How to Stop Performing and Start Being – Getting ADHD Unmasked This Halloween
- Brainz Magazine
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Anna Dafna, a multiple award-winning ADHD and high-performance coach, mentor, and psychologist (GMBPsS). She coaches ambitious yet scattered minds to move beyond productivity and into presence. Through her holistic, evidence-based and soulful approach, she transforms how we think about focus, identity, and success.
Many adults with ADHD move through the world behind invisible masks shaped by politeness, performance, and the fear of being misunderstood. This article explores how masking impacts identity, relationships, and the nervous system, and offers trauma-informed guidance on reconnecting with your authentic self so connection no longer comes at the cost of your wellbeing.
ADHD masking and the cost of connection
“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.” – François de La Rochefoucauld.
Not every mask is made of plastic. Some are shaped by politeness, productivity, and the quiet exhaustion of holding it all together.
For many adults with ADHD, the show starts long before Halloween, the daily act of appearing consistent, composed, and in control. Saying yes before you mean it. Overexplaining to feel understood. Performing to belong, all while your mind sprints ahead of your body.
One client in her mid-fifties told me, “I am 55, and I don’t know who I really am.” She had learned to stay safe the only way she knew, through adaptation. Masking can feel comforting because it offers temporary safety. It helps you blend in and get through the day. But inside, the body and mind fall out of sync. You can be smiling and speaking, yet feel absent from your own life.
Disconnection doesn’t just happen in the mind, it shows up in how we love, lead, and listen. It sounds like over-apologising, avoiding boundaries, or mistaking self-sacrifice for connection. It is the quiet exhaustion of being easy to love by never being inconvenient.
Masking keeps the peace but costs intimacy. The body stays alert, scanning for approval or tension. The cost is not only emotional, it is physiological. Over time, the nervous system begins to associate connection with danger and authenticity with risk. To truly unmask, we must understand how the body interprets safety beneath the surface.
Understanding the nervous system
Our nervous system constantly scans for cues of safety or threat, a process Stephen Porges (2011) calls neuroception. When it is balanced, we move fluidly between connecting, acting, and resting. When it is dysregulated, we get stuck in overdrive or in shutdown, shaping how we think, feel, and relate.
Ventral vagal, safety and connection: Here, the body feels calm and engaged. Breathing is steady, curiosity returns, and relationships feel possible.
Sympathetic, mobilisation and protection: This is the body’s accelerator. It fuels focus and action, but when it runs too long, tension replaces clarity. You might appear productive but feel wired and restless.
Dorsal vagal, immobilisation and freeze: This is the emergency brake, the body’s way of conserving energy when escape feels impossible. Life feels hopeless. Motivation fades. It is not weakness, it is protection.
Fawning: The people-pleasing response
“If you trade your authenticity for approval, you may gain acceptance but lose yourself.” – Brené Brown.
Trauma specialist Pete Walker and PsychCentral define fawning as appeasement, a nervous system response to stay safe through people-pleasing. Fawning is a learned trauma response for survival and protection. Polyvagally, it is a hybrid state, blending connection with mobilisation and combining the ventral vagal system (social engagement) with sympathetic activation (fear-based compliance). Prolonged fawning may collapse into shutdown, a ventral-dorsal blend where you keep pleasing but feel numb and invisible inside.
Fawning makes relationships look harmonious on the outside but erodes honesty on the inside. True closeness is not about avoiding conflict, it is about staying present when it arises, because conflict, when safe, can actually deepen a genuine connection.
Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD): The ADHD pain point
Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) is part of ADHD. It describes the intense emotional pain triggered by real or perceived rejection, a wave of shame or sadness that feels like danger. This sensitivity is linked to how the ADHD brain processes emotion. Studies show that areas such as the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, which regulate emotion, function differently in ADHD. That can make emotional reactions faster and harder to control.[5]
“I could sense rejection before anyone said a word,” one client told me.
Trauma can intensify the RSD experience, but it is not what causes it. Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria can lead to different reactions, including withdrawal, lashing out, or fawning. Fawning is the reaction that looks composed on the outside but is fuelled by fear on the inside.
From coping to connection
But when the body starts feeling safer, rejection or perceived rejection still hurts, but no longer defines you. It becomes something you can feel, repair, and move through. Sometimes healing looks like catching yourself mid-apology and taking a breath instead. Sometimes it is choosing silence over a story that is not true anymore.
We can meet others to the extent we have met ourselves. When self-connection deepens, connection with others can deepen too, especially if they are the right crowd. As the body learns safety, relationships shift from managing others’ comfort to meeting in honesty. Learning about trauma-informed self-regulation can help rebuild this bridge between safety and connection.
Reclaiming authenticity
These are some ways to begin reclaiming authenticity and to move from understanding it in theory to experiencing it in practice. Each invites you to return to your body as the starting point for truth, safety, and self-trust. Authenticity is not performance, it is presence. It is not loud, it is peaceful, the quiet confidence that comes when your body feels safe to be seen.
Before you answer, let your body be heard: If your yes feels heavy, it is likely a no. Your body knows boundaries before your words do. Expansion signals truth, contraction signals cost and a warning of self-betrayal. Honour your body’s wisdom beneath the urge to please.
Regulate, then relate: Breathe before responding, not after regretting. A regulated body creates space for clarity and curiosity. Coherence in the body creates clarity in the mind because the prefrontal cortex can engage and curiosity returns. This safety creates space for presence, the kind that lets you listen and understand.
Work in rhythm: Your energy has seasons. Honour them. Productivity thrives on consistency, but the pace can and should change. There is a time for sprinting and a time for slowing down or being still, both are sacred forms of progress.
Seek safe company: Choose people who are good for your nervous system. Our bodies mirror those around us. Some connections coregulate you, others drain you. Notice how you feel with them and after you leave.
Reflection
In reflection, unmasking is not an act of exposure but an act of reclamation. This Halloween, the challenge is not to rip off every mask. It is to notice which ones once saved you and which now keep you small. The nervous system does not need perfection, it needs permission. When it finally trusts that authenticity will not cost a genuine connection, the performance ends. When your body feels safe, your personality stops auditioning. You stop performing worthiness and start remembering it.
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Read more from Anna Dafna
Anna Dafna, ADHD Coach, Mentor, Psychologist (GMBPsS)
Anna Dafna is a multiple award-winning ADHD coach, mentor and psychologist (GMBPsS), coaching neurodivergent, scattered and misunderstood minds to move beyond productivity and into presence. Her evidence-based, soulful approach bridges neuroscience, psychology, and identity, transforming how we understand focus, performance, and self-leadership. She is the founder of Anna Dafna Coaching Ltd and has been featured internationally for her pioneering work in moving beyond burnout and into brilliance.
References:
Brown, B. (2017). Braving the Wilderness. New York: Random House.
Cozolino, L. (2014). The Neuroscience of Human Relationships. 2nd ed. New York:
W.W. Norton.
Kolacz, J. et al. (2019). ‘Validation of a Polyvagal Theory Measure’, Frontiers in Psychology, 10, pp. 1–15.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Posner, J. et al. (2011). ‘Neural systems of emotion regulation in ADHD’, Journal of Psychiatric Research, 45(9), pp. 1201–1211.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. New York: W.W. Norton.
Schulz, K. P. et al. (2017). ‘Prefrontal cortex and amygdala structure and function in ADHD’, NeuroImage: Clinical, 15, pp. 767–774.
Shaw, P. et al. (2014). ‘Emotional dysregulation in ADHD’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 171(3), pp. 276–293.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking. Siegel, D. J. (2020). The Developing Mind. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press.
