Babble Challenge: 50 Ways to Overcome Impostor Syndrome
Here we go again. Time to become stronger.
This week’s challenge:
Imagine you are a bright young PhD student with interesting articles to write. You have picked your journals, developed the thesis, and are hard at work dratfting publications.
But there’s one problem. You have impostor syndrome. You often feel like your ideas are bad, or that you are unqualified, or should only write about one very narrow area. When you examine each doubt, they are clearly unfounded. Impostor syndrome slows down your progress during day long mood swings.
Give me 50 ideas to solve impostor syndrome!
Rules
Rules from JacobJacob’s babble challenges
50 answers please
Post answers inside spoiler tags
Not all you ideas have to work (“feel better” or “go for a walk” are great answers)
When your stuck, say something stupid.
If you spend 5 min agonising over not having anything to say, you’re doing it wrong. You’re being too critical. Just lower your standards and say something, anything. Soon enough you’ll be back on track.
Go get them tiger!
I will post my attempt at 5:30 EST today
My familiarity with the topic gives me enough confidence to join this challenge!
Write down your own criticism so it no longer feels fresh
Have your criticism read aloud to you by someone else
Argue back to this criticism
Write down your counter-arguments so they stick
Document your own progress
Get testimonials and references even when you don’t “need” them
Praise the competence of other people without adding self-deprecation
Same as above but in their vicinity so they’ll feel compelled to praise you back
Teach the basics of your field to newcomers
Teach the basics of your field to experts from other fields
Write down the basics of your field, for yourself
Ask someone else to make your beverage of choice
Ask them to tell you “you deserve it” when they’re giving it to you
If your instinct is to reply “no I don’t”, consider swapping the roles
Drink your beverage, because it feels nice
Build stuff that cannot possibly be built by chance alone
Stare outside the window, wondering if anybody cares about you
Consider a world where everyone is as insecure as you
Ask friends about their insecurities
Consider you’re too stupid to drink a glass of water, then drink some water
Meditate on the difference between map and territory
Write instructions for the non-impostor version of you
Write instructions for whoever replaces you when people find out you’re an impostor
Validate those instructions with other experts, passing it off as project planning
Follow the instructions to keep the masquerade on
Refine the instructions since they’re “obviously” not perfect
Publish the whole thing here, get loads of karma
Document everything you don’t know for reference
Publish the thing as a list of open problems
Criticize harshly other people’s work to see how they take it
Make amends by letting them criticize you
Use all this bitterness to create a legendary academic rivalry
Consider “impostor” as a cheap rhetorical attack that doesn’t hold up
Become very good at explaining why other people are better than you
Publish the whole thing as in-depth reporting of the life of scientists
Focus on your deadline, time doesn’t care if you’re an impostor or not
Make yourself lunch, balance on one foot, solve a sudoku puzzle
Meditate on the fact you actually can do several complex things well
Consider that competence is not about knowing exactly how one does things
Have motivational pictures near you and argue how they don’t apply to you
Consider the absurdity of arguing with pictures
Do interesting things instead, not because you have to, but to evade the absurdity
Practice the “I have no idea what I’m doing, but no one does” stance
Ask people why they think they know how they do things
If they start experimenting impostor syndrome as well, support them
Join a club of impostors, to learn from better impostors than you
Write an apology letter to everyone you think you’ve duped
Simulate the outrage of anyone reading this letter
Cut ties with everyone who would actually treat you badly after reading
Sleep well, eat well, exercise, brush your teeth, take care of yourself
Imposter syndrome hits close to home, and I’d like to be more involved in this kind of stuff. So here are my 50 ideas:
50 Ways to Solve Imposter Syndrome
1. Say to myself, “I have imposter syndrome, but I am not an imposter.”
2. Write encouraging messages on sticky notes and place them in places I will see.
3. Pretend I AM an imposter and make a game out of deceiving my peers.
4. Smile to myself as I write my stupid ideas into a scientific looking paper, because everyone will just eat it up.
5. Remind myself that research and papers aren’t just something I happen to do, they are part of who I am. I am a researcher and a paper writer.
6. Call a parent or someone who believes in me, and ask them what they think of what I do.
7. Talk to strangers and tell them about my work.
8. Read previous papers I’ve written, and tell myself what’s good about them.
9. Read previous papers I’ve written, and critique them, so that I can see how far I’ve come in my skills and intuitions for this field.
10. Read papers someone else has written in this field, and write down what I would do differently or better.
11. Pretend I’m some other researcher that I know of, and imagine that they have imposter syndrome too, and write down their anxieties and fears.
