A canceled plan, a slightly different tone of voice, a text that simply says “OK,” or your boss asking if you can talk on Monday can sometimes trigger a surprisingly intense emotional reaction for someone with ADHD. You may know intellectually that you do not have enough information to assume the worst, yet your nervous system can respond as though rejection is already happening.
In this episode of The Dr. Brighten Show, I sit down with Alex Partridge, founder of UNILAD and LADbible, host of the award-winning ADHD Chatter podcast, and Sunday Times bestselling author, to talk about ADHD rejection sensitivity, masking, identity, emotional regulation, people-pleasing, and what can happen when you spend years learning that being yourself is somehow wrong.
The conversation begins with rejection sensitivity, but it quickly becomes something much bigger: how repeated criticism can affect self-trust, how masking can disconnect you from your own identity, and why some of the traits you learned to suppress may eventually become some of your greatest strengths.
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ADHD Rejection Sensitivity, Masking, and the Loss of Self-Trust
One of the most important things to clarify at the outset is that rejection sensitivity dysphoria, commonly called RSD, is not currently a formal diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR. That does not mean the emotional experiences people describe are imaginary. It means that the term itself is not an established diagnostic category, and we need to be careful not to present it as though it is.
People with ADHD can experience emotional dysregulation, sensitivity to criticism, shame, fear of rejection, and difficulty regulating responses to perceived disapproval. “RSD” has become a popular shorthand for an especially intense experience of rejection or criticism, but the mechanisms behind it are still being studied and may overlap with other psychological processes.
That nuance matters because we can validate lived experience without oversimplifying the science.
Alex describes rejection sensitivity through another lens: the cumulative experience of being corrected for behaviors associated with neurodivergence. A child may repeatedly hear things like “you’re too much,” “stop fidgeting,” “why are you so sensitive,” “calm down,” or “why can’t you just do it this way?” Sometimes the message is not even verbal. A sigh, an eye roll, exclusion from a group, or visible frustration can communicate the same thing.
Over time, that child may stop asking, “Who am I?” and begin asking, “Who do I need to become so people will accept me?” That shift is one of the most important themes in this episode because masking can become much more than hiding symptoms. It can reshape identity and self-trust.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Why a seemingly small rejection can sometimes trigger an enormous emotional response
- How masking can begin very early in childhood
- Why repeated criticism may contribute to self-doubt and people-pleasing
- How Alex learned to study and imitate other children in order to fit in
- Why masking may help socially while making it harder to know who you really are
- How rejection sensitivity can show up in work, friendships, and romantic relationships
- Why a delayed text, ambiguous email, or change in tone can trigger catastrophic thinking
- How perfectionism and overworking may become attempts to avoid criticism
- Why some people who appear “high functioning” are actually high masking
- How emotional reactions can lead to quitting, relationship conflict, or impulsive decisions
- Why shame often becomes the second wave after an emotional trigger
- How collecting evidence can help challenge a rejection spiral
- What repair can look like after an emotional reaction has affected someone you love
- Why “try harder” is one of the most damaging messages people with ADHD hear
- How curiosity, creativity, pattern recognition, and deep interests can become meaningful strengths
What Is Rejection Sensitivity in ADHD?
Rejection sensitivity generally refers to an intense emotional response to actual, anticipated, or perceived rejection, criticism, failure, or disapproval. For some people, the trigger is obvious. A supervisor criticizes their work, a friend excludes them, or a partner says something hurtful.
For others, the trigger may be much more ambiguous. Someone replies with a thumbs-up emoji. A friend takes longer than usual to text back. A partner’s tone sounds slightly different. A manager says, “Can we talk Monday?” Nothing objectively terrible has happened, but the brain begins filling in everything it does not know.
That can lead to thoughts like, “They’re angry with me,” “I messed something up,” “I’m going to lose my job,” “They don’t want me anymore,” or “Everyone hates me.” The emotional experience can be very real even when the interpretation turns out to be inaccurate.
That distinction matters because it creates an opportunity to intervene. You do not have to force yourself to believe that everything is fine. You can start by asking a simpler question: what do I actually know?
