What Is Masking? Hiding Yourself in Autism and ADHD

You come out of a meeting and everyone thought you were great. You get into the car and sit for ten minutes unable to do anything. Someone looking from the outside saw a successful person in that meeting. You spent forty-five minutes in that meeting managing yourself.

The distance between those two sentences is called masking.

I do not have an autism diagnosis, and I am not going to give myself one. But the concept of masking was largely described in autism research, and that description also made it easier for me to understand what I live through on the ADHD side. In this article I first write what the research says, then the difference between the two profiles.

Where the concept comes from

In the autism literature, masking was for a long time a subject talked about within the community but not studied systematically. One of the works that changed this was the study by Hull and colleagues (2017).

In this study with ninety-two autistic adults, three questions were asked: why do people do this, what exactly do they do, and what happens as a result?

The picture that emerged was this. The reason was mostly fitting in and forming bonds with others; that is, not a lie, a need. The thing done consisted of two parts: hiding and compensation. The result was exhaustion, a complicated burden that comes with breaking patterns, and a blurring of the sense of self.

This triad took the concept out of being a personality trait and turned it into a measurable behavior.

Hiding and compensation are not the same thing

This distinction is very useful in practice, so I am writing it separately.

Hiding is making what you struggle with invisible. Keeping restlessness under the table, stopping the movement of your hand, suppressing a reaction, not showing that you are tired.

Compensation is producing what you think is missing by another route. Preparing conversation openers in advance, managing eye contact by counting, memorizing jokes, waiting for the other person to finish their sentence and building what you will say beforehand.

Hiding is tiring but a kind of pause. Compensation is a calculator that runs all the time. People usually do both together, and the real fatigue comes from compensation.

What masking covers in ADHD

Here I can speak from my own side.

The things masked in ADHD are a little different: disorganization, forgetfulness, lateness, inner restlessness, unfinished jobs. The ways of covering up take shape accordingly.

• Over-preparation. Going to a meeting with three times the preparation, to close off the possibility of forgetting. From the outside it looks like meticulousness, from the inside it is fear.
• An obsession with arriving early. Leaving forty minutes early so as not to be late and spending those forty minutes in the car.
• Staying silent. Not speaking at all so as not to interrupt. The result: looking uninterested.
• Hiding the mess. The two hours of panic before guests come to the house. Or never inviting guests at all.
• Pretending to take notes. Keeping your hand busy while actually trying to listen.

I still do some of these, and I can say that all of them work. The problem is not that they do not work; it is that their bills come later. I went into more detail on this side in the article what is masking in ADHD.

Where the difference between the two profiles lies

Roughly it divides like this:

In autism, masking is aimed more at social functioning. Managing reciprocity, eye contact, turn-taking, figurative language. And suppressing sensory reactions: making the reaction to light, sound and touch invisible.

In ADHD, masking is aimed more at executive functions. Covering up forgetting, lateness, disorganization, leaving things half done. And suppressing impulsivity: not interrupting, not cutting in, not showing impatience.

If both are present, both are done at once and the load adds up. I covered this picture in the article on AuDHD.

The common point is this: in both, masking is not deception but an attempt to fit in. Nobody does it for fun.

How this is learned

Masking does not look like a decision, because most of the time it does not begin as a decision.

The typical course described goes like this: the child does something, gets a reaction, stops doing that thing. Over the years this becomes a layer made of hundreds of small corrections. Nobody says "hide yourself from now on"; the environment constantly communicates which behavior is accepted, and the learning happens by itself.

One consequence of this is that years later masking is no longer noticed. The person does not know what they are covering, because they have never seen the uncovered version. Underneath the sentence "actually it seems I don't have a problem" that people going for assessment often say, this is generally what lies.

And there is this too: masking works. It makes it possible to get a job, form relationships, stay in an environment. If it did not work, nobody would do it. For this reason, treating it simply as a bad habit is both unrealistic and pushes the person to defend themselves.

Has the cost been measured

It has, and the results are as follows.

Cage and Troxell-Whitman (2019), in a study with 262 autistic adults, examined the reasons, contexts and cost of masking together. Two patterns turned out to be associated with worse mental health outcomes: masking intensely in all contexts and switching constantly between contexts, that is, masking in some places and not in others.

The second finding is interesting, because it looks counterintuitive. The expectation would be "at least in some places you can be yourself, and that's good." The finding points to constant mode-switching producing a load of its own.

The study by Hull and colleagues (2020) showed a gender difference: autistic women reported higher masking than autistic men, while no such difference appeared among non-autistic people. I wrote about the relationship of this finding to diagnosis in the article autism and ADHD in women.

The cost of masking is usually not paid at that moment. It is paid in the evening, it is paid the next day, sometimes it is paid weeks later. Because of this delay, making the connection becomes harder.

Masking in the diagnostic process

This is practically the most important heading.

Masking works in the assessment room too. Someone who has fitted in for thirty years fits in for forty-five minutes as well. The clinician sees someone managing well, and the picture stays incomplete.

The way to get past this is deliberate preparation:

• Describe the cost, not what you do. The sentence "I can give presentations" is incomplete. The sentence "I can give presentations, but I can't sleep for two nights before and I can't talk to anyone for a day afterward" is complete.
• List what you avoid. The environments you do not enter, the jobs you do not take, the invitations you do not go to. Avoidance makes the problem invisible.
• Say what you memorize. Sentences like "I count my eye contact" or "I prepare conversation openers in advance" carry clinically meaningful information.
• Get a written note from someone close. Someone looking from the outside notices the things you consider normal.

I described the general framework of this preparation in the article how autism is diagnosed in adulthood.

There is no button for lowering the mask

Most of the advice circulating online on this subject does not seem realistic to me. The sentence "be yourself" ignores why masking is done.

People mask because not masking has a cost: losing a job, exclusion, being misunderstood, in some environments safety. This cost is real, and telling a person "just drop it now" means ignoring this cost.

The approach that seems more realistic to me is this: instead of dropping masking completely, deciding where you will not mask.

• Choose one place. Home, a friend, one meeting. Consciously drop masking there.
• Then widen it. Every place you find safe is added to the list.
• Reduce context switching. The finding of Cage and Troxell-Whitman (2019) goes in this direction: constantly switching modes is expensive. As far as possible, reduce entering very different environments within the same day.
• Write recovery time into the calendar. Do not put work after a day that required heavy masking. This is not a whim, it is a line in the budget.
• Separate what you do from why you do it. Some masks work and it is good that they stay. Some are only habit. Separating the two shrinks the list.

For my part

The mask I carry most is "over-preparation," and I will not give up some of it, because it keeps my work running. What I gave up was something else: I stopped trying to look well on a day when I am not well.

The concrete form of this is: if it is a bad day, I postpone the meeting. I used to count the wish to postpone as a weakness, and I would go to that meeting, do a poor job and then beat myself up for three days. Now I postpone, and both the work and I end up better off.

The second thing I gave up was at work. I used to tidy my messy desk before every meeting, because I was afraid of what the mess said about me. Now I do not tidy it, and I saw that nobody cares. A large part of what I was afraid of lived in my own head.

There are also things I could not give up, and I have no intention of giving them up. Calendar alerts, lists kept in three separate places, over-prepared presentations. Whether these are masking, compensation or just a system that suits me, I am not sure. What I am sure of is this: I do not have to let go of what keeps me standing because it has been called masking.

I covered masking's relationship with burnout in the article burnout in ADHD, how the social side runs out in the article social battery, where the two separate in the article are ADHD and autism the same thing, and its counterpart in social communication in the article social communication in autism and ADHD.