Psychology in IT: Imposter syndrome and depression

There’s a lot of talk about mental health issues nowadays, and I had to throw my thoughts in the mix too. Very many proclaim that they have imposter syndrome, depression, or some other mental health issue. But we all can’t be suddenly that sick in medical terms. What’s going on?

Imposter syndrome is not an illness, it’s more a phenomenon or mindset. History says it was introduced in 1978 in research among women who felt anxiety, lack of self-confidence, and frustration to meet self-imposed performance levels. Another part of the syndrome is that the person can’t accept the success deserved. This mental framework is real and the phenomenon happens inside the person’s head. External factors don’t matter much because it’s the person itself who imposes these external expectations and flattens themself.

The root cause is you and your personality, be it the need for pleasing, setting high-achievement targets, uncertainty, or something else. It’s mainly your feelings that make you uncomfortable, therefore you can also change them. We all have mental and physical feelings, good and bad, more or less, all the time. That’s perfectly normal. There are also people who have mental disorders for real, and I don’t want to underrate their difficulties. But we others have now reached the point where individuals can diagnose their normal behavior as a medical disorder. That gives us reason for our feelings and acts, and outsource or externalize them to somewhere else beyond our control. We don’t want to be accountable for our own life!

Uncertainty is normal, everyday feeling, and we should tolerate it to a large extent. Everyone feels uncertain and uncomfortable about something, subjects and levels only vary. I would be worried if we didn’t feel it. I think we have lowered the bar so much that now everyone can have a diagnosis like imposter syndrome, depression, ADHD, or some spectrum of autism. Actually, we all might have some level and spectrum of autism symptoms and that’s just fine. We can live with it. However, the trend is that our life is going to be more and more individualistic, meaning we live in our own bubble, reality, and comfort zone. We tolerate less and less insecurity and inconvenience. We drive ourselves to a meaningless vacuum that makes us mentally sick. Life should be easy, but the easier life gets, the less we have the effort and patience to do anything.

The comfort zone is the area where the development stops. I heard a saying: if you put carp in a pond too small, it will never grow up to its true size. So true, are we really diminishing ourselves smaller than we are in reality? Self-development needs challenges, some blood, sweat, and tears. Going outside your comfort zone, seeking new challenges, and tolerating insecurity even a moment, will show you that you can do many things you couldn’t believe. You survived and other people didn’t even care how perfect you were or not. It gives you self-confidence and the power to do more. Achieving something and managing a hard situation feels good and it boosts your mental health. If you always bury yourself in self-pity in your comfort zone and don’t even try, that’s really bad for your mind in the long run.

Wise men say: when you don’t know, do something, no matter what. Experiment something. Trying new things means you’re going to fail too. Failing is totally normal and very common. Other people hardly notice or care if you fail slightly, again the problem is in your head. Once you have done a good job, credit is earned and you should enjoy it. Take it as a confidence boost for future challenges. There is also another end where Dunning–Kruger effect takes place. This is when you think you can do some specific task although you don’t actually have abilities to succeed. I would say this is common too, but in reality, we can do much more than we think and every task doesn’t need so extra specific skills that we are not able to learn them. It’s usually better to have bold plans and confidence to get the job done, although the results or style are far from perfect.

Worklife has gone crazy. We can only dream of golden work days in the late 1990s and early 2000. I think the problem now is us, people. We bring individualism, hectic restlessness, lack of concentration, and pursuit of quick satisfaction to work and organizations. The problem is the more we try, the harder the targets will be. Business will be so tightly tuned that eventually nobody can succeed at any level. We only drive ourselves to depression which is the new norm now. Why do we make our work so impossible and miserable?

Everyone should be accountable. First you and then it will spread among people and change organizations and communities. We should stop executing blindly, making miracles, and thinking that everything would be possible if we just believe. We are lazy in incorrect ways so that we easily drift to faulty patterns. Cheesy or not: work smarter, not harder. Respect your limits but others’ limits too. We all can stop working over our daily limits and let the overflow work buffered. It’s an organization’s problem, not yours. If someone else doesn’t stop the flow, do it yourself. Move the problem where it should be.

Organizations must provide a psychologically safe environment where we can experiment, learn, test our skills, grow, fail, and be vulnerable. Your job is to take advantage of that. The most important thing is to take care of yourself because anybody else won’t. Make your rules, goals, values, and routines but be flexible also. Tolerate occasional hard and uneasy feelings, failures, and disappointments. They can give you the power to change things.

First and foremost learn to respect yourself and be honest. Then learn to laugh at yourself and be vulnerable, fail and succeed, own the mistakes and take credit. Talk with anybody: friends, peers, family, community, boss, or therapist, things that give you perspective and common ground, and offload and align your feelings. I believe this could be your weekday therapy replacing the official therapy sessions which we now desperately need to save ourselves. Remember that we all are good at something and we all have deficiencies somewhere. Too much comparison is just bad and avoiding competition is one way to cope. Try to differentiate by finding your special skills and then utilizing them. Enjoy your special talent and let other people supplement you.