I’m looking at an old photo of myself at fifteen. From the mouth down, I’m smiling. But my eyes tell a different story: wide and disengaged.
The externals of my life were similarly misleading. On the outside, I performed “just fine” — good grades, never disrupting class, never acting out in noticeable ways.
But behind the smile was unseen, intense effort. Feeling too weird and too much, I buried my anxieties in overdoing.
Who would I be if I could stop working so hard just to be a person? If I could drop all the effort and simply be?
I didn’t know. I’d been doing this for so long it was hard to imagine another way.
If this sounds familiar, my heart goes out to you. Because you may have learned, like I did, the dire cost of pushing through — the way every accolade, every hard-won milestone, seemed to come at the direct expense of your authentic self.
What High-Masking Burnout Looks Like
Sometimes this is what overwhelm looks like: a wide grin, eyes fixed and staring, performing “I’m okay” — while inside, you’re running on fumes, drained from pretzeling yourself into systems that were never designed with your needs in mind.
Early on, many of us learn to hide the needs that would out us as different. If we’re capable enough, we channel that capability into learning to pass.
Until one day, we can’t do it anymore.
All that forcing. All that pushing through. All that marshalling of inner resources to survive, achieve, and do what’s expected. We do it until we can’t — and then the bottom falls out. Overwhelm takes over, and we sink beneath it, into exhaustion and burnout.
How You Came to Do This
Spoiler: there’s nothing wrong with you.
If you’ve come to live in a way that overrides your nervous system’s needs, this doesn’t mean you’re broken. These patterns usually developed for good reasons — to help you belong, stay connected, succeed, or avoid rejection.
Humans are deeply social. Our well-being is shaped by our relationships and our sense of belonging, so it makes sense that we’re highly sensitive to cues of acceptance and rejection — and that we adapt ourselves in response. The problem comes when adaptation becomes self-abandonment.
For people who are highly sensitive, neurodivergent, or different in other ways, fitting in can take enormous effort. You may learn to suppress behaviors that draw attention, override sensory needs, anticipate other people’s expectations, or work harder than everyone around you just to appear as though everything comes easily.
Researchers call this masking or camouflaging — strategies people use to fit into social environments, including compensating for differences and suppressing behaviors to appear more typical. In a widely cited study, researcher Laura Hull and colleagues interviewed autistic adults about their experiences of camouflaging, and found it was described as both physically and mentally exhausting, often leaving people feeling disconnected from their true selves (Hull et al., 2017). Camouflaging has also been linked to more serious mental health outcomes, including higher rates of suicidality (Cassidy et al., 2018). And this isn’t only about autism. Many of us learn to perform versions of ourselves that seem more acceptable, capable, easygoing, or “normal.” We learn to read the room, learn what gets approval, learn what makes others uncomfortable — and then learn not to do those things.
Masking isn’t a personality trait. It’s a job that some part of you learned to do, generally very young, to help you survive the circumstances you were born into. That’s the lens Internal Family Systems brings — and if you want to see it applied to one specific, very common bind, here’s how those parts show up when a parent is torn between their kids and their marriage.
In Internal Family Systems, one of the primary modalities I draw on as a therapist, these adaptations are the work of protective parts. When the world signals that some part of us is wrong, different, too much, or not enough, a part steps in — an expert people-pleaser, an overachiever, someone exquisitely attuned to other people’s moods. These parts aren’t trying to hurt us. They’re trying to keep us connected, safe, or out of trouble. And sometimes they’re extraordinarily good at their jobs.
The strategies that once helped us belong can become exhausting. We spend years overriding hunger, fatigue, sensory overwhelm, the need for solitude — the simple inner signal that says this is too much for me. Eventually the external pressure doesn’t even need to be there anymore. We carry it inside.
This is part of why burnout can feel so confusing. From the outside, you may look like someone coping beautifully — getting things done, showing up, achieving, taking care of everyone else. Underneath, your system may be spending enormous energy just maintaining that performance.
