I don’t know anyone who would look at corporate America and say, “wow, is this a healthy place to be!” Most companies run on short-term, short sighted values that don’t serve most of their employees. Because the systems are terrible, employees’ mental health suffers. A recent survey found 84% of people said aspects of work worsened their mental health. People from historically marginalized groups suffer worse mental health at work. As Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper explains, in most work cultures, white men have higher status than others: “Status is reflected in gender, it's racialized, and it's also reflected in social class. Organizations are gendered and racialized as well.”

The intersectionality of mental health and work is under-researched – which means we don’t know how to talk about it. The idea of adding race, gender, and class to a discussion of mental health has most executives running for the hills.

I struggle with how to talk about it too, but I’m trying. Anxiety and mental health challenges exist at so many macro and micro levels. Poor mental health can be caused by, and exacerbated by, systems that are broken… but it also also exists within us. When I’m speaking to groups, I often use a slide that says “It’s not all in your head.” What drives poor mental health is often out of our control. Still, we do have the ability within us to change and lessen the personal impact of anxiety and other mental health challenges. 

Let’s talk about impostor feelings, for example. For many of us, especially those of us with anxiety, impostor feelings are difficult to turn off like a switch. It’s not that easy, because these feelings tap into our deepest feelings about self worth and belonging. Sometimes I tell people, even though your imposter feelings may be rooted in causes that are outside your control, it doesn’t mean you don’t feel them, and it doesn’t mean they aren’t painful. 

And even while impostor feelings stalk your thoughts, those same feelings are part of a system trying to blame you. We have to hold and manage the personal reality of these feelings while pushing back to change the system. In Time, S. Mitra Kalita just wrote about the systemic roots of impostor syndrome, and the growing pushback against this extremely popular concept. Kalita writes:

Thankfully, people like Saujani and Ruchika Tulshyan are leading a movement that recognizes most people live and work in unjust systems that don’t serve them, and it’s time to stop asking individuals to tie themselves in knots “fixing” themselves when it’s society and systems that need fixing.

Often, imposter feelings are based on long-held stories we tell ourselves. We have pushed ourselves very hard, all our lives, and when we’re faced with challenges, we feel anxious. For a lot of us, the story that we’re a fraud or we’re not good enough and we don’t belong and we must absolutely work harder than everyone else can be deeply held- even habitual. The causes for these feelings are so varied. It could be because we have been a “other” or an “only” in systems, organizations, teams and offices that treat us like we don’t belong. 

Or sometimes we belong to the privileged class, but we still feel anxious, and we still feel like we don’t belong or we’re not good enough. I believe imposter syndrome is rooted in anxiety, anxiety that turns into habitual thought traps. In my podcast, I have interviewed many high achievers who have operated from a system of feeling like an impostor or a failure, and then use that anxiety to push themselves ever harder. This takes a toll but can drive achievement. 

Researchers Lisa Orbé-Austin and Kevin Cokley have identified two overarching responses to imposter syndrome. One is the path of procrastination, which is a kind of self-sabotaging response to feelings of fraudulence: Worried they won’t succeed, these workers put off tasks until the last minute, and when they do succeed, they easily discount their success as undeserved or a stroke of luck. Others take the path of overpreparation. These are the workers who overachieve, overwork, and overfunction. I call them anxious achievers – and I’m one of them.

People with impostor syndrome, like many anxious people, often achieve at work because anxiety pushes them to work harder and never stop. Research has even found that people with impostor feelings become “more other oriented” and are collaborative, socially skilled, and effective in teams. We humans are good at adapting! With therapy we can reduce the impact of impostor feelings – but we still need to change the systems that create and foster impostor feelings.

Like all things in mental health, there’s as much work to be done in dissembling toxic systems as there is helping individuals build skills and play to their strengths. Workplace cultures more rooted in empathy are more mentally healthy. Everyone feels anxious at work sometimes-- because we’re human. We care about what people think, we want to do well, we want to matter and contribute.  

Morra

PS: Check out my interview with Dr Lisa Orbé-Austin and also, this APA article is really helpful.