In a 2026 study of 202 adults with ADHD, 91.6% said they conceal their ADHD traits at least some of the time. The strategies they listed were not the ones I expected. Pretending to pay attention. Rehearsing conversations before having them. Over-preparing.
That last one stopped me.
Over-preparing does not look like hiding. Over-preparing looks like being good at your job. So I went and read the research on ADHD masking, because I wanted an answer to something specific: what happens when the disguise stops looking like a disguise and starts looking like a work ethic?
Key takeaways
- In one 2026 survey, over 91% of adults with ADHD reported concealing their traits, and over-preparing sat on the list of named strategies.
- A 2017 study found adults had built elaborate systems and structures years before anyone diagnosed them, and concluded symptoms can hide behind those systems.
- Participants described a real cost: exhaustion, needing days to recover, and having their struggles waved off by people who only ever saw the output.
- Researchers are currently arguing about whether masking is even the right word for what happens in ADHD.
- Almost nobody searches for this. That turns out to be part of the story.
What ADHD masking at work actually looks like
Start with the plain version. Some of us learn, early and without deciding to, that certain parts of how we operate get punished. So we cover them. We run a second job on top of the first one, and the second job is managing how we come across while doing the first.
Researchers call that camouflaging. It is the one bit of jargon in this post, and it is borrowed language, which matters later.
The 2026 study asked adults with ADHD what they actually do. The strategies they named included pretending to pay attention, mimicking other people, avoiding social situations, suppressing the urge to fidget or interrupt, and over-preparing. They described doing it at work, in public, and in their closest relationships, mostly to be seen as capable and likeable and to avoid being judged.
Read that list again and notice how many of those look like virtues from the outside.
Suppressing the fidget reads as composure. Rehearsing the conversation reads as preparation. Over-preparing reads as conscientiousness. Nobody has ever pulled someone aside to ask why they are so ready for a meeting.
Chester Gregory put a version of this to me on the podcast. He spent years in an industry that runs on high energy, and looking back through a new ADHD lens he could see how much of that life had been spent masking to fit a neurotypical world. From outside, it read as stamina.
That is the thing about busy. For a lot of us, busy is the socially acceptable version of struggling, and it is the only version that gets rewarded.
“High functioning ADHD” is a measurement problem
Here is where the older research earns its place.
Back in 2017, a team interviewed 32 adults with ADHD about what they had built for themselves before anyone diagnosed them. The strategies they described grouped into five categories, and the organizational ones came up most: checklists for every step of a job, tightly planned weeks, a plan A through D for ordinary situations, work arrangements engineered around their own failure points.
Several of them said the structure was the thing that let them outperform. One estimated he got noticeably more done than a typical colleague precisely because of how tightly he compressed the day.
Notice what that paper does not measure. It catalogues the strategies carefully and says very little about what running them costs. That part shows up in the 2026 research.
None of them knew they were compensating. They thought they were just people who needed a lot of lists.
The authors ended on a line I have not stopped thinking about: some core symptoms may hide behind well-developed coping strategies or particular working environments, and that lowers how well a person can see their own symptoms. They point back to earlier work suggesting the condition often goes unrecognized in adults whose coping is good enough to keep the surface intact.
Worth being careful here. That is 32 people at one clinic, all of whom eventually got diagnosed, describing their own history. It is a mechanism, not a prevalence figure. It tells you how this can happen, not how often it does.
But it reframes the sentence a lot of us have heard. “You seem fine” is not an observation about your brain. It is an observation about your compensation.
Nobody has the words for this yet
I ran keyword data while researching this post, which is the least romantic possible way to find something out.
“ADHD masking” gets searched about 5,000 times a month in the US. “ADHD masking at work” gets searched about 50. Phrases like “ADHD exhaustion from pretending” and “ADHD effort no one sees” returned no data at all, which means the volume is too low to register.
So the concealment is recognized socially and basically invisible occupationally. People know the word for pretending at a party. They do not have a word for the version that shows up on a performance review.
Which brings up the part of this that is not abstract. Participants in the 2026 study reported that camouflaging cost them: exhaustion, anxiety, low self-esteem, a sense of inauthenticity, and needing days to recover after intense stretches of it. Some described it making their actual attention and memory worse, so the effort of hiding the problem fed the problem.
The one that lands hardest for me is quieter. They described other people dismissing their struggles because of how well they were covering, which reduced their access to support.
