ADHD Masking: Why Fighting Your Own Brain Backfires — an article by Carl Argent

The short answer

If you have ADHD, your own mind may have let you down often enough that part of you now treats it as a risk. The natural response to a risk is to guard against it, so many adults with ADHD spend their days holding their brain down: clamping the restlessness, watching every word, pushing unwanted thoughts away before anyone notices.

The trouble is that holding something down takes the very attention and memory that ADHD already runs short on. So the effort to seem reliable can leave you less reliable, more exhausted, and oddly further away from the people you are trying so hard not to let down. There is another way to relate to your mind, and it starts with it feeling less like an enemy.

When your own mind feels like the risk

You are in a meeting and you can feel it starting. The thought that has nothing to do with the agenda. The urge to jump in before the other person has finished. The sudden blank where the thing you were about to say used to be. So you tighten. You fix your eyes on the speaker, you press your foot into the floor, you rehearse your sentence three times before you say it.

Nobody else sees any of this. They see someone who looks calm, perhaps a little quiet. By the end of the day you are more tired than the day can explain.

It may feel strange to describe your own brain as something you are afraid of. Yet many adults with ADHD recognise the feeling at once. Not fear of the world, but a steady watchfulness towards the inside: what will it do next, and will anyone see?

If that is you, it is worth saying plainly that this is not weakness or vanity. It is a sensible reaction to a long history, and it deserves to be understood before anyone asks you to change it.

Why the threat makes sense

ADHD is common. Around two to three in every hundred adults in England are thought to have it, many of them undiagnosed until well into adult life (NHS England, 2025). For most of those years, the lapses happened without an explanation. The forgotten forms, the missed turn in a conversation, the project that stalled at eighty per cent.

What usually came with each lapse was correction. From teachers, parents, managers, partners, and eventually from yourself. Adults with ADHD tend to perceive more criticism from the people around them than adults without ADHD, and that sense of being criticised goes a long way towards explaining why they also tend to find it harder to be kind to themselves (Beaton, Sirois and Milne, 2020).

Over time the criticism does not even need to be spoken. Many adults describe a feeling of being judged that persists with no evidence at all, and a habit of hiding their difficulties at work to stay safe (Beaton, Sirois and Milne, 2022).

Put those together and the logic is clear. If your mind has repeatedly got you into trouble, and trouble has repeatedly meant criticism, then your mind itself becomes the thing to watch. Your threat system is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what it learned to do.

How holding it down becomes the plan

When something inside feels unsafe, the most instinctive response is to hold it down. For adults with ADHD that tends to show up in three ways, often all at once.

Clamping down on the body

The restlessness gets held in. Legs kept still by force, fidgeting turned into a clenched jaw, the urge to move saved up until the meeting ends. It can look like composure. It usually feels like pressure.

Watching yourself all day

Part of your attention is always turned inwards, monitoring. Am I talking too much? Did I miss something? Do I look distracted? You are taking part and supervising yourself taking part, at the same time, for hours.

Pushing thoughts away

The stray thought, the worry, the idea that arrives at the wrong moment, gets shoved aside. The difficulty is that telling the mind not to think about something tends to make that thought return more often, not less (Wegner et al., 1987). So the pushing has to be repeated, again and again, and each push costs something.

None of this is chosen in a calm moment. It is a strategy that grew up under pressure, and in the short term it often works. People may never guess what it takes.

Then you get home. The guard that held all day tends to drop the moment the door closes, and what was held down comes out all at once: the snapped reply, the evening lost to your phone, the jobs that simply do not get started. The people closest to you may see the version of you that is left over, and wonder why everyone else gets the calm one. That can add its own layer of guilt, which becomes one more thing to hold down tomorrow.

The cost nobody sees

Here is the part that tends to surprise people. Holding things down is not free. Keeping a feeling off your face uses up mental resources, and people who do it tend to remember less of what was happening around them while they were doing it (Richards and Gross, 2000).

For anyone, that is a cost. For someone with ADHD, it lands on exactly the capacities that were already stretched: attention, working memory, the ability to hold the thread. So the effort spent guarding against lapses quietly makes lapses more likely.

That creates a loop. The mind feels like a threat, so you hold it down. Holding it down uses up capacity. With less capacity, you miss things. Missing things confirms that your mind cannot be trusted, and the guarding tightens.

From the outside, the loop is almost invisible. From the inside, it often feels like exhaustion that makes no sense, irritability at the end of a good day, or a flat, hollow tiredness after being with people you like. Many adults with ADHD describe the same thing: they look fine, and it is costing them everything they have.

