1: The masking performance I got quite good at
I’ve spent over twenty years in television edit suites, and for most of that time I was very good at looking “fine”. I’m fine! I’m fine! But I can tell you now, I wasn’t fine as in coping, I was fine as in polished; so I was the Producer/Director who revised everything twice, who turned up early, who worked late into the night making notes. As an Edit Producer I was the one who marked up and logged everything in the rushes, who could sit with an Editor for eleven hours withoutletting on that the light was drilling into my brain, without telling them that my temperature was all over the place, and I was fully in stress mode. I was the calm one, totally unflappable in a crisis, able to work out workarounds, able to track down music a few hours before the show picture locks, able to stay composed. I was masking.
It took me a long time to understand that being the calm one was the mask, and that actually being calm can come with quite a big cost. After every single contract I have had in TV, I have always spent time afterwards completely exhausted, unable to leave my bed, not knowing what was happening, thinking it was some sort of cold, but it wasn’t.
I wanted to explore masking further and so this is the first in a series about masking in ADHD. I want to look at what the research actually says about it, why it looks different depending on who you are, and how the work place rewards people who mask extremely well.
What the masking research says, and why there is so little of it
Most of what we know about masking comes from autism research. There have been lots of studies of autistic adults over the last decade, and for a long time nobody thought to ask whether ADHD’ers were doing the same thing.
However, thankfully, this is starting to change. Over the last few years a small but fast-growing body of research has begun asking the question directly, and the answer, from every study so far, seems to be yes.
A Dutch study in 2024 compared adults with ADHD to autistic and neurotypical adults and found that ADHDers masked significantly more than the neurotypical group, particularly in the strategies people use to fit in socially. This year a Canadian team asked 202 adults with ADHD the same open-ended questions first used to study autistic masking a decade ago. More than nine in ten said they hid, or compensated for their ADHD traits in social situations. And the reasons were probably the same reasons you might have if you mask – to fit in, to be liked, to avoid being judged, to survive in a neurotypical world.
The cost of masking for me was the complete exhaustion and this is what has been showing up in the participants taking part in these surveys . As well as exhaustion, there’s anxiety, low self-esteem and a sense of not knowing who they really are. Some like me, needed days to recover after periods of intense masking. And the effort of masking makes your ADHD symptoms worse because there is less energy and focus for executive functions.
We need better tools and research
Total transparency here, because I really want to make it clear about the limits of these studies because they are small studies, and the questionnaire most of them use was designed for autism rather than ADHD, but this just tells me that we need better tools and bigger samples and to research this more.
What masking might look like in ADHD
ADHD masking is quieter than autistic masking and easier to miss, even if you know about it. It is an elaborate system of internal alarms and lists that means nobody can tell that you lose your keys all the time. It’s the extra time (sometimes very last minute) before every meeting so you can appear to have read the documents in the normal way. It’s the making jokes about things to try and fit in to cover the fact you have lost the thread because you’ve been trying so hard to appear normal. You present fully competent at work, but your house looks like its been ransacked. It’s the happy go lucky person people see out and about, but inside your social battery is on zero.
Most late-diagnosed adults I coach describe it as being something in-built rather than something they have a choice about. So, somewhere when you were young, you learn that the way you behave naturally gets you either told off or quietly left out. In order to fit into society, you build a second self that you think other people want to see. That second self is often capable, organised, reliable, outgoing. And then holding this, what you think is the “perfect” person up every day is exhausting in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has never had to.
What masking costs
The thing about a good mask is that it works. It gets you the job, the friends, the reputation for being unflappable. And then it quietly sends the cost back to you.
The first cost is the energy. Every hour spent looking organised is an hour not spent being organised. People in the 2026 study described needing days to recover after a stretch of heavy masking and I recognised that immediately. The weekend after a TV shoot or a picture lock was never rest, it was repair.
The second cost is connection. When people only ever meet the edited version of you, they cannot really know who you are, and then you know it too, so it feels like there is a barrier up which makes it so hard to become close. Participants in the studies talked about relationships that felt less genuine, about impostor feelings even when they were succeeding, and about no longer being sure who they were underneath the performance.
The third cost is that If you are looking fine on the outside, no-one knows what you are really going through. A Berkeley study that has followed girls with ADHD since the 1990s found that as they grew up they showed fewer outwardly visible symptoms but went on suffering in more hidden ways, so with far higher rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm in adulthood than their peers. Looking fine really isn’t the same as being fine, in fact, most of the time in ADHD’ers its probably the opposite.
I have written an article on Substack for The Female Lead that explores masking in ADHD and AuDHD girls and women if you would like to explore this further.
Television, and the mask that fitted too well
I love my edit producing job and I still do it. But unscripted television is an environment where masking thrives. As a freelancer, you end up meeting a new team every few months and instant warmth is expected, otherwise why would people hire you? Luckily I have been around the industry for long enough that I mainly get to work with people who are wonderful and I don’t have to wear my mask with. I also have the best job share partner, who I was myself with immediately and we work so well together because of it. Anytime I feel something about a job, I know I can sense check it with her with no judgement, ever. It’s absolutely the reason I have managed to stay in this industry for so long. I would honestly advise anyone working in the industry to have a job partner.
Where this is going
Masking isn’t something to be ashamed of. It has kept a lot of us employed. But it is a survival skill and when you have used it for years without a break, it stops being a skill and becomes an energy drain.
Next in this series I will be looking into how masking builds in childhood and why school almost guarantees it, what it does to your sense of who you are, what burnout looks like.
If any of this landed, that is usually a good sign, and if you have your own story of being the calm one, I would love to hear it.
Tamsin
Research referenced: van der Putten et al. (2024), Is camouflaging unique for autism?, Autism Research; Lai et al. (2023), The dimensional structure of the CAT-Q in a representative general population sample, Comprehensive Psychiatry; Mylett, Boucher & Iarocci (2026), “I wish I could just be myself”, Research in Neurodiversity; Australian ASD and ADHD Study (2026), Research in Neurodiversity; Frontiers in Psychiatry (2025), Diagnosis acceptance, masking, and perceived benefits and challenges in adults with ADHD and ASD; Hinshaw et al., Berkeley Girls with ADHD Longitudinal Study.