If you've recently been diagnosed with ADHD or you're wondering whether you might have it, there's a high chance people in your life were surprised.

But you're so organised.

You've always been so capable.

Don’t be silly, you don’t have ADHD.

And maybe the most insidious: Everyone struggles with focus sometimes. Everyone’s a bit ADHD.

This is the reality for many of us with this different neurotype. On the outside, things look fine. Inside, it's a different story.

What is masking?

Masking is the conscious or unconscious process of hiding or compensating for neurodivergent traits in order to meet expectations or fit in. Sometimes we ‘mask’ just to get through the day.

For professionals with ADHD, masking often starts early. At school, you may have learned that being smart and having the answers could cover for being disorganised. That being the student who said yes to the extra curricular tasks, was a way to being liked. That working that bit harder than everyone else meant that you could fly under the ‘challenged’ radar. That if you just stayed late, worked into the night, worked through the night, you could keep up.

And you likely did keep up, but this keeping came with a cost. And you hid that too.

And now you find yourself in the middle of your life, and it feels like your wheels are starting to fall off. Because let’s face it, our energy is finite. Our body has limits. And what worked when we were 25 doesn’t work that well when we’re 45. And it’s not just about work, we are managing more than our uni workload. On top of our jobs we now have kids, a mortgage, ageing parents, possibly managing divorce, perimenopause for the women..

What high masking actually looks like

High masking ADHD in a professional context rarely looks like the stereotype of the restless 9 year old who can't sit still on the school mat. It tends to look more like this.

Exceptional output, enormous effort. You produce great work, but it takes you longer than you know it should, or it happens in a frantic burst at the last minute, after hours of putting it off. Nobody sees the beneath the surface frazzle and shame.

Hyperfocus as a coping mechanism. You can go deep on things that genuinely interest you, sometimes so deep you lose track of time, forget to eat, or miss other deadlines. You tell yourself that this capacity for focus is a strength, which it can be, but it also can conceal how dysregulated everything else is.

Creative compensating strategies. Colour-coded calendars, multiple reminders, notes in every room, lists of lists. These work until you no longer notice them, forget they exist, aren't interested in them anymore, or until the mental load of maintaining them becomes exhausting in itself.

Overcommitting. Saying yes to all the requests because saying no feels too risky, and if we say yes, people will be pleased with us, and what’s more, in that moment of being asked, the cost of the workload we’ve said yes to doesn't feel real (hello time-blindness).

The Sunday dread. For the week ahead, remembering the things you didn’t get achieve last week but still have to do, catastrophising about everything that might go wrong and how-am-I-going-to-cope, and this will be the week of being pinged by your manager.

Exhaustion that sleep doesn't ameliorate. This is because the fatigue isn't always about insufficient shut eye, but the cumulative cost of over-performing every day.

Why women and older professionals are disproportionately affected

ADHD was historically researched and diagnosed in school aged boys presenting with hyperactivity. The profile of a quietly struggling, deeply capable, outwardly-composed professional (often a woman, often in her 40s or 50s) simply wasn’t on clinicians’ radars, let alone getting the attention from the rest of us.

Many of us have spent decades developing sophisticated strategies before anyone suggested ADHD might be part of our story. Many of my clients use the term ‘camouflaging’ when they reflect on how they’ve moved about their lives. We haven’t considered that the identity we’ve constructed is how to manage others’ impressions of us really well in an effort to conceal our true selves, and that we’ve been performing to cloak a deep sense of shame.

By the time we’ve reached a diagnosis, our coping mechanisms are so second nature that they we haven’t recognised them as coping mechanisms at all. We just think we have to try really hard, and that everyone else is too.

When I received my own ADHD diagnosis at 49, I’d been coaching for years by then. But when I went through that process of discovery, so much fell into place. The relief was enormous. But the awareness of the lengths I went to conceal and manage my differences, was mind-blowing. 

The cost of long-term masking

Research increasingly links chronic masking with:

• Burnout - particularly ADHD burnout, which can look like depression but has different roots and needs different support

• Anxiety - often a secondary condition that develops from years of trying to manage an unmanaged nervous system

• Low self-esteem - when you're always working harder than everyone else just to keep up, and you don't know why, it's easy to conclude there's something fundamentally wrong with you

• Late or missed diagnosis - because you look fine, so why would anyone look further?

The difference between contextual appropriateness and neurodivergent masking

There’s an important distinction to be made between masking and behaving in context.

I’ll be upfront with my position here: I have an issue with ‘bringing our whole selves to work’. Contextually, we bring different parts of ourselves to different scenarios, depending on the environment, depending on our role.

We bring the parent part of ourselves to our parenting, we aren’t colleagues or peers, and there’s a considerable age differentiation.

We bring the collegial part of ourselves in our workplaces. It would be a mistake to assume a parenting role with our colleagues.

No one wants to see the project manager picking his nose on the work call. Or walking around in boxer shorts (though there’s plenty of covid-era working from home faux pas as the world got used to operating in lockdown).

The main difference between healthy contextual performance and neurodivergent masking is whether the cost of it exceeds the payoff. If you’re coming home and your evenings are weekends are recovering to be able to function and do it all again, there’s a high chance that you’re masking. Masking is costing you, this cost is unsustainable, and something needs to change.

What actually helps

The good news is that once you understand what's actually happening in your brain, things can change immediately. Not because you start trying harder, but because you stop fighting yourself. Some of what helps:

Getting the right diagnosis and support. If you're in New Zealand, your GP is the first port of call for an ADHD assessment/referral. A diagnosis doesn't change who you are, it gives you a framework for understanding yourself that makes sense. And when we know how the system works, we can better work the system.

Understanding your nervous system. ADHD is increasingly understood as a difference in how the nervous system regulates attention, emotion, and activation. It’s not a deficit of willpower, capability or talent. One of my favourite frameworks is Dr William Dodson's interest-based nervous system model - INCUP - which is a really useful place to start.

Rethinking your systems. The elaborate compensating systems many high maskers build aren't wrong. In fact they're evidence of your intelligence and adaptability. But they often need to be rebuilt with your actual brain in mind, not the brain you think you should have!

Working with someone who gets it. There's a particular kind of relief in talking to a professional or therapist who understands ADHD from the inside, who doesn't need you to explain why you have seventeen tabs open and still can't start the one thing you need to do today.

Surrounding yourself with ‘like-minds’. If you feel like the odd one out in your circles, it may be time to find circles that fit. Meet ups for neurospiceys. Online groups. Hobbies and interests where divergent minds converge. Know that finding and sustaining friendships can be difficult for us neuro-atypicals. Be kind to yourself. 

And please be assured, you’re most definitely not broken!

If you've spent years wondering why things that seem easy for other people feel so hard for you, and that continuing in the way you’ve been working just isn’t sustainable, masking is worth exploring further.

Annie Romanos is an Executive ADHD and Neurodiversity Coach based on the Kāpiti Coast, New Zealand. She works with professionals, leaders and business owners who want to understand their brain and build a working life that actually fits. Find out more about working with Annie.