The problem isn’t that you adapted — adaptation is one of the remarkable things human beings do. The problem is when an adaptation that once helped you survive starts requiring you to live in chronic disconnection from yourself.
Years of practice pushing through means years of practice overriding your body’s signals — and practice matters. The brain is plastic; it changes in response to experience, across the whole lifespan. Which means if you’ve spent years practicing disconnection or overfunctioning, those patterns can be genuinely hard to shift.
But it also means something hopeful: you can practice something new. The same capacity that helped you become exceptionally good at pushing through can, over time, help you become exceptionally good at listening to yourself. Not overnight. Not through force. Through practice.
Three Practices to Interrupt the Push-Through Pattern
Inspired by the work of Stephen Porges and Deb Dana, here are three small practices for doing the opposite of pushing through.
1. Before you push through, pause. Next time you hear yourself thinking I just need to push through — pause, even for ten seconds. Ask: what is my body trying to tell me right now? Maybe all you notice is a tight jaw, a fluttering stomach, shoulders creeping toward your ears. If there’s urgency, notice where you feel it. If you notice numbness instead — that’s okay too. You’re rebuilding a relationship, and relationships start with listening.
2. Orient toward safety. Our nervous systems are excellent at scanning for danger. You can use that same skill to notice safety instead. Look around the room and let your eyes settle on three things that feel even slightly pleasant — light through a window, a favorite mug, a tree moving outside. Stay with each for a breath or two. This isn’t pretending everything’s okay; it’s reminding your nervous system that alongside the intensity, there can also be glimmers of safety.
3. Look for one percent more ease. When you’re overwhelmed, “how do I calm down?” can feel impossible. Try instead: what would give me one percent more ease right now? Taking off your shoes. A glass of water. Opening a window. Deciding that one last task can actually wait until tomorrow. Burnout recovery rarely comes through a single dramatic breakthrough — more often it’s built through hundreds of small moments that teach your nervous system: my signals matter.
These practices won’t undo years of survival strategies overnight. But they can start rebuilding trust between you and your body — which is where lasting change begins.
And if you recognize yourself in this and you’re tired of carrying all of it alone, that’s where individual therapy can help.
If this resonates, I’d love to send you my free guide, The Overgiver’s Nervous System Reset, with more tools for recognizing and interrupting high-masking burnout.
Or, check out our YouTube.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does masking look like in adults?
In adults, masking often looks like chronic overachievement, difficulty relaxing, people-pleasing, and a persistent sense of exhaustion that doesn’t match how “put together” someone appears on the outside. It can include suppressing natural reactions, rehearsing conversations in advance, or closely monitoring how you’re coming across in social situations — all while appearing calm and capable to everyone around you.
Is high-masking burnout the same as regular burnout?
Not quite. Regular burnout is usually tied to workload or external stressors, and tends to ease with rest or a change in circumstances. High-masking burnout runs deeper — it comes from years of overriding your own needs and signals just to appear “normal” or acceptable, so rest alone often isn’t enough to resolve it. Healing usually involves rebuilding trust with your own body and nervous system, not just reducing your to-do list.
Can you recover from years of masking?
Yes. The nervous system is plastic, meaning it continues to change in response to new experiences throughout life. Recovery isn’t usually one dramatic breakthrough — it tends to happen through small, repeated moments of safety, choice, and self-attunement that gradually teach your body a different way of relating to itself.
Do I need to be autistic for this to apply to me?
No. While masking and camouflaging are widely studied in autism research, the underlying pattern — suppressing your needs to fit in, succeed, or avoid rejection — shows up in many people, including those who are highly sensitive, neurodivergent in other ways, or who simply learned early that certain parts of themselves weren’t welcome.
References
Cassidy, S., Bradley, L., Shaw, R., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2018). Risk markers for suicidality in autistic adults. Molecular Autism, 9(42).
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M. C., & Mandy, W. (2017). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534.