12. Talk to my pet, or get a pet. I’m smarter than this cat, aren’t I? This cat would REALLY have messed this up.
13. Pretend I’m someone smarter, and do the work while pretending to be them.
14. Write down a list of any specific failings or anxieties I have in this area. Is there anything I actually don’t know or can’t do that my imposter syndrome is feeding off of? Make those fears concrete.
15. Address the items on my list with actionable tasks that I can do to work on my weaknesses. Read that paper that I skipped, learn that formula I never quite got, etc.
16. Post something on reddit about having imposter syndrome and let the encouragements roll in.
17. Make a really simple to do list of the next five things I need to do to accomplish this.
18. Make a list of things that I would expect from this project so that it doesn’t suck, and then try to make sure it doesn’t suck.
19. Write down a list of all my gut wrenching fears about this, and then write a counterpoint list that directly states the opposite of every fear as a personal mantra, and repeat those statements to myself every day.
20. Pick a class that I did well in at some point, and spend some time fondly remembering how well I did.
21. Make a list of my classmates/peers that I think I’m better than.
22. Pick someone in my field who is only a LITTLE bit better than me, and state why. Then make a plan for what I can do to surpass them.
23. Buy something for myself that makes me feel like a person who does what I do—some sort of prop that represents my valid identity.
24. Go talk to a professor/advisor, and tell them about what I’m experiencing. Record the conversation since they’ll probably give me encouragement and advice.
25. Explain what I’m working on to a rubber ducky or something with equivalent intelligence, to help me work through what I’m thinking about.
26. Pick a paper/project that has a worse premise than mine and remind myself that mine will at least be better than that.
27. Remind myself that this process of struggling is part of the growth that will turn me into what I want to be, and it’s okay if I’m not there yet.
28. Take a break and spend some time with some friends.
29. Get drunk or do drugs and work on the paper while intoxicated.
30. Play loud music or white noise into some headphones and work, to cut out some of that internal chatter.
31. Write a fictional story about myself overcoming these obstacles.
32. Exercise and work when I’m exhausted.
33. Get some actual sleep for once.
34. Eat some better food.
35. Try NOT drinking or doing drugs, if I’m doing those things already.
36. Browse popular media or forums where laypeople discuss the field I’m in, and shake my head at how little they know.
37. Go to therapy.
38. Look for other available mental health resources, and get some help already.
39. Talk to a friend about how hard things are, and for once try NOT being an imposter and just being myself. Let my barriers down for a bit.
40. Cry. Figure out some way to make myself cry if I can’t cry.
41. Write a fictional conversation between myself and one of my idols in this field, and imagine the sort of things they would say to me to help.
42. Get well-groomed and dressed up like I’m on a date or something. Make myself feel good about my appearance and let those good feelings propagate to my overall sense of self.
43. Do that thing from that one TED talk where you pose in a position of power, with your arms up superman style. Body language affects your self-perception.
44. Record encouraging statements and listen to them.
45. Design business cards with my current title on them.
46. Get a tattoo that has something to do with my field of research. Now I’m really committed.
47. Pick a special physical space that I do work in that feels important and intellectual, and separate my personal life from work life by only working there.
48. Make a “study group” of peers and work on our projects together in the same room.
49. Write about things I know about online, anonymously, to remind myself how much more I know than the average person.
50. Study and work really hard until the imposter syndrome goes away.
Something really interesting about this exercise for me was how long it took me to consider the idea of seeking professional help or talking to someone like a professor or advisor. I tend to be overly self-reliant, and I would have probably benefited from both social and professional advice when I was in college, but it just didn’t seem like something I could do. Writing down ALL the ideas is really helpful in shaking off those assumptions.
My biggest reasoning for not babbling is imposter syndrome. So there’s no better exercise than this to start babbling :)
Read a book on imposter syndrome.
Meditate
Talk to someone
Cut yourself some slack
Read about babble!
Ignore it and publish the result anyway
Look at your past achievements
Do a poll on twitter asking how many people get imposter syndrome
Sleep
Go do something you know you’re amazing at
Write about your feelings—writing therapy
Enjoy it until you have it.
Get a coloring book and color inside the lines. That’s hard!
Cook something delicious
Listen to some motivational/self-help speaker for some short-term boost
Go for a walk
Do some intense workout
Laugh at yourself
Take some time off and have some fun
Take a crazy cold shower or better yet, an ice bath
Watch batman take on the Justice League
Help someone less fortunate than you
Dance
Take it out on a punching bag
Do some kindness meditation
Maintain a streak of how many times you overcome imposter syndrome
Break it down to identify the underlying reasons, and solve them one by one.