I should say plainly that I am not a doctor and not a licensed mental health professional. I am a guy who got diagnosed at 35 and reads a lot of research. Nothing here diagnoses anyone, and nothing here replaces a real evaluation with someone qualified to do one. If any of this is landing, that is a reason to go talk to a professional, not a reason to skip it.
Where the researchers actually disagree
This is a live argument, and the post would be dishonest without it.
Camouflaging came out of autism research. The questionnaires were built from autistic adults’ descriptions of their own experience, then applied to ADHD. The authors of the 2026 study say so themselves.
In 2026 a guest editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry argued the construct is not ready for clinical use in ADHD at all: no agreed definition, no ADHD-specific measure, and a mechanism that sits awkwardly with how executive function actually works in ADHD.
I am not qualified to settle that, and I am not going to pretend the field has. Two things can be true. The word may be wrong. The experience people are describing is still being described, consistently, by a lot of them.
One more limitation that matters for this audience: the sex breakdown of that 202-person sample is not reported anywhere I could find it. For a readership where women are the majority and were historically missed, an unreported split is not a small footnote.
Five ways to make the effort visible
These apply the mechanism from the two studies. None of them is a tested intervention, and I would rather tell you that than dress them up.
1. Track cost, not output, for seven days. Each evening, write one line: what did today cost me. Not what did I finish. If you compensate well, your output record looks fine and your cost record does not, and only one of those has ever been written down.
2. Mark the hours that required a performance. Take one ordinary weekday. Go hour by hour and put a mark next to any hour where you were managing how you came across on top of doing the work. Count the marks at the end. Most people are surprised by the number.
3. Bring the cost to the appointment, not the results. Before you go, write down three specific things that took far longer or cost far more than they appeared to from outside. Read them out loud. “I have a good job” is the sentence that ends an assessment early. “Preparing for a routine meeting takes me two evenings” is the sentence that does not. If you have already been brushed off once, I wrote a whole piece on what to do when your doctor dismisses adult ADHD.
4. Drop one small cover in one safe room. Pick the smallest behavior and the safest setting. Not the boardroom. A friend’s kitchen. Who this is not for: the researchers behind the 2026 study are explicit that these behaviors are an ingrained response to real social pressure and that unlearning them takes serious time. If your workplace or your family would genuinely punish you for it, this step is not yours right now, and skipping it is not a failure of nerve. The two things that predict whether it goes well are whether the room is actually safe and whether the behavior is small enough to drop without a conversation about it.
5. Book the recovery before the heavy day, not after the crash. Open next month. Find the two densest days. Block the evening after each one now, while it is still empty and easy to claim.
Questions I get about ADHD masking
Can you have ADHD and still be successful at work?
Yes, and for some people the success is built partly out of the compensation. The 2017 research describes people whose rigid structures were the reason they outperformed. Achievement is not evidence against ADHD. Sometimes it is evidence of how much scaffolding somebody quietly built.
What does high functioning ADHD look like?
Usually it looks like nothing, which is the whole issue. The term is not a clinical category, and I would not lean on it too hard. What people tend to mean is that the output holds up. What it does not tell you is what the output cost.
Why am I so tired after a day that looked fine?
If you spent the day running the second job on top of the first one, the tiredness is not mysterious. Participants in the 2026 study described needing days to recover after heavy stretches of camouflaging. Worth saying: plenty of things cause fatigue, and this is one possible explanation rather than the explanation.
The cost of undiagnosed ADHD is paid in advance
The thing about a really good disguise is that it works on you too.
You do not walk around thinking “I am concealing.” You walk around thinking you are someone who needs a lot of lists, who prepares more than most, who is tired in a way other people do not seem to be. The compensation starts to feel like personality before it ever becomes a question.
So the useful move is not deciding whether to unmask. That is a big word for a decision most of us cannot make in the middle of an ordinary week. The useful move is smaller: start counting what it costs, in writing, where you can see it.
You have been paying for years. You might as well see the bill.
If you want more like this, I send one email a week to people whose brains do not run on the standard schedule. You can sign up here.
Much love. Good vibes. ‐ Ky
Sources
1. Mylett, M. L., Boucher, T., and Iarocci, G. (2026). “I wish I could just be myself”: Experiences of social camouflaging in adults with ADHD. Research in Neurodiversity.
2. Canela, C., Buadze, A., Dube, A., Eich, D., and Liebrenz, M. (2017). Skills and compensation strategies in adult ADHD, a qualitative study. PLOS ONE.
Also cited, to show where the field disagrees: Adamou, M. (2026). Camouflaging in ADHD: the need for construct validation before clinical adoption. The British Journal of Psychiatry.
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