Why Can Criticism Feel So Intense With ADHD?
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that can affect executive functioning, attention regulation, impulse control, motivation, and emotional regulation. But a person’s emotional experience is rarely explained by neurobiology alone.
Environment matters. Relationships matter. Learning history matters. The feedback a child receives about themselves matters.
If a child repeatedly discovers that certain natural behaviors generate criticism, embarrassment, punishment, or social rejection, they may begin monitoring themselves more closely. Over time, this can evolve into masking. They watch, analyze, rehearse conversations, copy other people’s behavior, suppress interests, monitor facial expressions, and learn which version of themselves receives the least negative feedback.
Alex describes doing exactly this at seven years old. After being told that he could be one of the cool kids if he were not so weird, he began studying another boy who appeared socially successful. He practiced facial expressions in the mirror, learned about football so he could participate in conversations, and deliberately suppressed the interests that genuinely fascinated him.
From the outside, that strategy worked. He experienced less obvious rejection. Internally, however, something else was happening: he was becoming extraordinarily good at being someone else.
ADHD Masking Can Become an Identity Problem
Masking is not simply hiding a symptom. For some people, it becomes a much broader attempt to control how other people perceive them.
You may suppress your enthusiasm, talk less, smile more, rehearse conversations, pretend to understand social expectations you do not intuitively understand, hide sensory discomfort, or force yourself through environments that exhaust you. You may even change your interests because you believe other people will consider them strange.
Eventually, you can become so skilled at monitoring yourself that the performance begins to obscure the person underneath it.
This part of the conversation resonated deeply with me because I had my own version of that experience. Years before I understood that I had ADHD and autism, I had a university assignment asking one deceptively simple question: “Who are you?”
I wrote about everything I did, my responsibilities, my work, and how I helped other people. The professor failed the assignment. Her feedback was essentially that I had told her what I did for everyone else, but I had not told her who I was.
I did not know how to answer her.
It was not until much later that I understood why that question had been so difficult. When you have spent years internally saying, “Don’t be so loud,” “Talk less,” “Smile,” “Don’t say that,” or “People aren’t going to like this,” it can become surprisingly difficult to distinguish your identity from the rules you created to make yourself acceptable.
When High Functioning Is Actually High Masking
One of the most useful ideas Alex brings into this conversation is the distinction between high functioning and high masking.
Imagine someone who looks extremely successful at work. They meet deadlines, earn promotions, perform well, and appear completely capable. Then they get home and the dishes are stacked in the sink, the laundry is everywhere, bills have been forgotten, and they cannot initiate another task.
From the outside, someone might think, “If you can do all of that at work, why can’t you do this?”
That question misses the point.
A better question might be: how much energy did it take to maintain that level of performance all day?
Someone can be highly successful and still be expending tremendous cognitive and emotional effort to maintain that success. The collapse happens when there is nothing left.
The Problem With “Try Harder”
People with ADHD are frequently given some version of the same advice: try harder, focus, apply yourself, be more disciplined, stop procrastinating, get organized.
The problem is that visible output does not tell us how hard someone is trying.
Two people can produce the same result while expending dramatically different amounts of cognitive effort. Someone may desperately want to begin a task while simultaneously experiencing difficulty with initiation. From the outside, you might see someone scrolling their phone instead of working. From the inside, they may be dealing with overwhelm, paralysis, shame, competing thoughts, and the increasingly loud internal demand to “just start.”
Adding more shame rarely improves executive functioning.
How Rejection Sensitivity Can Affect Relationships
Rejection sensitivity becomes especially complicated in intimate relationships because relationships contain ambiguity. Tone changes. People get tired. Partners become distracted. Someone closes a door more loudly than usual. Someone replies to a text differently.
A neutral interpretation might be, “They’re tired.”
A rejection-sensitive interpretation may immediately become, “What did I do?”
Alex shares an example of a woman whose husband asked about her day in a slightly different tone of voice. She interpreted that change as evidence that he no longer loved her. Her reaction escalated dramatically, and once she had calmed down, she recognized how disproportionate the response had been.