Join the army.
Do something you think you can’t do.
Go for a therapy session
Get out of your room and surround yourself with nature
Watch an uplifting movie
Have sex
Go to a coffee-place and chill out
Go for a hike
Pick something else, and come back to your current activity later.
Pray to god
Talk to yourself and increase your self-confidence
Ask someone to take a look at your paper—you’ll probably hear that it’s not that bad.
Hangout with someone
Sit by a river/lake/sea
Play with some animals (puppies?)
Talk to someone who you know is an imposter
Act like a real imposter and fake something. You’ll realize you weren’t being an imposter earlier.
Read psychology
Buy a block of cheese and slowly enjoy it to its fullest
Do a r/roastme
Sing your favourite songs
Go to a language club of your native language—feel like a king.
Don’t do anything. Sit there and notice when that feeling passes away.
I put on my robe and Babble Challenge hat.
Do ten push-ups.
“Hey Dr. Adviser, I’m experiencing impostor syndrome. Are you familiar with the idea, and do you sometimes get it, too?”
“Hey Candidate Smith in another PhD program, I’m experiencing impostor syndrome. Are you familiar with the idea, and do you sometimes get it, too?”
Post the kernel of your thesis on LW frontpage. People will think it’s neat.
Google “PhD impostor syndrome” and click on the first link you see from a person who’s famous to you.
Use your research skills and free access to zillions of journals to spend one hour looking at the best research on the syndrome; see what worked for people in studies.
Jog two miles.
Leave the house.
Call the campus mental health center and make an appointment.
See what your health insurance covers, and who accepts it, and make an appointment with a psychologist who’s a “Dr.”—and therefore has a PhD and probably went through it, too!
Work at a coffee shop.
Keep a CBT-style journal of all the impostory thoughts you have, maybe one page per thought-type, and just make a note of the thought, the date you had it, and what thought you wish you’d have instead.
Get with a CBT professional (even a “lowly” LCSW can help with this) and do the work every day for six months.
Get a smaller article published in a trade journal.
Go to a conference...once that’s possible.
Get a hobby that you can use to partially define yourself, so even if you feel like an impostor PhD person, you can feel like a real...up-and-coming powerlifter, or something. (can you tell I think exercise and fitness are major components of all mental health angles)
Write a book of poetry about your impostor syndrome.
Consider, “Would I let this impostor-syndrome-voice jerk in my head live rent-free in my apartment? So why in my head?”
Impostor syndrome subreddit.
Join a union/org/etc of PhD candidates and talk to them about it.
Spend time turning your thesis into concrete subsections and just hammer away at one until you finish. Voila, you accomplished something concrete. What impostor could do that?
Develop an oracle AGI and ask it what to do. Please solve AI safety first.
Call your parents and ask them about their impostor syndrome.
Talk to GPT-3 about it.
Talk to ELIZA the chatbot about it.
Do this babble challenge.
Set a five-minute timer to write down “all the reasons why my impostor syndrome voice is wrong about me”.
Consult with a BDSM professional to see if they have any helpful, uh, methods. Seems like a lot of their clients are high-flying professional people.
Develop actual AGI so that everyone you work with is equally impostory, relative to the AGI, in your area of study. Please solve AI safety first.
Take advantage of placebo effects—I bet a few magic spells to banish impostor syndrome would have some effect even if you explicitly did not believe in magic. Burn sage, hit yourself with a tulip, whatever.
Have a conversation with your impostor syndrome and write down what it tells you. Take an outside view of these thoughts, or ask your friend for one.
Re-read up on cognitive distortions and biases and see how they might be playing into your syndrome. I’m 80% confident that if you can recognize that some of what you’re experiencing is impostor syndrome, then at least three distortions/biases will resonate with you.
Ten minutes in the sauna.
Take a month off from alcohol; observe effects.
Offer free tutoring to a struggling but bright undergrad. See, you understand your subject so well, you can explain it to a struggling but bright undergrad.
Five-minute timer: the ways in which your thesis will contribute to advancing your field.
Spend 30 minutes in front of the sun or a sun lamp.
Stay up for 36 hours—does it change? maybe it’s depression-mediated? Cf. recent Astral Codex Ten called “Sleep Is the Mate of Death”.
Lexapro 10mg
Interrogate your impostor syndrome like it’s an al Qaeda operative in the 24 hours after 9/11, before we all started thinking hard about the ethics of torture. Imagine waterboarding it. Dehumanize it. It’s trying to make you fail. How many seconds of waterboarding could it tolerate before it gives up and admits that you’re doing fine?
