How Masking Can Drive Our Coping Behaviours
Why can food, alcohol, scrolling, and other habits become a refuge when we're exhausted from performing our way through life?
Have you ever arrived home after a perfectly ordinary day and felt completely exhausted, despite nothing particularly difficult happening? Perhaps you spent the day being agreeable when you wanted to say no. Smiling when you were frustrated. Appearing confident when you felt uncertain. Keeping your emotions in check, reading the room, and making sure everyone else was comfortable.
Then, when you finally get home, you find yourself standing in front of the fridge, scrolling mindlessly through your phone, or reaching for a glass of wine. You might wonder why you have so little self-control at the end of the day. But what if the question isn't why can't I control myself? What if it's what have I been controlling all day?
What is masking, anyway?
Masking is often discussed in relation to autism and ADHD, where it describes the conscious or unconscious suppression, modification, or compensation of behaviours to meet social expectations.
An autistic person might suppress stimming, rehearse conversations, or force eye contact. Someone with ADHD might work exceptionally hard to conceal difficulties with attention, organization, or impulsivity. But masking isn't exclusive to neurodivergent people.
In a broader psychological sense, we all adjust how we present ourselves depending on our environment. We regulate emotional expressions, adapt our behaviour, and sometimes conceal aspects of ourselves to maintain relationships, avoid conflict, or feel accepted. I was recently talking with one of my friends from the gym who described his job in pharmaceutical business development as “cosplaying professional”.
Psychologists have studied related processes for decades, including impression management, self-monitoring, emotional suppression, and what sociologist Arlie Hochschild described as emotional labour. Think about the different versions of yourself you might present throughout a single day.
The competent professional who has everything under control. The easygoing friend who doesn't want to make a fuss. The supportive partner who doesn't want to burden anyone. The cheerful colleague who is actually having a terrible morning. These aren't necessarily examples of dishonesty or inauthenticity. They're often ordinary, adaptive social behaviours.
Masking is a natural behavioural strategy. The problem isn't that we do it. It's what happens when we feel we can never stop. Importantly, everyday social masking isn't equivalent to the sustained camouflaging experienced by some neurodivergent people, which can carry particular cognitive, emotional, and identity-related costs.
Your brain is constantly calculating how to belong
Human beings are profoundly social animals. Throughout our evolutionary history, belonging to a group offered protection, resources, and opportunities for survival. Being excluded could carry serious consequences. Masking can help us survive our social environments - Avoiding bullying, rejection, harassment, or social isolation. In professional settings, masking helps us with fulfilling implicit workplace or academic expectations to keep a job or advance a career.
Our brains therefore developed sophisticated systems for monitoring social information, detecting potential threats, and adjusting behaviour in response. These processes involve distributed networks supporting social cognition, emotion regulation, salience detection, and cognitive control, including regions of the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and amygdala.
When we're in environments where we feel psychologically safe, social adaptation can happen relatively effortlessly. But when we believe that acceptance depends on performing a particular version of ourselves, social interactions can require substantially more conscious monitoring.
Am I talking too much? Did that sound stupid? Should I have said something different?
Don't look upset. Don't let them know you're struggling.
This persistent self-monitoring can become exhausting, particularly when it involves suppressing emotions or navigating situations that feel unpredictable or threatening. Sometimes, the people who appear to be coping exceptionally well are working the hardest to maintain that appearance.
The hidden cost of being 'fine'
Imagine spending eight hours holding a beach ball underwater. You can do it. You might even become very good at it. But the effort doesn't disappear simply because nobody else can see it.
For some people, masking feels much the same. You might suppress irritation, anxiety, sadness, sensory discomfort, or the urge to withdraw. You might continually prioritize what other people need over what you're experiencing internally.
Over time, this can create a disconnect between your outward behaviour and your internal emotional state. Research on emotional suppression suggests that inhibiting emotional expression can increase physiological demands and interfere with aspects of social connection. Suppressing the expression of an emotion doesn't necessarily make the emotion itself disappear. There is also a distinction between choosing to adapt and feeling compelled to adapt.
Choosing to be professional during a difficult meeting can be useful. Believing that you must never express frustration, uncertainty, or vulnerability is something quite different. When masking becomes habitual, we may become so practised at noticing what others expect that we struggle to recognize what we actually need. And those needs don't simply vanish - sometimes they emerge through our coping behaviours.
When coping becomes another way of escaping ourselves
Food: comfort without having to explain yourself
After a day of monitoring your words, expressions, and behaviour, food can offer something wonderfully uncomplicated. Sweet, salty, and highly palatable foods engage reward and motivational systems and may provide temporary pleasure, distraction, or emotional comfort. Emotional eating isn't always about hunger. Sometimes it's about relief, soothing, or finally having something that feels like it's just for you. Food doesn't ask you to be agreeable, competent, or emotionally available.