If this sounds familiar, the answer is not to try harder at holding it down. That is the loop. The answer tends to lie in making the inside feel less dangerous, so there is less to guard against in the first place.

What it does to trust

This is where the pattern reaches beyond ADHD. The same thing happens to anyone who habitually holds their inner life down. ADHD tends to make it happen more often, and over a longer history.

Trust in yourself

When you spend years overriding what your mind is doing, you can lose touch with what it is actually telling you. Tiredness, interest, boredom, alarm: all of them get treated as noise to be managed. It becomes harder to know which signals are worth listening to, and harder still to believe your own read of a situation. “I cannot trust my own mind” stops being a passing thought and becomes a settled belief.

Trust with other people

Holding back what you feel also changes how you come across. People who habitually keep their feelings off their faces tend to feel less close to others and to receive less social support, even though nobody is doing anything wrong (Gross and John, 2003). In conversation, suppression can quietly disrupt the connection, leaving the other person less comfortable and less drawn in (Butler et al., 2003).

So the person working hardest to seem reliable may come across as guarded or distant, which is the opposite of what they intended. Partners, friends and colleagues sense something held back, and trust thins on both sides.

It can be painful to realise this. You may have been guarding your mind precisely so that people could rely on you, and still find that closeness feels thin. It is worth knowing that this is not a verdict on you or on the relationship. It is what tends to happen to anyone who has had to hide a large part of their inner life for a long time, and it tends to ease when there is less that needs hiding.

Where the people around an adult with ADHD come to understand what is going on, criticism often eases and relationships steady (Beaton, Sirois and Milne, 2022). Being understood seems to do more than being perfect ever could.

Working with your brain instead of against it

If the problem is partly that your mind feels like a threat, then the way forward is less about control and more about safety. That tends to involve three shifts, none of them dramatic.

Curiosity before correction

When your mind does the thing, drifting, jumping, blanking, try noticing it with interest rather than alarm. “There it goes again” is a different experience from “not again”. The behaviour may be the same. The threat is lower, and a lower threat leaves more capacity for everything else.

Putting the load outside your head

Much of the guarding is really an attempt to hold everything in working memory so nothing slips. Lists, reminders, visible plans and agreed signals with colleagues take that load off your head and put it somewhere reliable. It is not a crutch. It is freeing up the part of you that was on permanent watch.

Kindness towards the mind you have

Self-compassion tends to be lower in adults with ADHD, largely because of how much criticism they have absorbed (Beaton, Sirois and Milne, 2020). That also means it is one of the places where change can make a real difference. Speaking to yourself about a lapse the way you would speak to a friend is not letting yourself off. It turns down the threat that keeps the whole loop running.

It is also worth choosing, deliberately, one or two places where you do not have to hold everything down. With one person who understands, or in one part of your week, letting your mind be as it is can feel remarkably restoring.

Try it this week

Pick one conversation this week with someone you trust, and let one thing through that you would normally hold back. The fidget. The tangent. The admission that you have lost the thread and need a moment. Afterwards, notice two things: what it cost you to let it through, and how the other person actually responded. For many people, the second is gentler than they feared, and the first is less than they expected.

Quick answers

If you want to take this further

An article can describe the loop. Working together can help you step out of it: understanding where the threat came from, noticing what you guard against and why, and finding places where your mind no longer has to be held down. You can read more about ADHD therapy with me, and a free initial conversation is the usual first step. Where the difficulty is mostly practical, coaching is also available.

Sources and further reading

Beaton, D. M., Sirois, F., & Milne, E. (2020). Self-compassion and perceived criticism in adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Mindfulness, 11(11), 2506–2518.

Beaton, D. M., Sirois, F., & Milne, E. (2022). Experiences of criticism in adults with ADHD: a qualitative study. PLoS ONE, 17(2), e0263366.

Butler, E. A., Egloff, B., Wilhelm, F. H., Smith, N. C., Erickson, E. A., & Gross, J. J. (2003). The social consequences of expressive suppression. Emotion, 3(1), 48–67.

Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.

NHS England (2025). Report of the independent ADHD Taskforce. NHS England.

Richards, J. M., & Gross, J. J. (2000). Emotion regulation and memory: the cognitive costs of keeping one’s cool. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(3), 410–424.

Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5–13.

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ADHD Self-Trust: What Happens When You Stop Believing Your Own Promises

ADHD Emotional Regulation: Feelings Can Get Overwhelming

Understanding Your ADHD: Learning to Work With Yourself

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