The Feeling Before the Meeting
It’s that moment before a meeting. Not just any meeting – the kind where the stakes are real, where people are looking at you, where something has to go right.
And something shifts.
Not nerves, exactly. Something worse. A quiet, cold certainty that you are not quite equal to this. That today is the day you’ll be found out. That the decisions you’ve been making for years have been a kind of performance – and now the curtain is about to come down.
Here’s what’s strange about that feeling: the higher you’ve climbed, the more often it shows up. Not less. More.
And here’s what nobody tells you. That feeling isn’t a character flaw. It isn’t low confidence. It isn’t even a psychological pattern, not really.
It is a neurological state – and when you understand what’s actually driving it, everything changes. In this episode, you’ll understand exactly why the most capable people struggle the most with self-doubt – and what to do about it that actually works.
The Higher You Climb, the Louder It Gets
Let me introduce you to Alex.
Alex is 48. He’s a Chief Technology Officer at a company that’s doing well – partly because of decisions he made. He gets through his inbox before most people have poured their first coffee. He doesn’t miss things. His team trusts him. By any external measure, Alex is exactly where he should be.
But three minutes before a board presentation, he’s sitting in the car park scrolling back through his slides for the fourth time. Not because anything is wrong. Because he can’t shake the feeling that something must be.
Alex has been doing this his whole career. He’s told himself it’s just how driven people operate – that the anxiety before big moments is the price of caring. He’s actually a little proud of it. Thinks it keeps him sharp.
What he hasn’t realised is that it’s a sign his brain is chronically running on empty.
This is the thing about imposter syndrome that doesn’t get enough attention: it doesn’t just show up in people who are struggling. It concentrates at the top. The higher the responsibility, the more visible the stakes, the more opportunities there are for the brain to turn on itself – and the more brutal the internal voice gets when it does.
The original research on this phenomenon, published in the late 1970s by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, identified something that has been confirmed many times since: high-achieving people are particularly prone to feeling fraudulent, specifically because they are aware enough of complexity to know how much they still don’t know. The competence and the doubt grow together.
But what that research couldn’t fully account for is how profoundly this experience is shaped by the state of the brain itself. Because there’s a version of imposter syndrome that is temperamental – a stable part of how someone moves through the world. And then there’s a version that is neurological – that fluctuates with sleep, with stress, with what you’ve eaten, with how long you’ve been running on fumes.
Alex is deep in the second kind. And he doesn’t know it.
The brain, under chronic pressure, doesn’t just feel worse about performance. It actually becomes less accurate at judging performance – including its own. Research into how we evaluate ourselves shows that self-assessment is already an imprecise business under normal conditions. Under stress and fatigue, it degrades further. The gap between what we’re actually capable of and what we believe we’re capable of widens – and it almost always widens in the wrong direction.
What’s happening to Alex is not a story about confidence. It’s a story about a brain that has been under-resourced for too long, and what that quietly does to the way you see yourself.
And this is where most advice about imposter syndrome goes wrong – because it tries to fix the belief without restoring the brain.
What’s Actually Happening in Your Brain
So what’s actually happening inside Alex’s brain in that car park?
Let’s start with fatigue, because it’s the biggest driver.
There’s a part of the brain – the prefrontal cortex – that handles our most sophisticated thinking. Planning, nuanced decision-making, and critically for our purposes: the ability to accurately reflect on our own performance. Researchers call this metacognition – thinking about your own thinking. It sounds abstract, but it’s extremely practical. Metacognition is what lets you review a decision you made and say: that was actually pretty good, given what I knew at the time. It’s the faculty that produces accurate, calibrated self-assessment.
The prefrontal cortex is also the first region to suffer when sleep is poor. Researchers who have studied sleep deprivation and complex decision-making have found that the things we lose first aren’t the simple, mechanical tasks – those hold up surprisingly well. What goes first is exactly the kind of nuanced, flexible, high-stakes judgement that senior professionals rely on most. Accurate self-evaluation falls directly into that category.
So the first mechanism is this: fatigue quietly dismantles the part of the brain that would let you accurately see your own competence. It doesn’t just make you feel worse. It makes you assess worse.
Now add stress.
When we’re under pressure – anticipating a difficult meeting, carrying a heavy quarter, running on shallow sleep – the body releases cortisol. And cortisol does something very specific to memory.
The hippocampus, which stores your episodic memories – the specific things you’ve done, the problems you’ve solved, the moments you navigated well – becomes less accessible. It’s not that those memories disappear. They’re still there. But cortisol effectively turns down the volume on them.