Scrolling: switching off by switching on
Endless scrolling can become an appealing escape from the demands of self-monitoring. Social media provides novelty, distraction, and intermittent rewards. Instead of navigating the complexities of a conversation, you can passively consume content that asks relatively little of you. Except, of course, that scrolling doesn't necessarily provide genuine psychological restoration. You can spend an hour trying to switch off and finish feeling just as overstimulated as when you started.
Alcohol: permission to lower the guard
Alcohol can temporarily reduce inhibition and dampen feelings of tension or social anxiety. For someone who spends much of their day tightly controlling their emotional expression, that experience can feel like relief. But relying on alcohol to regulate uncomfortable internal states can strengthen a cycle of negative reinforcement: drinking provides short-term relief, making it more tempting to repeat when distress returns. True story, I used to drink to wind down the night after work, and I would have that extra glass of wine to to make sure I wasn’t competent to write academic papers or research grants anymore. Healthy hey? Over time, alcohol can worsen sleep, anxiety, and emotional regulation, even when it initially feels relaxing.
But, these behaviours aren't automatically addictions. Emotional eating, scrolling, and drinking exist on a continuum, and many people engage in them without developing problematic patterns. However, they can become increasingly rigid or compulsive when they're repeatedly used to escape uncomfortable internal experiences.
This is where the relationship between masking and coping becomes particularly interesting.
The neuroscience of relief: why the behaviour sticks
From a behavioural neuroscience perspective, the relationship between masking and coping can be understood partly through negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement doesn't mean punishment. It describes a learning process in which a behaviour becomes more likely because it removes or reduces something unpleasant.
If eating, drinking, or scrolling reliably reduces an unpleasant emotional state, the brain learns that the behaviour is useful. Reward-related circuits involving the striatum and dopaminergic pathways contribute to reinforcement learning, while stress and emotional regulation systems influence the motivation to seek relief. With repetition, behaviours can become increasingly automatic, particularly in familiar contexts such as arriving home after work or feeling overwhelmed before bed.
This doesn't mean masking directly causes addiction. Addiction is multifactorial, involving biological vulnerability, environment, learning history, stress, and substance-specific effects. But chronic masking may be one of several sources of distress that make avoidance-based coping particularly appealing.
The behaviour is doing something for us, even when its longer-term consequences are unhelpful.
The paradox: we hide our needs, then judge ourselves for having them
Many people who habitually mask are also exceptionally self-critical. They've learned that being accepted means being capable, pleasant, productive, and low-maintenance. So when they find themselves overeating, drinking more than intended, or spending hours scrolling, they interpret the behaviour as another personal failure.
Why can't I just have more discipline? Why am I so lazy? What's wrong with me?
And now, on top of the exhaustion of masking, there's shame about the way they've tried to cope with it. Shame can increase distress, which may create another reason to seek relief. Thus, the cycle continues.
It's particularly common for people who identify strongly with being high-achieving, independent, or the person everyone else relies upon to overlook their own emotional needs. Sometimes the coping behaviour is one of the few places where they allow themselves to stop performing.
So, do we need to stop masking?
Not necessarily. The goal isn't to become completely unfiltered, disclose every emotion, or abandon the social skills that help us navigate relationships. We all adapt to different situations. That's part of being human.
The more useful question is whether that adaptation is flexible and intentional, or automatic and driven by fear.
Can you choose when to put on the professional version of yourself? Can you also put it down? Can you disagree without feeling that the relationship is at risk? Can you tell someone you're struggling without immediately apologizing? Can you recognize that you're tired before your body starts demanding relief?
These are the kinds of questions that can help us understand the function masking serves.
Maybe the problem isn't your coping. Maybe it's how much you're coping with.
We often approach habits such as emotional eating, excessive scrolling, or drinking by focusing entirely on the behaviour.
Eat less. Drink less. Put the phone away. Develop more discipline.
But focusing exclusively on stopping a behaviour can overlook the psychological purpose it serves.
If food is providing comfort, what happens when we remove the food without addressing the need for comfort?
If scrolling is providing an escape, what are we asking someone to return to?
If alcohol is the only time someone feels able to relax, what makes the rest of their life feel so tightly controlled?
Understanding these functions doesn't mean ignoring the consequences of harmful behaviours. It means recognizing that sustainable change often requires more than simply removing the coping strategy. It requires understanding what made that strategy necessary, useful, or appealing in the first place.
Perhaps the work isn't about becoming better at controlling ourselves. Perhaps it's about creating a life in which we don't have to control so much of ourselves, all the time.
And perhaps, when we no longer need to spend every day proving that we're fine, we might find ourselves needing fewer ways to escape at the end of it.
A little less performing, a little more being
At Cultivae, I explore the relationships between our emotions, learned behavioural patterns, and the ways we cope, drawing on neuroscience, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and parts-informed approaches.
Whether you're navigating emotional eating, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or a persistent feeling that you have to hold everything together, therapy can offer space to understand what's happening underneath the behaviour.
You don't have to earn the right to rest by being everything everyone else needs.
