What Imposter Syndrome Feels Like and Why
It’s like Your Body is Betraying You…
I work with a lot of highly successful professional men and women, many of whom have worked their way up to high level positions or established very successful businesses. Many of these people, in spite of their success, struggle with feelings of inadequacy or fears of being a fraud. Most people would never know. On the outside they look like they have it all together. But on the inside high anxiety is derailing them.
Because successful people possess a lot of skills - intelligence, talent, communication, self awareness, resourcefulness, and drive - they've usually tried everything they can think of to overcome feelings of anxiety and imposter syndrome but remain stuck. That's when they tend to show up in my office, when they feel like they've tried everything and nothing is working. And when we sit down to talk about what they're experiencing, they almost always describe their anxiety and imposter syndrome in terms of body sensations. They describe feeling physically overwhelmed or shut down in ways that they don't completely understand...
Getting hot and flushing in the face...
Feeling panicked and breathless...
Experiencing a sensation of "my heart is beating out of my chest"...
Collapsing physically, like it's hard to move...
There's a reason for this.
There's no doubt that this all feels really terrible and out of control. It doesn't make sense to someone who is used to feeling competent and in control. It can create a vicious cycle of anxiety and shame that really compounds the problem. But it does make sense if you understand how your brain works and what's getting set in motion on a physiological level. There's a path that takes you down the road of high anxiety, and it's the same path you can reverse engineer to get out of it.
First, your brain perceives a threat
This can be an outward trigger like going into a meeting or having to give a presentation. It can also be an internal trigger, like thoughts of failing or being discovered as a fraud. Whatever it is, this perceived threat becomes a trigger that causes your nervous system to respond in preparation for a crisis.
At this point, you experience body sensations
Your heart rate increases and your breathing becomes more shallow. Your muscles may tense and your stomach may hurt. You may get chills and feel cold, or flush and get hot.
Next, your body releases stress hormones
Your nervous system tells your brain that you may be facing a life threatening situation and you need to prepare to mobilize a lot of energy quickly. Your body releases stress hormones, and cortisol and adrenaline increase. This process takes the thinking part of your brain offline. Your brain and body reason that if you're facing a threat, how could you possibly need to think at a time like this?
Finally, you experience a fight, flight, or freeze state
At this point, you're in survival mode. This can look like lashing out or feeling over emotional (fight), avoiding meetings or presentations (flight), or it can look like shutting down and checking out (freeze). If this cycle happens enough times, it will tax your nervous system to the point of feeling in a state of collapse, like it's physically hard to get up and keep going.
You do not have to live like this, my friend. This is completely resolvable. I help people do it all the time, and it's often quicker and simpler that you would think. Usually people are already doing a lot of the right things, just in the wrong order, or they may just be missing one piece of the puzzle.
The biggest piece that I usually see people missing, which it turns out is also the most important factor in breaking this cycle, in calming their body and diffusing the nervous system response before they try to think their way out of the problem. This makes sense if you think about the cycle. The first thing that happens in the face of a trigger or perceived threat is that your nervous system responds and you experience body sensations. This nervous system response is what paves the way to disconnecting from rational thought and ending up in a fight, flight, or freeze state.
Learning skills to calm and reset your nervous system, like breathing, grounding, and resourcing, can stop this cycle before it starts and put you on a completely different path. Once your nervous system is calm, your brain can think. And if your brain can think, you can find solutions and move beyond the problem.
