Masking: the cost of performing normal at work

Every meeting is two jobs: the meeting, and the performance of being someone who finds meetings easy.

For high-performing professionals in Chicago and Chicagoland: This article reflects clinical evidence and direct experience. If you're in the Chicago area or Illinois, contact me to discuss your concerns.

Masking describes the deliberate, often automatic, suppression of autistic traits in order to appear neurotypical: rehearsing conversations, forcing eye contact, mirroring other people's expressions, suppressing the need to move or to step away, and carefully monitoring tone.

It works, in the sense that people often succeed in not being noticed. That success is the problem.

What it costs

Masking is continuous cognitive labour running underneath every interaction. People describe ending a workday with nothing left, not because the work was hard but because the performance was. Weekends become recovery rather than living.

Over years the cost compounds. Masking is consistently associated in research with exhaustion, anxiety, and depression, and with a sense of not knowing who one actually is beneath the performance.

Masking is not a social skill. It is a load, and loads accumulate.

Why professionals mask more

Professional environments reward exactly the behaviours masking produces: composure, social fluency, reading the room. The more senior the role, the more it depends on interaction, and the higher the masking demand. Promotion can be the event that tips someone from coping into burnout.

What helps

Not abandoning masking entirely — that is rarely realistic in a professional role. Rather, reducing the total load: building recovery time into the week deliberately, adjusting the environment where possible, choosing where to spend the effort, and being unmasked somewhere.

Knowing that this is what is happening is often the first relief. Exhaustion with a cause is easier to manage than exhaustion that seems to prove something is wrong with you.

Published August 2026 · Reviewed for accuracy against the sources listed above.