, simply using empathic skills, by socializing or talking to others will help.
Another way of coping with stress, is to make the stress factor itself more predictable. If the elements exposing you to stress are typically found in work emails, read work emails at a certain time only, and definitely not right before going to bed. If exposure to a certain individual causes you anxiety, minimize your exposure to this person. Control either the timing or the amount of stress you receive.
Being in control of the stress, whether that is actual or artificial control, has a way of limiting the impact of the stress on how we feel.
Stress during Covid-19
Work-life balance is not a cliche. with many of us working from home, separating work from personal life is harder. We have less opportunity to decouple work deliverables from other important things, such as relaxing or spending time with family.
Do not try and compensate lost productivity by working longer. This is a crisis situation. We no longer measure team success by the same measure as we did during normal times.
This is not always possible, but if you work from home and have the luxury, consider allocating a special room or space where you only go to work. For more tips, see Work from home effectively.
Take care of yourself. Be kind to yourself and do not judge yourself on how you are coping by how you see others cope. Maybe they are just better actors than you and they are coping with the extra stress in the same way you are.
Measuring Stress
The study performed by psychologists Holmes and Rahe basically goes like this: Take the list above and add up all the scores for the life events you experienced in the last year. If you end up with a score of 300+, you have direct risk of illness. With a score of 150–299, risk of illness is moderate (30% lower than the previous category). With a score <150, you have a slight risk of illness.
I just did the above test myself, after two months of working and living at home due to Covid-19, and I came to 244. This means I am moderately at risk of developing illness such as ulcers. Maybe I should take more walks or play more golf?
What is your score?
Burnout
Burnouts results from chronic stress where people feel responsible for their situation but are powerless and lack the ability or control to make changes.
Typically, in a burnout situation, people are emotionally exhausted. They may expose symptoms of depersonalization, where feelings become excessive, all-consuming and interfere with daily living. Work-related productivity is often impacted negatively.
People experience burnouts when they experience a conflict between personal and organizational perspectives on workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Other causes may be extended exposure to chronic stress situations.
Do you find yourself being overly cynical at work? Less inspired to contribute? Always headaches? You may have chronic stress and early signals of a burnout.
What can we do?
Our main goal in life is to bring out the best of ourselves. We are all unique.
What you should not do: alcohol, drugs, unnecessary risks, ignore your symptoms, and suffer alone. What you should do: eat well, exercise, cultivate social connections (family, friends), practice mindfulness and meditation (if that helps you), seek help, listen, and laugh. Of course, you know all these things and I am not trying to be patronizing here, just to remind us all.
Make your world predictable. Time box what you cannot control. Work fixed hours. Avoid negative news or social media. Read a book.
Pick a small thing you want to improve on. If walking seems like a huge thing, make a five minute walk to get started. Find someone else to go on a walk with. Start small. Celebrate progress. Congratulate yourself on your achievements.
Do the hard things first. Then do the things you like as a reward. If you want to work on your productivity, check out Four Ingredients of Productivity.
Do meaningful things that you can easily control. Learn a new thing. Tell others of your achievement. Celebrate. Do the dishes. Wash your clothes. Vacuum. Celebrate again.
Time box the things you cannot control and that cause you stress. Limit them to a given physical location in your house where you allow yourself to be stressed. That is fine. When you close your laptop or close the door, you unlock yourself from the factors that cause the stress. Now allow yourself to be no longer stressed.
Summary
This was a long article. Thanks for staying with me all the way. A quick summary to take away:
- We are all imposters. We are all “abnormal”. And this is normal.
- Exercise, music, empathy, and good sleep help reduce stress.
- When you are emotionally exhausted or have excessive feelings, you may have a burnout. Reduce your stress one way or another ASAP.
Tips for the rest of your life:
- Be honest to yourself and others.
- Find out what you want out of life. When you get there, allow yourself to be happy.
- We are all imperfect. The world is imperfect. We are all imposters acting on the great stage of life.
- Use your talent.
- Work hard.
- Accept good luck with gratitude.
- Do not focus on winning, but focus on success.
“Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”
— John Wooden, Basketball coach at UCLA
Imposter syndrome, stress, and burnout can have major negative impact on individuals, their support structure, and their work environment. We all realize this intuitively, but it is important to detect the early signals. Thanks for reading this far. You are awesome.
Final Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor. I followed a few credits in Psychology, but that’s it. I have a lot of experience with imposter syndrome. I have also been stressed a lot. But, I am an amateur at the coping part. Please talk to a professional when you think you need help after you read this article. Take care of yourself.