Meanwhile, the amygdala – the part of the brain that processes threat and encodes fear-relevant experiences – becomes more active. It has more signal. It speaks louder.
Research into how acute stress affects episodic memory retrieval indicates that under pressure, the brain is biased toward material that matches its current threat state. When you’re stressed and looking for evidence of your own capability, the search is skewed. Failures come to mind easily. Successes feel distant, vague, less real. Not because the successes didn’t happen – but because the neurochemical conditions for retrieving them have been disrupted.
Think of it like a filing system that’s been reorganised in the dark. The files aren’t gone. But the ones marked “threat” and “failure” have been moved to the front. The ones marked “competence” and “success” are still there – you just can’t find them quickly.
This is the imposter experience, from the inside. And it’s not a story you’re telling yourself. It’s a physical state.
Here’s what makes this particularly uncomfortable: the experience of imposter syndrome – that cold, certain feeling that you’re not quite enough – actually generates more cortisol. The self-criticism, the pre-emptive bracing for exposure, the internal running commentary – all of it activates the same stress response that caused the problem in the first place.
So the retrieval bias gets worse. The prefrontal cortex gets more depleted. And the brain, searching for evidence of competence, finds it even harder to locate.
That’s the loop. And it is not a personality trait.
Why Most Advice Makes It Worse
If this is true – and the evidence suggests it is – then most advice for imposter syndrome is working against the grain of the problem.
The most common response is to try to argue yourself out of it. To tell yourself: I’ve earned this. The feedback was good. Other people believe in me. That might produce a few minutes of relief – until the cortisol climbs again, the prefrontal gets depleted again, and the negative retrieval bias returns. Because you haven’t changed the neurological conditions. You’ve just been pushing against a current that keeps renewing itself.
The other common response is to compensate. Over-prepare. Over-check. Over-deliver. And the cruel irony is that these strategies increase cognitive load – which is exactly the thing that’s already making the self-assessment worse. The harder you work to prove you’re not a fraud, the more depleted you become, and the more fraudulent you feel.
This is the trap that Alex is in. The extra time in the car park, scrolling through slides he’s already reviewed four times, is not reassuring him. It’s burning resources he doesn’t have.
What actually drives this experience isn’t a fixed personality trait. It’s a set of conditions – overlapping, mutually reinforcing – that most people have never been given the language to see.
Consider what’s feeding Alex’s experience from every direction. The years of poor sleep – late nights, early starts, the accumulated sleep debt of a career lived at full throttle – have steadily eroded the prefrontal resources that would allow him to assess himself accurately.
The way he fuels himself tells a similar story. Meals skipped during heavy periods, the afternoon dip that arrives reliably around three or four o’clock when blood sugar has fallen and energy has dropped – that’s also when many people report their sharpest feelings of inadequacy. It may not be a coincidence. Cognitive performance, including self-evaluation, is sensitive to blood glucose stability in ways that are often underestimated.
Then there’s the body. Alex barely moves during the day. He drives to the office, sits in meetings, drives home. Physical movement – regular, varied, even gentle – produces a protein in the brain called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which supports the connectivity of the very prefrontal circuits involved in accurate self-assessment. When movement disappears from a life, one of the things that slowly fades with it is the brain’s capacity for clear, calibrated thinking.
And finally, the internal commentary. The self-critical loop, the anticipatory bracing, the silent running score Alex keeps on his own performance – this is what generates the cortisol that narrows his access to his own history of success. The mind feeding the stress response. The stress response feeding the mind.
These four inputs don’t operate independently. They interact. Sleep deprivation makes blood sugar management harder. Poor blood sugar control elevates cortisol. Elevated cortisol impairs sleep. A sedentary body raises baseline stress. And the mental habits of self-criticism amplify the whole system.
What Actually Works
The goal here is not to think more positively. It’s to restore the conditions under which your brain can assess itself accurately. That’s a different project – and a much more tractable one.
The most powerful single lever, over the long term, is sleep. This isn’t surprising, but it bears saying plainly: consistently getting adequate sleep does more for accurate self-evaluation than almost any other intervention. It restores prefrontal function. It regulates the cortisol rhythm. It improves the fidelity of the brain’s own assessment systems. The research on this is not subtle.
But there’s something you can do starting tomorrow – before the sleep is fixed, before the stress has dropped – that works with the neurological problem directly.
It’s called an Evidence File.