This is where two ideas need to coexist. Your emotional experience can be real, and you are still responsible for your behavior.
Understanding ADHD should create more opportunities for regulation, communication, and repair. It should not become permission to harm other people.
How to Interrupt an ADHD Rejection Spiral
One of the practical strategies Alex discusses is building evidence. This can be especially useful because rejection sensitivity often thrives in ambiguity.
Suppose your boss emails, “Can we talk Monday?” Your brain immediately announces, “I am getting fired.” Instead of arguing with the thought, separate the event into what you know and what your brain is predicting.
What you know: your boss asked to talk Monday.
What your brain is predicting: you are getting fired.
Those are not the same statement.
From there, look for additional information. Has your boss criticized your performance? Have you recently received positive feedback? Were you invited to an upcoming project? Have you received messages suggesting that your work is valued?
You are not trying to force yourself into positive thinking. You are widening the evidence pool.
Create Your Own Evidence File
A simple strategy is to keep a note on your phone containing things your rejection-sensitive brain tends to forget when you are activated. This might include positive feedback from colleagues, successful projects, kind messages from friends, repaired disagreements, invitations, accomplishments you are proud of, or situations where you feared rejection and your prediction turned out to be wrong.
Think of it less as an affirmation list and more as a reality file.
Your brain is presenting evidence for one interpretation. You are reminding it that additional evidence exists.
Why You May Seek Criticism When You Already Feel Bad
This was something Alex and I both recognized in ourselves.
When I am already in a negative headspace, my brain can suddenly decide that this would be an excellent time to read one-star reviews of my books. Objectively, that makes no sense. But psychologically, familiar emotional states can have a strange gravitational pull.
Alex describes experiencing something similar. Praise can feel uncomfortable because it contradicts the story someone has repeatedly learned about themselves, while criticism may feel strangely familiar.
Not pleasant. Familiar.
Recognizing that pattern makes it possible to interrupt it. For me, that has meant creating places where I can easily revisit positive feedback instead of automatically giving my brain access to the harshest criticism available.
How to Repair After an Emotional Reaction
Sometimes you will recognize a trigger before reacting. Sometimes you will not. Human relationships are messy.
If an emotional reaction has already happened, repair becomes important. Wait until both people are regulated enough to communicate productively, then talk specifically about what occurred.
A useful repair conversation might include what happened, what you interpreted it to mean, what you felt, how you reacted, what impact that reaction had, and what you want to do differently next time.
Understanding why something happened does not erase responsibility for what happened. The goal is not to excuse the behavior. The goal is to understand the chain well enough that you have a better chance of interrupting it in the future.
Rebuilding Self-Trust After Years of Masking
Perhaps the deepest theme of this episode has very little to do with productivity. It is self-trust.
When you have repeatedly been told that the way you think, feel, move, communicate, or experience the world is wrong, you can start looking outside yourself for instructions about how to exist. You begin asking what everyone else thinks, whether they approve, whether they will be disappointed, and whether you are doing things correctly.
Alex connects this directly to one of the most consequential decisions of his life. He remembers his intuition telling him not to sign a business agreement, but he signed it anyway. Years later, he began wondering why it had been so difficult to trust himself even when something inside him was screaming no.
That is an important question for many people who have spent years masking: when did keeping other people comfortable become more trustworthy than listening to yourself?
Rebuilding self-trust does not mean assuming every instinct is correct. It means allowing your own perception to become part of the evidence again.
The ADHD Strengths That Can Hide Underneath the Mask
The episode ends where I think conversations about ADHD need to go more often: not by romanticizing ADHD, and not by pretending the challenges do not exist, but by recognizing that a person cannot be reduced to their impairments.
Alex talks about being intensely curious as a child. He studied insects, obsessed over financial markets, designed a board game at ten years old, and mailed it to manufacturers. Later, those same tendencies appeared in entrepreneurship. He became fascinated by emerging social media platforms, patterns in algorithms, audience behavior, and the opportunities those patterns created.
The thing that once made him different became enormously valuable.
