If you live with ADHD, or you’re thinking that you ought to get tested, you’ve probably become an expert at one thing without even knowing it – masking.

Masking is a self-preservation tool and the art (I use that word loosely) of hiding your ADHD traits so you can appear ‘neurotypical’ enough to blend in, cope and avoid judgment. On the outside, it looks like you’re ‘fine.’

Inside? ‘Not fine.’ You’re running on empty, hiding a full-blown meltdown, waiting to get home to hide under a weighted blanket, or glass of wine, and doom-scroll your anxiety away.

As an aside, doom-scrolling can help as a self-regulation tool. However, you need to put a limit on if before it becomes a diversion tactic and you move into hibernation mode.

The constant monitoring of your tone and the words you use, layered over with moderating your body language, add trying to maintain your focus at work and remembering to keep your face polite in meetings, or on calls. All this while fighting the invisible tidal waves of your ADHD brain’s constant chatter is exhausting.

It’s not just tired-in-the-evening exhausted. It’s a bone-deep, soul-weariness that creeps into your muscles and makes you forget what rested even feels like.

This tiredness is also when women can seek help from their GPs. They don’t know what is wrong, but they know they are not right. We cannot keep looking after everyone else, let alone ourselves, when our energy levels are in our boots.

We find a spare half hour to go to the doctors, where we’ll be asked about the past couple of weeks; which when you share all the things may prompt a questionnaire from the GP to gauge our mood levels. Please remember, if you’re in ADHD Burnout, you can present with symptoms similar to depression and anxiety. This is not to blame GPs, they’re doing the best they can in an over-stretched and underfunded system. If you show up with what looks like increasing anxiety, or depression, or both over the past month or so – that is what GPs will look at supporting you with.

This may all be you’ve hit the menopause, but that’s a whole other blog post. But in short, a lot of the tactics you’ve used to hold your life together over the years got swept away and now don’t work. Not least because your hormone levels fell off a cliff, taking your coping skills with them. The reverse of this is also true, girls can fall over when they start going through puberty.

Because we’re so used to just carrying on; when we do ask for help, our colleagues and acquaintances don’t understand the depth of it. They’re so used to seeing us managing, coping, hustling, juggling – why should we suddenly need help now?

Why We Mask

We mask because we’ve been told along our entire lifetime, both directly and indirectly, that our authentic selves are ‘too much’ and at the same time, ‘not enough.’ We’re too loud. Too quiet. Too forgetful. Too fidgety. Too dreamy. Too blunt. Too emotional. We also don’t always pick up on the clues happening around us, so we miss things, or say something wrong.

We spent our childhood learning the rules, because we were shunned if we didn’t.

For the rest of our lives, we’ve continued to force ourselves into fitting in. We smile when we want to scream. We nod when we want to disagree. We keep our thoughts to ourselves because we’re scared of being seen as unprofessional, unstable, or incapable.

I’ve talked about this before, there is a scale of emotional acceptability of between 3-7 in public.

• 0-1: in bed hibernating under a weighted blanket. Too over everything to move, to speak or function.
• 2-4: down, but upright. Will be met with ‘You’re quiet today’.
• 5-6: normality (in the eyes of everyone else).
• 7-8: life of the party. ‘You’re so much fun!’
• 9-10: hyper, loud, quick to respond and worryingly word perfect thanks to all our rumination. Will crash and burn as soon as you switch off.

I’ve often been complimented on my loud laugh, but it’s only loud because I’m used to repressing everything, so when I laugh my emotions have to escape somewhere. When I’m laughing, properly laughing; I weep, my shoulders shake, but am actually quiet, except when I wheeze to get air in. For me to get to that stage with you? You have to be more than an acquaintance.

The Toll It Takes

Masking isn’t just tiring, it’s unsustainable. Over time, it chips away at your energy, your confidence, and even your physical health because it costs so much:

• Mental fatigue: constantly overthinking every action or word.
• Emotional burnout: feeling disconnected from your own needs and identity.
• Physical strain: headaches, tension, insomnia, sore throats and runny noses.

When you live in ‘performance mode’ all day, you lose the safe space to just be. And that constant dissonance of having to be who you’re not really who you are at your core? It’s not something you can simply power through without falling over. And here’s a reminder of the kicker; we’re so good at masking that people don’t us when we do say we’re struggling.

When You’re Not Being Heard

It’s a hard truth that when we finally ask for help, sometimes we’re met with silence, minimisation, or that dreaded phrase:

‘But you seem fine?’

If you’ve ever been brave enough to say, ‘I need some time and space to think about this’ to be ignored; I know that you know how deeply invalidating that feels. It’s like yelling for a life raft and being told to just swim harder.

This is where self-advocacy becomes survival. You are allowed to ask for what you need. Repeatedly if necessary. You are allowed to say, ‘No, I’m not okay’ without needing to prove it through collapse, or to justify it to people you don’t feel safe with. You are allowed to prioritise your own wellbeing, even when the world wants you to keep up the performance as it is easier for them.

Giving Yourself Permission to Rest

Masking might have helped you survive, to be fair it probably was necessary in school. However, at work or in social situations as an adult, it doesn’t have to be your default. It’s okay to:

• Step back from conversations or meetings when your brain is overloaded. If I’m in a meeting and feeling fried, I don’t put my camera on now. My face has subtitles on it at the best of times.
• Block out recovery time in your calendar, without justifying it.
• Take your lunch breaks, and away from your desk.
• Tell people, ‘I can’t give you my best answer right now, let me come back to you’.

Rest is not laziness. Silence is not weakness. Pausing is not failure.

The unmasked version of you might be messier, louder, quieter, more forgetful, or more intense than some people have seen before and that’s fine. Your people will love you for who you are, no matter what. Please stop trying to worry about everyone else and concentrate on you.

Your energy is finite, and you don’t have to spend it making other people comfortable while you slowly burn out. I would rather you slow down on your decisions, so you make the right one. Conversely, I would rather you make a quick decision to get something underway, but have the courage to change what you need to do when you have more information.

Now, if you’ve not done this already today – make a cup of tea. Sit away from your screen to drink it and start thinking about what you need to do now to make yourself feel more comfortable.

• Do you need to block time out in your diary so you don’t over commit to all the things?
• Do you need to drink a glass of water every hour on the hour? This is a hack I started when my role was busy, because I’d need to get up to go to the bathroom it got me away from my desk more frequently.
• If this isn’t something you can do, set a reminder on your phone (or watch) to get up and move every hour on the hour instead.
• Do you need to put your phone down tonight when you get home and have a night off screens for good behaviour?

That last one? I heartily recommend. Put some music on when you get home instead, have a dance party in the kitchen while you do the dishes and get as much ready for tomorrow as you can. Then have an early night and start all over again tomorrow.

We keep the world turning, but we need to stop doing it at the expense of others.