You've just done something well. Maybe a project landed better than expected, or you received feedback that was genuinely positive, or you got the promotion you'd been working towards. And instead of feeling good - or at least settled - you feel anxious, exposed, like the bar has just been raised and you're not sure you can meet it again.
This is one of the most confusing and disheartening features of imposter syndrome: success doesn't fix it. For many people, it makes it worse. If you've ever wondered why that happens - why achievement seems to fuel self-doubt rather than quiet it - the answer lies in a pattern that psychologists have been studying for nearly fifty years.
The Impostor Phenomenon
The term most people know as imposter syndrome was originally described in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who called it the impostor phenomenon. They were deliberate about that word - phenomenon rather than syndrome or disorder - because what they were describing wasn't an illness. It was a pattern: a recognisable, repeating cycle that capable people find themselves caught in, often without quite understanding why.
Clance and Imes first identified it in high-achieving women, but research since then has consistently shown that it affects people of all genders, backgrounds, and career levels. Estimates suggest that somewhere between 70 and 82 percent of people experience it at some point. It is, in that sense, one of the most common private struggles there is.
Why the Cycle Keeps Repeating
What makes the impostor phenomenon so persistent - and so frustrating - is its structure. It's not just a feeling, it's a cycle, and each stage of the cycle feeds the next.
It typically begins with a new challenge or responsibility: a task that matters, a situation where the outcome is visible, something where getting it wrong feels genuinely consequential. Self-doubt arrives quickly. What if I can't do this? What if this is the moment I get found out?
From there, people tend to respond in one of two ways. Some over-prepare - working far harder than the task requires, checking and rechecking, covering every angle, staying late. Others procrastinate - putting the task off until the deadline forces action, then working frantically at the last minute. Both responses are driven by the same anxiety, they just look different from the outside.
The work gets done. Usually well and here's where the cycle does its most damaging work: instead of taking that success as evidence of genuine competence, the mind explains it away. I just got lucky. I worked so hard that anyone could have done it. The bar was lower than I thought. They were being generous. The success lands but it doesn't stick, the anxiety resets, ready for the next challenge, a little more entrenched than before.
Why Success Raises the Stakes
Understanding the cycle helps explain something that otherwise seems to make no sense: why doing well can feel worse than struggling.
When you succeed at something, particularly something visible, the perceived stakes for the next thing increase. There's now an expectation to maintain, a level to live up to, people who previously didn't know your work now do. And the threat system - the part of the brain designed to monitor for rejection, failure, and exposure - responds to all of this as genuine danger.
This is why promotions, public praise, and new responsibilities so often trigger imposter feelings rather than settling them. The very things that should feel like evidence of legitimacy become new sources of threat. It's a pattern, not a personal failing.
Where It Comes From
The cycle doesn't develop randomly. It tends to grow from a combination of early experience and environment.
For many people, the roots are in how achievement was framed in childhood - whether praise was conditional on performance, whether mistakes were treated as failures or learning, whether it ever felt safe to not know the answer. The internal rules formed in those environments - I must not get things wrong; my worth depends on my performance - tend to persist long after the environments themselves have changed.
Environmental factors matter too. Workplaces that reward constant comparison, professional cultures where admitting uncertainty is seen as weakness, or being in a setting where you're underrepresented - all of these can intensify imposter feelings considerably. They give the cycle something to grip on.
What Changes Things
Recognising the cycle is genuinely useful - not because naming it makes it disappear, but because it changes what you're dealing with. Instead of a vague, pervasive sense of inadequacy, you have something more specific: a pattern that activates in particular situations, follows a predictable structure, and can be responded to differently once you can see it.
Therapy for imposter syndrome isn't about eliminating self-doubt or accumulating enough successes to finally feel legitimate. It's about interrupting the cycle - developing the awareness to catch it as it starts, understanding what's driving it, building the skills to sit with uncertainty without automatically reaching for over-preparation or avoidance, and gradually learning to let success land rather than explain it away.
That last part - allowing yourself to take in evidence of your own competence - is often slower work than people expect. But it's also where the most durable change happens.
Recognise yourself in any of this?
If you recognise yourself in this cycle and would like to understand it better, I offer a free 15-minute phone consultation - no obligation, just a conversation.