Masking Strategies and Their Psychological Costs

Masking in the highly gifted range is basically the art of dimming your cognition so that the environment doesn’t get nervous. It sounds harmless – but it isn’t. It is a continuous performance act that is surprisingly expensive psychologically.

Masking Strategies

1. Mental Throttling

Deliberately slowing down thinking, speaking, and problem solving. You “wait” internally for others, even though your brain is already done.

Typical behaviors:

• Giving answers later than you actually could
• Staying quiet in meetings even though you already see the solution
• Taking detours so you don’t disrupt the group’s flow

2. Social Self-Sandbagging

Pretending to be more average than you are.

Forms:

• “Oh, I’m not really sure about that…” (even though it’s clear)
• Making mistakes on purpose
• Selling successful intuition as “luck”

3. Cognitive Translation Work

Artificially reducing the amount and depth of information.

Forms:

• Breaking things down into tiny micro steps
• Deliberately removing complexity
• Forcing intuition into linear explanations that don’t reflect the real thinking process

4. Masking Topics and Interests

Hiding advanced knowledge to avoid appearing like a “know-it-all”.

Forms:

• Steering conversations towards “safely average” topics
• Keeping complex interests private
• Not asking questions even when they are on the tip of your tongue

5. Damping Your Personality

A lot of your real self is moderated away through self-control.

Forms:

• Showing less enthusiasm
• Not making jokes that are too fast or too sharp
• Carefully filtering what you reveal

Psychological Costs

1. Constant Cognitive Self-Control

Forcing your brain to run at low RPM all the time is unnatural. It creates mental fatigue – like a sports car forced to stay in second gear on the highway.

Consequences:

• Exhaustion
• Irritability
• Drop in concentration (due to underchallenge, not overload)

2. Dissolving Sense of Identity

If you constantly act as if you were someone else, it eats away at your self-image. You lose the feeling of actually being “yourself”.

Typical thoughts:

• “I don’t fit anywhere.”
• “Nobody really knows me.”

3. Distorted Self-Worth

Masking reinforces the idea that your true mode is “socially undesirable”. You start seeing your natural way of thinking as a disturbance.

Long-term risk:

Internalized self-devaluation: “Maybe I really am too much.”

4. Social Loneliness Despite Contacts

You do interact with people, but from a dimmed, filtered version of yourself. That creates disconnected relationships.

Feeling:

“Everyone likes the mask, but not me.”

5. Permanent Social Overthinking Mode

Highly gifted people already move through life with a strong analytical lens. With masking, this overthinking intensifies even more, because every sentence is simulated in advance.

Consequences:

• Hypervigilance
• Stress
• Self-censorship
• Cognitive load like being under constant examination

6. Risk of Collapse

At some point the system is overloaded. Many report reaching a point where they can no longer maintain the adaptation – burnout, social withdrawal, or emotional numbness are typical end points.

7. Loss of Vitality

When you constantly dim yourself mentally, you lose your inner drive. Intellectual enthusiasm – which is actually your natural fuel – turns into a threat instead of a resource.

The result is often a lived spiral of underchallenge.

In Short

Masking, for highly gifted people, is the psychological equivalent of inhaling for years – without exhaling. Socially, it works. Internally, it destroys.