Masking is one of those words that has moved from relatively niche neurodiversity conversations into everyday language. You may have heard an autistic person talk about masking, or perhaps recognised the experience in yourself without having had a name for it.
Masking, also referred to as camouflaging, describes the ways neurodivergent people hide, suppress or compensate for traits that might identify them as different. It can involve changing behaviour, copying social norms, suppressing natural responses or putting considerable effort into appearing more “typical”.
For an autistic person, this might mean forcing eye contact, rehearsing conversations, suppressing stimming or carefully monitoring facial expressions. For someone with ADHD, it could mean trying not to fidget, pretending to listen when their attention has wandered, over-preparing for meetings or copying the behaviour of colleagues.
And importantly, masking is not necessarily a deliberate decision.
Sometimes it becomes so deeply learned that the person does it automatically.
Why do people mask?
At first glance, masking can look like a social skill. And sometimes it is.
Learning how to navigate an unfamiliar environment, adapting communication style or finding strategies that make work and relationships easier is not inherently harmful. Neurodivergent people, like everyone else, adjust their behaviour according to context.
The problem arises when adaptation becomes a requirement for acceptance.
Research increasingly suggests that masking is often a response to stigma, rejection and social expectations. People may mask because they have learnt that being visibly neurodivergent comes with consequences: being judged as rude, difficult, lazy, immature, unreliable, dramatic or incapable.
In other words, the question is not simply, “Why are they hiding their traits?”
It is also: “What has happened to them that makes hiding those traits feel necessary?”
A 2026 study of 202 adults with ADHD found that more than 91% reported camouflaging their ADHD traits. Participants described masking to fit in, to be liked, to avoid judgement and discrimination, and to appear capable in social and professional settings. Common strategies included pretending, mimicking others, over-preparing, avoiding situations and suppressing impulses such as fidgeting or interrupting.
The short-term payoff can be real. Masking may help someone get through a job interview, make a good first impression, avoid conflict or feel safer in a particular environment.
But there can be a substantial bill to pay afterwards.
The exhaustion nobody sees
One of the most commonly reported experiences of masking is exhaustion.
Imagine constantly monitoring yourself while simultaneously trying to participate in a conversation. Am I making enough eye contact? Am I interrupting? Am I talking too much? Is my face showing the right expression? Am I sitting still? Did I miss something? Did that person think I was rude?
Now imagine doing this throughout an entire working day.
The cognitive load can be enormous.
In the recent ADHD study, participants described exhaustion, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, feelings of inauthenticity and uncertainty about their identity. The additional cognitive effort involved in masking could also affect attention, memory and concentration, while some participants reported needing days to recover after intense periods of camouflaging.
This can create a particularly cruel cycle.
A person masks in order to perform well.
The masking consumes cognitive resources.
Their performance suffers.
They then work even harder to compensate.
And the more exhausted they become, the more they may believe they need to hide their difficulties.
When the mask becomes part of your identity
Perhaps one of the less visible costs of masking is not simply exhaustion, but uncertainty about who you are underneath it.
If you have spent years watching other people to work out how to behave, copying the way they speak, suppressing your natural reactions and adapting yourself to fit different environments, eventually the distinction between adaptation and identity can become blurred.
You might know how to be the person your family needs, the colleague your workplace expects, the friend who never asks for too much and the partner who is easy to be around. But what happens when you are alone?
What do you actually enjoy? What are your preferences? What do you need? How do you communicate when you aren’t monitoring yourself? Which parts of your personality are genuinely yours, and which have been carefully constructed over years of trying to belong?
This is one reason unmasking can be both liberating and unsettling. Discovering that some of the behaviours you thought were simply “who you are” were actually coping strategies can leave you with a profound sense of uncertainty.
There can be grief in that realisation, too. Grief for the time spent believing there was something wrong with you. Grief for the version of yourself you never had the opportunity to explore. And sometimes grief for relationships in which you were valued primarily because you were able to make yourself easier for other people to understand.
But there can also be discovery.
Unmasking isn’t necessarily about finding a hidden, perfectly authentic self underneath everything. We are all shaped by our experiences. Rather, it can be about gaining enough safety and freedom to experiment: Do I actually like this? Do I want to do this? Does this way of communicating feel comfortable? What happens when I stop performing?
Sometimes the journey isn’t about becoming someone new.
It’s about finally getting the chance to find out who you’ve been all along.
Research supports the importance of this question. A 2025 systematic review of 24 studies on social camouflaging in autistic adults identified impacts on identity, mental health and delayed or missed diagnosis among the longer-term consequences of camouflaging. At the same time, the review found genuine short-term benefits, including avoiding stigma and increasing connectedness.
