Do you ever:

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then you might be experiencing imposter syndrome.

There is no single, universally used definition of imposter syndrome, but here's something that is generally agreed upon:

Someone experiences imposter syndrome when they doubt their abilities and feel like a fraud, despite having the relevant abilities.

Other aspects of imposter syndrome (such as attributing success to luck and failure to incompetence or fearing that people will discover that you are a fraud) are more debated but often appear in definitions of the concept.

Imposter syndrome has been getting a lot of attention lately. Unfortunately, lots of misconceptions and confusion about it exist. We at Clearer Thinking are in the middle of a big project aimed at understanding and helping people overcome imposter syndrome, so we wanted to share with you some insights that we’ve learned as we’ve been conducting studies and literature reviews on the topic.

Here are five things people often get wrong about imposter syndrome:

It’s called imposter syndrome, but it’s not technically recognized as a syndrome at all! The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses (DSM) used by healthcare professionals to diagnose psychological syndromes and disorders does not list it; it's not officially recognized as a clinical syndrome. For this reason, academics and researchers refer instead to imposter phenomenon or simply imposter feelings.

Of course, the fact that imposter phenomenon isn’t technically recognized as a syndrome right now doesn’t mean it’s not real. There is plenty of evidence that it is a genuine feeling (or set of feelings) experienced by many individuals. Some early papers questioned whether imposter feelings could be explained by things other than a distinct phenomenon (e.g., by low self-esteem), but subsequent work has validated the phenomenon, providing evidence that it is a real, distinct experience even if it’s not currently recognized as a syndrome.

Although imposter syndrome isn’t officially recognised as a syndrome in the DSM, it does seem to fit some definitions of the word. For instance, Calvo at al conceptualize a syndrome as a “recognizable complex of symptoms and physical findings which indicate a specific condition for which a direct cause is not necessarily understood.” They argue that “once medical science identifies a causative agent or process with a fairly high degree of certainty, physicians may then refer to the process as a disease [or disorder] not a syndrome.” Imposter syndrome appears to fit such criteria; it is a recognizable complex of symptoms (feelings of fraudulence, fear of evaluation, fear of being discovered to be less competent than people perceive one to be, and so on) for which no straightforward, direct cause is yet known.

So, it’s not quite as simple as saying that it is or is not a........

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