We live in a competitive world where we are judged by the results that we achieve, depending upon which stage of life we are going through currently, when we are in school we are under pressure to be among the best and the brightest and when we are adults our work keeps us constantly under stress to meet the deadline as per the requirements of the organisation that we work for.

The intense pressure takes a toll on our mental health and is a major cause of what is known as the imposter syndrome.

It is a fact that many people suffer from this syndrome, it depends upon the individual as in some cases the effects are short term while for others it lasts for a long time.

Imposter Syndrome can be described as a state of mind where people begin to lose confidence in their ability to get things done and start thinking that all that they have done has no real value.

There are some ways to identify how the imposter syndrome affects your daily life such as:

A) Worrying about what others think about you and being dissatisfied with the end results of your work because of unrealistic comparison with what others are doing.

B) Living in a constant state of fear of being unable to complete the work given to you, which results in failure and blaming yourself despite having the ability to be an achiever.

C) Being unable to complete what you are doing on time and losing faith in yourself to take on work that challenges your ability to achieve results.

D) Despite being qualified and having the skill set  necessary to be employed in the job market, we do not value our efforts and think that all our hard work was for nothing.

Now that we have an idea about what is the imposter syndrome, we need to understand the different categories that exist and how people are affected by this particular syndrome.

1. Firstly, we have those who are never satisfied with the work that they do, they are their own worst enemy and are continuously trying to bring themselves down.
2. Next, there is the person who has to do everything on their own, they refuse to take help from others because they are afraid that they will be viewed as dependent and incapable of working on their own.
3. On the other end, there are people who are over confident and think that they are capable of doing everything on their own and when this does not happen, they blame others for their failure to achieve the desired results.
4. Then, there are those who rely more on theory and have to do everything by the book, they find it difficult to accept that theory does not work all the time in the real world.
5. Finally, we have people who think that they are better than others and know it all, they become easily angry and frustrated when they are at work and find that things are not going their way.

We need to be mentally strong and make a conscious effort to overcome this problem before the imposter syndrome takes over our daily lives and threatens our ability to lead a normal life.