Making Sense of Anxiety, Self-Doubt & Imposter Syndrome
Practical, compassionate articles for capable people who overthink, second-guess themselves, and feel like frauds despite the evidence. Drawing on CBT, ACT, CFT and EMDR, these posts will help you make sense of what your mind is doing, understand the patterns that keep you stuck, and learn to trust your own experience.
You know the feeling. You’re about to send the message, make the call, put yourself forward, and a voice pipes up: are you sure? What if you’re wrong? What if you’re not up to this? For a lot of capable people, that voice is a near-constant companion, and its favourite trick is to sound like […]
Perfectionism has the best public image of any psychological pattern I know. Say it in a job interview and it counts as a strength. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist” is the humble-brag we’re all allowed. And often there’s something real behind it: many perfectionists genuinely care about their work and hold themselves to a […]
Your heart is pounding, your breathing has quickened, there’s adrenaline moving through you and a slight tremor in your hands. Are you about to give a presentation you’re dreading, or are you three sets into a workout you love? From the neck down, there is almost no way to tell. This is one of the […]
You’ve got the presentation next week, so you start preparing. Sensible enough. But somewhere along the way, preparing tips into something else. You rehearse it again. You rewrite the slides a fourth time. You script the answers to questions nobody may ask. And the odd thing is that the more you prepare, the less ready […]
Have you ever walked through the “nothing to declare” channel at an airport, done absolutely nothing wrong, and still felt a wave of guilt as though you were smuggling something? Nothing in your bag, nothing on your conscience, and yet there’s the feeling, insisting you’ve been caught. That little moment is one of the most […]
When anxiety or self-doubt takes hold, it can feel like one big, formless wave that arrives and sweeps you along. But if you slow it down, it isn’t formless at all. Everything that happens is happening in one of six specific places, and every skill worth learning targets one of them. I use this map […]
You replay the conversation on the drive home. You’re mid-email when the doubt arrives. You lie awake at 2am with a mind that won’t switch off, and somewhere along the way you’ve concluded that you think too much. Here’s something I find myself explaining in the therapy room more often than almost anything else, because […]
Why do I feel anxious all the time when nothing is actually wrong? It’s one of the questions I hear most often, usually from people who have already spent years trying to answer it themselves. If that’s you, you’ve probably tried the obvious things. You’ve told yourself to calm down and reasoned through why […]
The feedback is good. The promotion happened. The work keeps landing well. So why is there still a voice insisting that sooner or later, someone is going to realise you don’t belong here? If you live with that voice, you’ve probably tried to reason with it. You’ve listed your qualifications, replayed the successes, and somehow […]
You’ve read the books. You’ve listened to the podcasts. You’ve asked the people you trust – maybe more than once. So why, after all that advice, do you still not know what to do? If that question lands, you’re in good company. Many of the people I work with are intelligent, capable, and conscientious. They […]