Impostor syndrome and burnout: when success brings no relief

Daniel is the last one out of the office. Not because he has more work than anyone else. The materials for tomorrow's meeting have been ready since three in the afternoon and he has been going through them ever since, for the fourth time. When he locks up at a quarter to ten, he does not take home the feeling of a job done. He takes home the question of whether it was enough.

His team treats him as the one who carries the load, and at this year's review his manager held him up to the others as an example. What Daniel remembers from that entire review is one sentence about what could be handled faster next time.

This is not a story about being hard-working. It is a description of a mechanism in which the extra hours are not ambition but insurance. And insurance gets paid again every month.

Extra preparation as insurance against exposure

Impostor syndrome is the feeling that you do not belong where you are and that sooner or later it will come out. The psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described it in 1978, and plenty of people with a demonstrable track record take it to work with them every morning. It is not an illness or a disorder and it does not appear in the classifications of mental disorders. It is a learned way of explaining your own success to yourself.

The doubts do not come from one place. They split into three sources: feeling like a fraud (my seat belongs to someone more capable), discounting success (whatever worked out does not count) and luck and circumstance (it happened to land well). All three are taken apart in the piece on what impostor syndrome is and where the doubts come from. For the road towards exhaustion, what matters most is what each of them does to the amount of work.

They all do the same thing to it. When you are not sure you have what the job takes, one reliable defence suggests itself: prepare so thoroughly nothing can be held against you. Read more background than will ever come up. Go through the slides one more time. Stay until evening. It works beautifully, and that is exactly the problem.

The outcome does turn out well, but the credit does not go to you. It goes to the preparation. Without those three extra hours it would have shown. The relief therefore lasts until the end of the day, and the next assignment finds the doubt completely intact. Clance described this carousel as the impostor cycle, and the text on how impostor syndrome and perfectionism feed each other goes through it step by step.

The least intuitive part is this: success does not weaken the pattern, it feeds it. Every task handled well doubles as proof that it would not have gone through without the overwork, and next time the bar moves up a notch. Someone who has run on this for five years does not have five years of accumulated confidence behind them. They have five years of raising the dose.

What research knows about the link with burnout

That this way of working costs energy is obvious. The more interesting part is that it shows up in data. In 2016 Villwock and colleagues asked American medical students how strongly they saw themselves as impostors, and at the same time measured their level of burnout. Students with stronger doubts about their own competence came out worse on the scales of exhaustion and cynicism as well.

It was not a large study and the authors themselves called it a pilot, so no law of the psyche follows from it. It does fit into a wider picture: studies repeatedly link stronger doubts about one's own competence with higher exhaustion and lower satisfaction at work, across fields from healthcare to academia.

The word "link" carries the entire weight of a sentence like that. Nobody has measured whether self-doubt leads to exhaustion or whether an exhausted person simply starts doubting their abilities. Both may hold at once, because the two feed each other: the less energy, the worse the performance, the stronger the sense that you are not coping, the more hours on top.

The way burnout is usually described deserves attention too. Christina Maslach distinguishes exhaustion, cynicism and the feeling that your work leads nowhere. That third point is treacherous in people who doubt themselves, because they do not take it for a symptom. They take it for a finally accurate description of reality.

Why a free evening feels like a risk

Sarah took a week off after her promotion, a week she had been looking forward to for half a year. In the first two days she opened her work inbox three times, then put the phone away. She spent the rest of the week thinking about what was falling apart in her absence. She came back roughly one fifth rested.

For someone who credits success to preparation, rest is not an innocent pause. It is the stretch of time when the insurance is off. If something goes wrong during it, the exact fear that keeps them working evenings gets confirmed. And if nothing goes wrong, they learn nothing from it, because a week without a disaster can always be explained by nothing difficult having come up.

On top of that sits an ordinary question of identity. If your worth rests on how much you get through, a free evening leaves only the person you do not trust. Avoiding it is not a strange idea.

When did you last have a free evening in which it did not once occur to you what you could be finishing off? The answer to that question says more about your situation than the number of hours you put in.

Where hard work turns into something else

A lot of hours on its own means nothing. People work enormous amounts for years without burning out, because the work gives something back. The difference is not in the volume but in what happens to the result afterwards.

The right-hand column shows why the tiredness stacks up faster than the hours would suggest. Work that leaves nothing credited cannot be deducted from any account. You keep starting from zero.

The signals worth noticing tend to be inconspicuous, and people usually spot them in a colleague long before themselves:

• overtime after which the work has moved no further than if you had left at five
• an offer of help meets the answer that explaining it would take longer anyway
• time off that you only take once an illness forces you into it
• you catch yourself being ironic or indifferent about things you used to enjoy
• a meeting you spent a week preparing for leaves nothing behind in you once it ends

It is fair to state the limit of this text. Burnout is a workplace phenomenon with its own signs and it cannot be recognised from an article or from an online test; what research knows about it and how it runs its course is described in the separate piece on burnout at work. Doubts about your own competence are one of the roads that lead there, and certainly not the only one.

Where the circle can be broken

The good news is that the mechanism has several points where it can be uncoupled, and none of them requires you to acquire confidence overnight.

The first is a cap on preparation. Decide in advance how much time the task gets and stop when it runs out, regardless of how you feel. Extra preparation usually does not raise the quality, it only quiets the uncertainty for a moment, and by doing so teaches it to speak up again next time. It is unpleasant roughly twice.

The second point is the moment of handing in. To every finished thing add three steps that led to it and how long they took. A finished result looks simple even to you, because the road to it is not visible from the outside, and without that road success is easily rewritten as ordinary work nobody gets praised for.

Then there is a boundary you set once and do not renegotiate daily. No email after nine. Sunday stays free. It sounds banal, but in people who doubt themselves this thing has a different function than in everyone else: every evening on which nothing collapses is one entry in the evidence column.

The most underrated step is saying it out loud. Clance and Imes worked with people in groups precisely because the sense of being uniquely incompetent dissolves the moment someone discovers that the colleague they consider the most self-assured of all knows it too. Specific approaches for each source of doubt are laid out in the text on how to overcome impostor syndrome.

Which of those four steps fits you depends on where your doubts come from. With feeling like a fraud, the cap and the conversation tend to work; with discounting success, writing down the road; with luck and circumstance, breaking the outcome down into the individual decisions behind it. A short impostor syndrome test gives a rough picture: the overall level of doubt and which of the three sources is strongest in you. Take it as a starting point, not a verdict.

One area is left that you will not fix on your own. Overpreparation is partly an answer to an environment where only a flawless delivery gets praised and feedback arrives in the form of objections. What can be done about that in a meeting, in a new role or in a performance review is covered by the text on how impostor syndrome shows up at work.

When self-knowledge is no longer enough

Everything above applies to tiredness that has limits. When the exhaustion lasts for months, when you wake up as tired as you went to bed and when a holiday no longer restores what a weekend used to, this is no longer a habit of thought and no cap on preparation will solve it.

At that point it makes sense to see a GP or a psychologist, even with a single sentence about your energy having run out and not coming back. It is not an admission of defeat and nobody there will take your work ethic away from you. The only thing that changes is that you stop being alone with it.

Daniel tried one thing. He wrote down the time his materials had been ready and went home two hours earlier. The meeting the next day went exactly like all the previous ones, and he credited it to that time.

One such record proves nothing. Ten of them make a fairly decent argument.