Imposter Syndrome: What It Really Is and How to Stop It

Prabhu Bala Subramanian is a general practitioner based in London. He has years of clinical training, a specialisation in diabetesology, and a clear vision: to set up a practice in Chennai that teaches diabetes prevention at scale. He knows his subject. His colleagues respect him. By any external measure, he belongs in the room.

When he stands in front of colleagues to give a presentation, his heart rate climbs. His thoughts pivot from the content to the audience. He starts wondering what they are thinking about him. The palpitation arrives before he speaks his first sentence. The imposter symptom, in its precise form, is not incompetence. Not ignorance. A physiological response to imagined judgment.

This is what makes the condition so disorienting. You know you are qualified. You know the material. And yet the body behaves as though you are about to be found out. The gap between what you know to be true and what your nervous system insists is happening produces a particular kind of exhaustion. You spend more energy managing the internal state than actually communicating.

The conventional framing says imposter syndrome is a cognitive distortion. You tell yourself you are a fraud even when evidence says otherwise. The fix offered is usually cognitive too: recall your achievements, gather external validation, reframe your self-talk. These approaches treat the symptom as a belief that can be argued out of existence.

Prabhu did not talk himself out of anything. He did not build a list of professional accomplishments to counter the feeling. He went through a collapse anchor session, and the next time he stood in front of a crowd, the palpitation was gone. That shift points to something the cognitive model misses entirely.

Anticipatory anxiety is the mechanism underneath imposter syndrome. Before you walk into the room, your nervous system runs a simulation of what is about to happen. In that simulation, someone in the audience sees through you. They question your credentials, your conclusion, your right to be at the front of the room. Your body responds to the simulation the same way it responds to a real threat. Heart rate up. Throat tightens. Thought narrows.

This is not a character flaw. It is a protection mechanism that has been calibrated to the wrong signal. At some point, probably in a high-stakes situation early in your career or your life, judgment from others felt genuinely dangerous. The nervous system learned to treat anticipated judgment as an emergency. It fires early, before the threat is even confirmed, because early warning feels safer than being caught off-guard.

The neurotic imposter label people apply to themselves assumes the pattern is irrational. It is not irrational. It is a very efficient system doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem is that the original context that trained it no longer applies. You are no longer a junior student whose grade depends on a supervisor's opinion. You are Prabhu, a GP with a specialisation, standing in front of colleagues who came to hear what you know. But the pattern does not update automatically based on new evidence. It runs the old program until the program is interrupted.

This is why telling yourself to stop feeling like a fraud rarely works. The pattern is not held in the part of the mind that processes instructions. It runs below that. It runs in the same layer that governs whether you flinch when something moves fast toward your face. You cannot think your way out of a flinch. You have to work at a different level.

What Antano Solar John describes in the video as going blank is a related but distinct phenomenon. When you have over-prepared a speech and arrive in front of a room and your mind empties, that may be the unconscious recognising that your prepared version does not match what the room needs. That is not imposter syndrome. That is calibration trying to happen. The distinction matters because treating calibration as failure makes you more rigid, not more capable.

After the collapse anchor session, Prabhu walked on stage voluntarily. He wanted to validate whether the change had held. He said there was still a small residual feeling, but it was much better. Then he spoke, clearly and at length, about his work, his plans for Chennai, his reasons for wanting to reach people at scale. He spoke from his experience, not from a script. He thanked the group. He left the stage having done the exact thing that had previously produced palpitations.

The change was not motivational. Nobody told Prabhu he was good enough. Nobody gave him a pep talk or asked him to recall three professional wins before speaking. The anticipatory pattern was interrupted at the level where it actually runs. Once the pattern stopped firing, the competence that was always there became available in the room. The gap between what he knew and what he can express in front of others closed.

Antano Solar John makes a point in the video that clarifies what lasting capability looks like. He describes being nervous before every session he facilitates, and he does not frame this as a problem to overcome. That nervousness opens his senses. It makes him more attentive to what the group needs. He distinguishes between nervousness that is resourceful, sharpening attention and responsiveness, and the kind of anticipatory loop that pulls performance in an unresourceful direction. The goal is not to eliminate all sensation before you speak. It is to have sensation that serves the moment rather than hijacks it.

Prabhu's next step, as Antano Solar John puts it, is simply to get more context. Go get the opportunities. Start wherever feels right. The point is that the gate that was previously blocking the path no longer exists. How to overcome self doubt is not a thinking exercise. It is the removal of the pattern that produced the doubt in the first place, followed by accumulating real experience that the nervous system can learn from without the old alarm distorting everything.

If you recognise yourself in Prabhu's description, the question worth sitting with is not whether you belong in the room. You already know the answer to that. The question is whether the pattern running inside you reflects who you actually are now, or whether it is still running a much older program that was built for a situation you are no longer in. That distinction is the beginning of something different.