Neurodivergent Masking

I hated my school uniform. I hated the thought of wearing it.  I understand the reasons for schools wanting everyone to wear the same thing – it’s a leveller.  It means no one is singled out for not having the best trainers, the nicest clothes. We all look the same so no one stands out.

Imagine wearing a uniform that weighed you down. Not just physically, like the hem was lined with rocks, but: mentally.  Emotionally.  And even though you thought you needed to wear this uniform to get things done, you’ve realised that just wearing it every day is taking more and more from you every time you put it on.

So why would you wear it?  Because you’ve looked at everyone else, and they all seem to be wearing the same thing.  Except they all move through life like their uniform was woven from the purest silk and butterfly farts. Whereas yours seems to have been invented by some deranged tailor – determined to create the most ill fitting, sensorially overwhelming and sartorially… odd garment possible. 

But you carry on wearing it.  Because if you don’t: how could you possibly go on without it?

This is masking.  This is what it feels like to understand that your whole life you’ve been doing something – sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously – that you thought was necessary to get by.  

ADHD or Autistic masking looks and feels different for different people.  Depending on their diagnosis.  Depending on their intersectional identity.  Depending on the environment they live and work in.   For me, it feels like I have a background task taking up valuable processing power, and it’s constantly running – every waking moment – analysing all possible inputs and asking three questions:

• Am I doing this right?
• Am I being too much?
• Am I not being enough?

Depending on how I’ve been managing my health and capacity to run my executive functioning that day, this process might not be a problem.  But on the days when I’m already feeling depleted – already feeling exhausted from the demands of my workload – it can feel like energy I can not afford to spare is being drained away from me. 

 

What’s Causing This

 

So what’s going on in a neurodiverse mind that causes this to happen?  Why do some people mask more heavily than others?

Hull et al. (2021) found that people with stronger executive function skills mask more, not less. It means that masking is often not a failure of capability, but rather a compensation strategy. Every one of those three questions running on a loop pulls directly from the same cognitive fuel tank you need for planning, focus and self-control, draining the same battery you use for everything else you’re trying to do that day.

This is also something Edward Hallowell describes in ADHD 2.0: two networks in the brain, one for getting things done (the Task Positive Network or TPN) and one for self-referential thinking (Default Mode Network or DMN), that compete with each other far more in the ADHD brain than in a neurotypical one. Masking adds a third demand on top of a system that’s already working harder than it should have to. You’re not just wearing the mask, you’re constantly adjusting and readjusting to make sure it still looks right, while also trying to get on with your day. And then you get to a point where you don’t know where the mask ends and you begin.

And so many of my female AuDHD clients come with a similar story about masking at work. Autism is currently diagnosed around four times more often in men than women, not because autism is rarer in women, but because masking looks so different depending on who’s wearing it. Professor Francesca Happé at King’s College London puts it plainly: the boy who visibly struggles gets noticed and gets help. The girl who quietly copies everyone around her to fit in gets missed entirely, sometimes for decades. 

Happé’s quote in that same Guardian article – that autistic people describe ending up with friends who are “friends with your mask rather than you” is something I found so quietly devastating that I had to close my laptop and take a break from writing this immediately after reading it.  

 

What You Can Do About It

 

If you’re the one wearing the uniform:

The goal is finding a way to reconcile your authentic self with the demands on your time.  It doesn’t happen overnight. Just because you’ve realised you have a mask doesn’t mean you should instantly throw it away.

• Find the specific people and specific settings where you don’t need it. Not everyone, not everywhere, just somewhere. Even a few genuinely unmasked hours a week protects the battery for the rest.
• Notice which of the three questions is loudest for you. And ask yourself what needs you might have that aren’t being met.  
• Plan ahead for it. If a meeting, an event or a work trip is going to mean hours of masking, plan real recovery time either side of it. Not as a luxury. As maintenance.
• If you got your diagnosis later in life, know that the exhaustion isn’t a sign you’re doing recovery wrong. You’re unlearning a strategy that took years, sometimes decades, to build. It won’t undo itself in a weekend.
• Be kind to yourself. You’ve been doing things in a way you thought was right.  Don’t be hard on yourself.  And don’t be afraid to ask for help.

If you manage people, or build the culture people work inside:

The environment decides how heavy the uniform gets. That puts more responsibility in your hands than you might think.

• Look at what “professional” actually means on your team. If it quietly means “doesn’t fidget, doesn’t make waves, doesn’t ask for things differently,” you’ve built a culture that demands masking as the entry fee.
• Make disclosure genuinely safe, not just technically permitted. There’s a real difference between a policy that permits it and a team where someone actually feels able to say “here’s how my brain works” without recalculating the risk first.
• Watch for the person who seems fine on the surface. Some of the most exhausted people in the room are the ones doing this well enough that nobody notices the cost.
• If this is genuinely new territory for you, that’s exactly what workplace neurodiversity training exists for. It’s not about fixing your neurodivergent staff. It’s about building an environment where fewer people need the uniform in the first place.

That’s also exactly the work I do here at WhereFocusGoes: 1-to-1 coaching for people learning to put the uniform down safely, and training for the managers and teams building workplaces where it’s finally optional.

 

If either of those would help your team, get in touch.