The Real Cost of ADHD Masking at Work
Nothing blew up today. No missed deadline, no hard conversation you're replaying on the drive home. And still you're wrecked by 6 p.m., the kind of tired a normal Tuesday has no business producing. A new study has a name for where that exhaustion actually comes from: the effort of looking fine, not the work itself.
What you're actually running
A 2026 study out of Simon Fraser University, led by Marisa Mylett and psychology professor Grace Iarocci, asked 202 adults with diagnosed ADHD how they actually get through a day. 91.6% said they routinely hide, suppress, or compensate for their traits just to move through the world. At work that means real, specific effort: rehearsing a sentence before you say it out loud in a meeting, or forcing eye contact that isn't actually helping you listen. Some people sit on their hands so nobody notices them fidgeting. Others stay up late over-preparing for a task a coworker would walk into cold.
Here's the part that actually matters: the study found camouflaging measurably worsens the exact symptoms it's meant to hide. Pretending to track a conversation and suppressing the urge to move both draw from the same limited attention. There's only one pool, and camouflage drains it before the actual work gets a turn. Call it a second job layered onto the first. You're staying focused enough to function; some other part of you is running a constant check to make sure it looks that way from the outside.
Mylett put it plainly: masking "may help you get your foot in the door socially... but they often leave people feeling exhausted." Some participants needed multiple days to recover after a stretch of heavy camouflaging, on a timeline closer to physical exertion than an average workday. By evening, several described anxiety and low self-esteem, plus something harder to name: the smoothed-out version of themselves they'd been performing all day had started to blur into the actual one.
Compensation vs. suppression
Before you swear off every coping tool you have, the research draws a real line. Compensating for ADHD — using a planner, showing up five minutes early to get your bearings — showed up as genuinely useful, with little of the downside. Suppression was the one doing the damage: forcing stillness when your body wants to move, or nodding along to a conversation you've actually lost the thread of. Researchers lump both under "masking," but they land very differently in the body.
Not everything on your list deserves the same verdict, though. Some of what you're doing is genuinely load-bearing — sort for that first, and let the rest go quietly.
Is the risk still real?
A separate 2026 study out of St. Francis Xavier University interviewed 22 Canadian adults with ADHD about disclosure and career outcomes. The finding that cuts right into this: the outcome barely tracked the disclosure itself. It tracked the manager — specifically, what that one person chose to do once they knew.
That's worth sitting with. A lot of masking stopped being a live decision a long time ago: it's a default that got set once, maybe years back, at a job or with a manager where hiding really was the safer call. It's been running on autopilot since, applied to every room whether or not that room has earned it. Researchers have a name for what that costs: an invisible tax of self-silence, paid continuously, based on a threat read that may be years out of date.
Nobody's saying announce your diagnosis at the next team meeting. Most people run the math as disclosure-risk versus concealment-safety, and only ever price one side of that ledger. Concealment costs too, and now there are actual numbers for it. Even a small signal counts as data. Mention offhand that you take notes because you process better in writing, or that you need a minute after a meeting before you commit to anything, and you'll learn something real about how one specific person reacts, without staking your whole reputation on it at once.
One thing to try
Don't audit your whole work persona tonight — that's a project for someone else's Tuesday. Pick one thing instead. Take a single masking behavior you run on autopilot, the note-taking you don't actually need, say, or the eye contact you force. Test it on the one person whose read of you actually shapes your outcomes: drop it quietly for a week and see what actually happens, not what you're braced for.
You're not bad at your job. Most of what wore you out today never showed up on paper, and it won't show up on a performance review either. It showed up around 6 p.m., in the fifteen minutes you spent staring at your inbox instead of answering it.
This is general information, not medical advice. If you're weighing disclosure or accommodations at work, that decision deserves a conversation with a qualified professional who knows your specific situation.
References
- Mylett, M., & Iarocci, G., et al. (2026). "I wish I could just be myself": Experiences of social camouflaging in adults with ADHD. Research in Neurodiversity. https://www.sfu.ca/sfunews/stories/2026/06/adults-with-adhd-may-pay-high-price-to-mask-traits-and-fit-in--s.html
- Bradley, C. (2026). TMI? Exploring the effects and experiences of ADHD disclosure on career progression. St. Francis Xavier University. https://stfx.scholaris.ca/items/a4d02319-5ed2-4dcf-856d-28620befd377