Here’s how it works. You keep a running record – digital or paper, it doesn’t matter – of specific, concrete things that went well. Not general statements of competence. Specific episodes. Not “I’m a good leader.” Instead: “I handled the Eriksson restructure when nobody else knew how to approach it.” Not “my presentations are strong.” Instead: “The board asked me to present that scenario analysis again at the next session.”
Specificity is everything, because you are building a library of episodic memories – real, retrievable, factual records of competence – that can be called up when the brain’s retrieval system is biased away from them.
Then, before any high-pressure event, you read three entries. Not to hype yourself up. Not as a pep talk. But to prime the retrieval system – to pre-load accessible memories of actual competence so that when your brain goes searching for evidence of who you are, it finds them.
Research on how planning and specific memory activation influence performance suggests that deliberately recalling concrete past successes before demanding situations improves both what you actually do and how accurately you evaluate your own contribution afterward. The mechanism is not positive thinking. It is giving the brain’s appraisal system accurate, accessible data to work with – because under stress, without that priming, the data it defaults to is skewed.
If Alex had been doing this – had pulled up three specific memories of decisions that worked before he walked into that boardroom – his prefrontal cortex would have had something real to hold onto. Not a story. Evidence.
The Evidence File also serves a slower, deeper purpose. Over weeks and months, it recalibrates the internal narrative. When the self-critical loop says you’ve never really known what you’re doing, the file says: actually, here’s what I did in March. And here’s what happened in the autumn. And here’s the email I got after that call.
That’s not denial. That’s accuracy.
Start tonight. Open a note on your phone or grab a piece of paper. Write down one specific thing from the past month that went well – something real, something concrete, something you did or navigated or decided. That’s the beginning of the file.
It doesn’t feel dramatic. It isn’t meant to. But done consistently, it quietly shifts the evidential basis on which your brain makes its judgements about who you are.
Where to Start
If you recognized Alex in this episode – the external composure, the internal waiting to be found out – here’s where to start. Not with a mindset shift. With a file. One entry. Tonight.
What we’ve covered in this episode is the difference between imposter syndrome as a personality feature and imposter syndrome as a neurological state. The first version is something you manage. The second is something you can change – by restoring the conditions the brain needs to see itself clearly.
The sleep. The fuel. The movement. The internal conversation. None of them alone is the whole answer. But each one moves the system in the right direction.
And the Evidence File is what you do in the meantime – while the other conditions are being restored – to give the brain accurate data instead of letting it guess in the dark.
This is Your Space Today – delivering the science-backed clarity you need every week because your health journey deserves expert guidance.
If you found value in this article, I’d really appreciate it if you’d share it with friends or family who might be struggling with similar issues. Sometimes, understanding that we’re not alone in this struggle, and that there are real, science-based explanations for what we’re experiencing – that knowledge alone can be incredibly empowering.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with your healthcare provider regarding any health concerns. You can find detailed information here.
Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. Until next time, take care of yourself. You deserve it.
Scientific References
If you’d like to explore the research behind this article, here are selected peer-reviewed studies supporting the key points discussed.
- Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman. (Foundational text on mastery experience as a source of self-belief; underpins the Evidence File’s mechanism of building accessible records of competence.)
- Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241–247. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232455649_The_imposter_phenomenon_in_high_achieving_women_Dynamics_and_therapeutic_intervention
- Cotman, C. W., Berchtold, N. C., & Christie, L.-A. (2007). Exercise builds brain health: Key roles of growth factor cascades and inflammation. Trends in Neurosciences, 30(9), 464–472. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17765329/
- Dunning, D., Heath, C., & Suls, J. M. (2004). Flawed self-assessment: Implications for health, education, and the workplace. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5(3), 69–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00018.x
- Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493
- Harrison, Y., & Horne, J. A. (2000). The impact of sleep deprivation on decision making: A review. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 6(3), 236–249. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11014055/
- Lupien, S. J., Maheu, F., Tu, M., Fiocco, A., & Schramek, T. E. (2007). The effects of stress and stress hormones on human cognition: Implications for the field of brain https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6364338_The_effects_of_stress_and_stress_hormones_on_human_cognition_Implications_for_the_field_of_brain_and_cognition
- Shields, G. S., Sazma, M. A., McCullough, A. M., & Yonelinas, A. P. (2017). The effects of acute stress on episodic memory: A meta-analytic review and analysis of the mediating role of stress hormones. Psychological Bulletin, 143(6), 636–675. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5436944/