Tweet something at Elon Musk. Maybe he’ll respond in some zany way that will make you chuckle but also be slightly concerned.
Adopt a dog/cat/two rats.
Use outside-view thinking to come up with a daily schedule broken down into Pomodoros. Pretend you are your own manager and structure it like you would for a subordinate. Maybe the lack of structure in PhD life is bothering you.
Outside-view an update on the following claim: “I got this far despite being a fraud.”
Start tracking your work time in .25-hour increments. Maybe you’re underestimating how much you get done.
Start a literature review club with your colleagues. Volunteer to lead the first session.
Post on a subreddit about your topic. Get a possibly net-unhealthy benefit from seeing Internet points roll in.
Ask your advisor for a quarterly progress review.
Marijuana edibles.
Supposedly 30 minutes playing a musical instrument has outsized benefits on wellbeing. :::
Had a thought of giving this a go, but I didn’t get to it in the initial pass. I don’t know how much cheating it is to read the prompt and then actually think aobut it later.
feel better
go for a walk
write what you think you would write 10 years in the future
write in order to post a juicy post on subreddit “today I fucked up”
Do an activity that you are more clearly an expert on in order to set a competence mood
Don’t do it—can’t be an imposter if you are not in the role touches temple
Be an imposter—write under a pseudonym
Hypnotise yourself out of imposter syndrome
Outsource, get a ghostwriter
Study more
Make thesis more modest and defendable (yikes!)
Instead of writing what you thin write what a socially acceptable median member would write
Recall all your qualificiations in detail, examine thoughts on why it woudl be insufficient for the task
Get an addtional qualification before starting to feel more competent
Fraudulently get an socially unassailable qualification to your name
Get someone to threaten you at gun point in order to do it
Go talk to whoever you would hand your text to and start talkign how you can’t deliver and try to make it as painful as possible
Cry to your friends how incompetent you are in order to elect passion and reassurances
Cease to exist—can’t have negative emotions if you are not having emotions touches temple
Take psychoactives to induce a manic episode to have illusions of grandeour to carry you through
Get so wasted by alchol that you inhibitions are super low (text quality warning)
Promise not to publish and have easier time to write—then write text you can publish based on text you have promised not to publish
Write multiple options intending to reject most and then try to keep the least stupid production
Do a roleplay session and write the paper roleplaying as a high-int character
Insult the whole world so much that you feel the most confident person on earth
Hire a servant / prostitute to worship you to get ego boost
Do an addtional paper before that has easies and way less complex journals on its basis
Publicly annouce that you are going to do a performance art how people talking about such a topic are laughable
Be so harsh on yourself that you think nobody else could be any harsher—then if you live throught the experience you know you ahve nothing worse to expect
Intentionally sabotage the articles so that any unintetnional mistakes are masked by intentional mistakes
Reflect on why you want to write the article and either feel like the pain is worth it or is not worth it and quit
Start writing a “bad article” cariatyre and then keep writing less and less cariatyrish versions
Start by writing the most prestigious and prideful article and keep humbling it until it feel your own
Ask for extension to accomodate the slowdowns / just take it easy and suffer the imposter syndrome
Write it in the voice of other people to the extent that your own voice is not discernible and thus you feel you yourself haven’t said anything
Ask people to prereveiw the arcticle and restrcture it based on feedback to the extent that you feel like it is only made out of feedback
Wear a mask as you write. Then feelings of imposterness are appropriate and understandable.
Make the subject so narrow that your audience is so narrow that your expectations don’t trigger
Write the opposite of what you think. Then invert that before submitting.
Defame the publication you are writing for so you don’t feel letting the publication down.
Dictate instead of write. Go thorught all different modes of production and pay attention whether same feelings arise
The moment you start the smallest incling of imposter go do your favorite leisure activity. Don’t allow yourself do leisure activity for any other trigger beside progress.
Deconstruct the institute that reading articles is meaningful and promote communication channels that don’t require premeditation
Go find people more stupid than you so taht you get a statistic that you are atleast of average respectability
Stare at a wall and psyhoterapy where your feelings of insecurity raise
Cease thinking and Just Do It
Apply a punishment to yourself everytime you feel like an imposter (ABA warning likely to be dysfuncitional in obvious and unobvious ways)
Apply imposter syndrom to the doubts about yourself—who are you to think that you are an imposter?
Prove to yourself taht no human can write a respectable article in the topic you are about to write. Then write a unavoidably bad article.
Defame yourself so you have no reputation to lose by being stupid.