91.6% of adults with ADHD report camouflaging
Camouflaging — the deliberate concealment of neurodivergent traits in social situations — emerged as a concept in autism research. The term, also known as masking, describes the strategies autistic people use to “mask” their differences: forcing eye contact, suppressing stimming, creating social scripts, and performing neurotypical behaviours (to name just a few). A study published this month in Research in Neurodiversity establishes that camouflaging extends well beyond autism. Of 202 adults with ADHD surveyed, 91.6% reported camouflaging their ADHD traits.
The Simon Fraser University research team replicated the methodology of Hull et al.’s seminal 2017 autism camouflaging study. The same questions, the same qualitative analysis framework, applied to a different neurodivergent population. The result: near-universal prevalence of camouflaging behaviours among ADHD adults, despite only 17.9% of participants also identifying as autistic. Camouflaging is not an autism-specific phenomenon. It appears to be a transdiagnostic response to navigating social environments that reward neurotypical presentation.
Participants reported camouflaging across contexts — professional settings, public spaces, close relationships, and social gatherings. Some described camouflaging in all situations. A subset reported being unable to stop camouflaging even when alone, the behaviour so ingrained it had become automatic. The motivations clustered into four themes: fitting in with others, being liked, avoiding adverse experiences, and survival in a neurotypical society. These motivations mirror those documented in autism research almost exactly. The language participants used to describe their motivations was stark. They spoke of wanting to be “treated like everyone else,” of camouflaging being “essential for operating in society,” of the trade-off between safety and authentic expression.
The masking strategies that backfire
The study identified three categories of neurodivergent camouflaging strategy: hiding and pretending, suppression, and compensation. Each carries specific costs — and some directly undermine the outcomes they are designed to achieve.
Hiding and pretending involves performing behaviours that diverge from authentic experience. Participants described pretending to pay attention by maintaining eye contact, nodding, smiling, and offering verbal fillers — “yeah,” “mhm,” “really?” — while their minds were elsewhere. They described mimicking others’ behaviours, speech patterns, and emotional expressions to discern social expectations and align with those around them. They described hiding fidgeting through discreet movements: toes inside shoes, tongue counting teeth, hands in pockets, nails digging into palms. Some described adopting characters, performing friendliness or calm they did not feel.
Suppression involves actively restraining impulses rather than redirecting them. Participants described clenching their mouths shut to prevent speaking, biting their tongues, forcing themselves to sit still despite the urge to move, withholding thoughts and interests for fear that expressing them would reveal their differences. One participant described cutting the bottoms of her feet with a razor during high school so the pain would ground her and prevent leg-bouncing in class. Suppression was consistently described as harmful over time — an accumulation of physical and emotional tension with no outlet.
Compensation involves effortful strategies to mitigate ADHD-related difficulties. Participants described overpreparing for meetings with detailed scripts, becoming “hyper-organised” at the cost of sleep and relationships, using timers and alarms and recording devices to compensate for distractibility and forgetfulness. Some described self-medicating with cannabis or alcohol to calm their minds in social situations. A few viewed their prescribed ADHD medication as itself a form of camouflaging.
The strategies differ in their mechanisms and consequences. Compensation strategies — using tools, planning ahead — were generally viewed as helpful with minimal negative impact. Suppression and pretending were consistently described as damaging.
When hiding becomes its own impairment
The study’s most significant finding concerns what happens to attention when someone camouflages attention difficulties. Pretending to pay attention — maintaining eye contact, nodding at appropriate intervals, offering verbal acknowledgements — consumes cognitive resources. Those resources are then unavailable for actually processing the content being communicated.
Participants described focusing so intensely on appearing attentive that they could not attend to what was being said. The performance of listening replaced the act of listening. One participant described “focusing on making eye contact so that they know I’m listening, but being too focused on making eye contact and not hearing anything they say.” Another noted that nodding along led to making mistakes because they had no idea what had actually been communicated.
Suppressing fidgeting and movement produced similar effects. For many participants, fidgeting is not a symptom to be eliminated but a regulatory mechanism that supports attention. Forcing stillness removed the mechanism. Participants described that suppressing the urge to move interfered with their ability to focus, that the cognitive effort of restraint left fewer resources for engagement, that camouflaging exacerbated the very symptoms it was designed to conceal.
This creates a feedback loop specific to ADHD camouflaging. The strategies adopted to appear more attentive make attention worse. The effort to seem focused depletes focus. The outcome is a widening gap between presented competence and actual capacity — which participants noted led others to form expectations based on the camouflaged version, expectations they then struggled to meet. When they inevitably faltered, the response was often dismissal: they had seemed fine before, so the difficulties must not be real.
The exhaustion was near-universal. Participants described needing days to recover from periods of heavy camouflaging, having no emotional resources left for loved ones or responsibilities after a day of performing neurotypicality, and burning out from the sustained effort of suppression and pretence.
Camouflaging as transdiagnostic phenomenon
The replication of Hull et al.’s autism methodology in an ADHD population produced striking parallels. The motivations for camouflaging — fitting in, being liked, avoiding judgement, survival, etc — transferred almost directly. The consequences — to name a few: exhaustion, identity disturbance, mental health deterioration, superficial relationships, and perpetuation of stigma — appeared across both conditions. The researchers conclude that camouflaging represents a transdiagnostic phenomenon observed across neurodivergent populations.
The distinctions were in the specific strategies, not the underlying structure. Autistic camouflaging involves suppressing repetitive behaviours, forcing eye contact, and creating social scripts. ADHD camouflaging involves pretending to pay attention, hiding hyperactivity, and suppressing verbal impulses. The behaviours differ because the traits being concealed differ. But the dynamic — performing neurotypicality in place of authenticity to avoid social penalty — operates identically.
This has implications for how camouflaging is understood clinically. The Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire, developed from Hull et al.’s original research, has been adapted to measure ADHD camouflaging. But the current findings suggest that camouflaging may be better understood as a response to neurodivergent experience generally rather than a feature of any specific condition. The driver is not autism or ADHD but the gap between how someone naturally functions and what their environment demands.
The study also found that camouflaging contributed to late and missed diagnosis. Because participants presented as more neurotypical than they were, their difficulties were dismissed. Family members thought they were lazy. Employers thought they were unmotivated. Mental health professionals denied accommodations because they did not “look disabled enough.” The camouflage worked — in the sense that it concealed the underlying difference. It then prevented the difference from being recognised and supported.
Participants were aware of this paradox. Many described camouflaging as perpetuating the stigma they were trying to avoid. By hiding ADHD traits, they reduced public exposure to neurodivergent presentation, limited awareness and understanding, and reinforced the assumption that such traits are unacceptable. The individual strategy of concealment contributed to the collective environment that made concealment feel necessary.
The question the research leaves open is what alternative exists. Participants did not camouflage because they wanted to. They camouflaged because the social and professional consequences of not camouflaging were worse. The study documents the costs of concealment. It does not resolve the structural conditions that make concealment feel required.
Citations
Mylett, Boucher & Iarocci (2026) — “I wish I could just be myself”: Experiences of social camouflaging in adults with ADHD
