Feeling Different, Overwhelmed, and Exhausted from Masking?

A lot of people I work with describe a kind of invisible effort they carry most days. Often looking like they are coping — holding things together, showing up, doing what’s expected — but underneath, there’s a constant inner dialogue:

• “Am I saying the right thing?”
• “Did I come across weird just then?”
• “I need to keep it together.”

This is what we call masking. For many people, they are exhausted because it feels like they experience many social interactions more than once. Its not just the original interaction they have spent energy on, its the relentless rehashing over and over again. The one that gets played back on repeat, even when your trying to settle for sleep. Masking is seldom something anyone chooses to do consciously. It’s something learned, often from a young age,  as a way to stay safe, accepted, or understood.

In sessions, we often begin by gently noticing just how much energy this takes because over time, masking creates a quiet but persistent strain and on your nervous system often resulting in utter exhaustion.

If you’re highly sensitive or neurodivergent, your system is naturally wired to take in more — and process it more deeply.

You might notice:

• You pick up on other people’s moods instantly
• You feel affected by tone, tension, or atmosphere
• Noise, busyness, or emotional environments can drain you quickly
• Your mind doesn’t easily “switch off”, no matter how much you try.

This isn’t a flaw , rather it’s a form of depth processing. However without understanding what’s happening inside you, it can feel like It’s all just too much.”

When this is explored in sessions,  we begin to reframe this — not as overwhelm to eliminate, but as something to understand, regulate, and work with.

Your empathy is likely one of your most beautiful strengths yet also, one of the reasons you feel so constantly exhausted.

You may find yourself:

• Feeling responsible for how others feel (to a point where is burdensome)
• Saying yes when something inside you is really saying 'no'
• Carrying conversations or relationships with more emotional effort than whats ideal.
• Struggling to separate what you feel from what others feel around you.

Over time, this can lead to a kind of emotional overextension — where you’re giving much more than you actually have and sometimes more than what you are getting in return.

During sessions, we gently explore this pattern , not to shut down your empathy, but to help you stay connected to yourself while staying open to others.

If ADHD is part of your experience, there’s often another layer happening alongside sensitivity and empathy.

You might recognise:

• A mind that moves quickly, jumps between thoughts, or won’t settle
• Periods of intense focus followed by complete depletion
• Feeling overwhelmed by everyday tasks
• Frustration with yourself for not doing things the “right” way, struggling to get things done, doing things inconsistently, and for others procrastination or even paralysis at starting a task.

This isn’t about a lack of motivation or discipline. It’s about a nervous system and brain that works differently. Together, these patterns can create a cycle of: push → cope → overextend → crash → repeat. 

This cycle can be utterly exhausting. So sessions are often spent helping you  make sense of this cycle — so you can begin to step out of it with more awareness and self-compassion.

When you put all of this together:

• Constant masking
• Deep emotional processing
• High empathy
• A fast-moving or overloaded mind which often struggles to shut off

creates a level of internal effort that’s easy to underestimate.

So when you feel tired, flat, or overwhelmed — it’s not because you’re doing life wrong.

It’s because you’ve been working incredibly hard just to get through the day. And this is

often what is not understood by those who don't have ADHD.

One of the most important shifts we make in sessions is this:

Moving from self-judgement → to self-understanding.

Instead of asking: “Why am I like this?”

We begin to explore:

• What am I noticing in my body right now?
• What feels overwhelming — and why?
• What have I learned to do in order to cope?

This is where real change begins — not by forcing yourself to be different, but by getting curious about your inner world. In particular -how you experience its sequencing in terms of thoughts, patterns and behaviours and understanding its unique pattern and how it plays out.

Many of the people I work with have spent years feeling like they need to:

• Tone themselves down
• Push through
• Be less sensitive
• Be more “together”

But underneath that is often someone who is:

• deeply perceptive
• emotionally intelligent
• thoughtful
• intuitive

In my approach, we don’t try to “fix” these parts of you. They don't need 'fixing'. 

We work to understand them — and help you build a different relationship with yourself.

Sometimes we explore this through gentle reflection, other times through patterns and parts of self and how they interact with each other.