ADHD Masking

Masking can be anything you do to hide your ADHD symptoms in order to avoid judgment or to fit in with others. 

For example, a person with ADHD may want to appear less fidgety during a job interview. The energy used to not fidget, while feeling internally restless, may require hyper focus to appear calm, and can be maintained only in short bursts.

Another example might be when a person with ADHD has trouble staying focused in conversations that don’t interest them but they don’t want to appear uninterested. So they use their ability to hyper focus just to stay tuned in to what the other person is saying.

At times people with ADHD may go to great lengths to appear high functioning to compensate for struggles.

Masking can be exhausting and isolating.

In addition to masking, self-stimulating behaviours (called stimming), involve making the same movements, actions, or sounds repeatedly. For example, humming, grinding your teeth, or rocking back and forth.

Stimming helps people with ADHD increase focus, decrease boredom, and increase soothing (decreased restlessness).

Masking might look like:

  • Suppressing the urge to fidget or stim

  • Bottling up strong emotion

  • Staying silent in conversations despite strong urge to speak

  • Expending energy to not “say the wrong thing”

  • Rehearsing conversations in your head (reviewing previous conversations, preparing what to say in advance)

  • Mimicking the behaviour of others to appear more like them

  • Writing everything down (out of fear of forgetting but then losing track of these written notes)

  • Working extra hard on tasks

  • Putting in far more effort or time than others to compete a goal (in an unsustainable way)

  • Downplaying symptoms because a high level of effort has become normalized for them (and eventually leads to burn out)

  • Often needing a lot of ‘recovery time’ after making episodes (such as work or socializing)

Masking has a huge emotional cost and often leads to burnout.

At times, a person may not know they have ADHD and instead believe that they have to work much harder than others just to keep up with work or relationship expectations.

Masking can delay proper diagnosis.

If you haven’t been assessed for ADHD and are interested in doing so, reach out.