It isn’t just an autism thing
Masking has historically been most closely associated with autism research. But the research landscape is changing.
A 2025 study involving adults with ADHD and/or autism found that masking was common and varied according to context. This fits with a broader understanding of masking: it isn’t simply a fixed characteristic of a person. It changes according to how safe the environment feels.
People may mask intensely at work but relax around neurodivergent friends. They may be themselves at home but become highly controlled in public. They may feel comfortable stimming around people who understand them, while suppressing every movement in a professional setting.
Research also suggests that some aspects of masking are not exclusive to autistic people. A 2021 study found that autistic, other neurodivergent and neurotypical participants all described experiences such as mimicking others, exhaustion and feeling disconnected from their sense of identity, although some forms of masking appeared more specific to autism.
This suggests that we need to look beyond the individual.
Sometimes the most useful question is not, “How can we teach this person to mask less?”
It is, “How can we make their environment safer so that they don’t have to?”
The latest research on masking…
The evidence base is still developing, and researchers are increasingly questioning the idea of masking as a single, simple behaviour.
A 2026 meta-analysis of 50 studies involving 16,895 people found a moderate association between autistic traits and camouflaging. Of the different forms of camouflaging, assimilation – trying to fit in and appear more socially typical – showed the strongest association, followed by compensation and masking.
This is important because masking isn’t always about hiding.
Sometimes it is about performing.
It can mean learning the rules, studying other people’s behaviour and consciously constructing a version of yourself that seems socially acceptable.
And that can make masking extremely difficult to recognise from the outside.
Someone who appears confident, sociable and successful may be working extraordinarily hard to maintain that presentation.
Their apparent ease may be anything but easy.
So should we stop masking?
This is where conversations about “unmasking” can become complicated.
There is no universal rule that neurodivergent people should simply stop masking.
For some people, masking can provide safety. In certain workplaces, relationships or social environments, being visibly different may expose someone to discrimination, bullying or exclusion. Telling people to “just be yourself” without addressing those realities puts the responsibility in the wrong place.
Unmasking should therefore not become another expectation.
Instead, it can mean having choice.
Being able to stim when you need to.
Being able to say, “I need a minute.”
Being able to communicate differently.
Not forcing eye contact.
Taking breaks before you reach burnout.
Admitting that something is difficult rather than automatically covering it up.
Most importantly, unmasking does not have to mean revealing everything to everyone.
It can simply mean creating spaces where you do not have to work quite so hard to be acceptable.
Creating a world that needs less masking
The growing research around masking shifts the conversation from individual behaviour towards environments.
If a child is constantly told to sit still, make eye contact and behave “properly”, we should ask what we are teaching them about difference.
If an employee has to hide their sensory needs to be considered professional, we should question the definition of professionalism.
If an adult with ADHD has spent decades believing that their struggles mean they are lazy or unreliable, perhaps the problem is not a lack of effort.
And if a neurodivergent person comes home after a day of appearing completely fine and collapses from exhaustion, “But you seemed fine” is probably the least useful thing we could say.
The goal should not be to make neurodivergent people better at pretending.
It should be to create families, schools, workplaces and communities where people have more freedom to communicate, regulate and participate in ways that work for their brains.
Masking can be a remarkably effective survival strategy.
But survival is not the same as thriving.
The real promise of the neurodiversity movement is not that every person will eventually become comfortable being completely unmasked everywhere. It is that perhaps, one day, fewer people will feel that they need a mask just to belong.
References
- Greig, L., Coundouris, S. P., & Henry, J. D. (2026). Autistic Traits and Camouflaging: A Meta-Analysis. Autism, 30(6), 1398–1415.
- Wurth, P., Fuermaier, A. B. M., Strand, A. H., & Thorell, L. B. (2025). Diagnosis acceptance, masking, and perceived benefits and challenges in adults with ADHD and ASD: associations with quality of life. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 16, 1668780.
- Mylett, M. L., Boucher, T. Q., & Iarocci, G. (2026). “I wish I could just be myself”: Experiences of social camouflaging in adults with ADHD. Research in Neurodiversity, 2, 100018. The study was reported by Simon Fraser University in June 2026.
- Summerill, J. S. J., & Summers, S. A. (2025). The consequences of social camouflaging in autistic adults: A systematic review. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 121–122, 202556.
- Miller, D., Rees, J., & Pearson, A. (2021). “Masking Is Life”: Experiences of Masking in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults. Autism in Adulthood, 3(4), 330–338.