For many neurodivergent people, there may be strengths intertwined with the same nervous system that creates difficulty. Curiosity, pattern recognition, creativity, unconventional problem-solving, deep interests, persistence, and entrepreneurial thinking can all become assets when they are supported rather than suppressed.
The goal should not be to pretend ADHD is secretly a superpower. The goal is to stop assuming that everything different about an ADHD brain needs to be corrected.
Sometimes the thing you spent years hiding deserves room to develop.
About Alex Partridge
Alex Partridge is one of the pioneers of social media content the way we know it today. At age 21, he founded UNILAD and LADBible, two of the most popular social news and entertainment Internet companies in the world with an astonishing following of 100 million people around the globe.
At 34 years old, Alex was diagnosed with ADHD and has quickly become a leading voice on social media around neurodiversity. His impassioned views on entrepreneurship and neurodiversity has quickly amassed him a following of over 5 million people.
Alex now hosts the award winning podcast, ADHD Chatter. He shares everything he’s learnt about ADHD in his No.1 Sunday Times Bestselling Books entitled ‘Now It All Makes Sense and Why Does Everybody Hate Me?’.
Alex has spoken over 300 times for various brands, conferences and events including for Formula 1, BBC, Sky, Virgin, Google, Drapers, TED, Experian, Barclays, and British Airways.
About Dr. Jolene Brighten
Dr. Jolene Brighten is a board-certified naturopathic endocrinologist (FABNE), nutrition scientist, Certified Menopause Specialist through The Menopause Society, and certified sex counselor. She is also an author and women’s health educator focused on helping women better understand their hormones, reproductive health, and whole-body health.
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Links Mentioned in This Episode
Learn more about Alex’s work and ADHD Chatter.
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My new book explores ADHD across the female lifespan, including the ways hormones, nutrition, the nervous system, and women’s health can intersect with ADHD.
https://drbrighten.com/adhdandwomen
Frequently Asked Questions About ADHD Rejection Sensitivity
Rejection sensitivity dysphoria, commonly abbreviated RSD, is a term used to describe an unusually intense emotional response to perceived or actual rejection, criticism, failure, or disapproval. It is widely discussed in ADHD communities but is not currently a formal diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR.
Rejection sensitivity itself is not part of the formal diagnostic criteria for ADHD. However, emotional dysregulation and difficulty managing intense emotional responses are frequently discussed in ADHD research and clinical practice. Other factors, including anxiety, trauma history, autism, and learned experiences, can also influence sensitivity to rejection.
There probably is not one single explanation. Differences in emotional regulation, impulsivity, past experiences with criticism, social exclusion, masking, anxiety, and expectations of rejection may all contribute. Individual experiences vary considerably.
People may describe sudden shame, sadness, anger, panic, embarrassment, or certainty that another person dislikes them. A relatively ambiguous event, such as a delayed text or changed tone of voice, may sometimes trigger catastrophic interpretations.
No. Rejection sensitivity dysphoria is not currently a diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR. The experiences described under the term may still be worth discussing with a qualified mental health professional, particularly when they are affecting relationships, work, or quality of life.
ADHD masking refers to efforts to conceal, compensate for, or suppress behaviors associated with ADHD in order to meet social, academic, or professional expectations. This can include rehearsing conversations, suppressing movement, hiding overwhelm, overpreparing, perfectionism, or copying socially accepted behaviors.
Some neurodivergent adults report that extensive masking makes it difficult to distinguish their authentic preferences from behaviors they adopted to gain acceptance. This experience can become especially apparent after receiving a later-life ADHD or autism diagnosis.
“High functioning” is often used to describe someone whose external performance appears successful. But external success does not reveal how much effort that performance requires. Someone may maintain excellent performance publicly while experiencing substantial exhaustion, executive dysfunction, or emotional distress privately.
One useful first step is separating facts from interpretation. Identify what objectively happened, then identify the meaning your brain assigned to it. Looking for evidence both for and against your interpretation can sometimes reduce catastrophic thinking. Therapy can also be helpful when rejection fears significantly affect your life.
When possible, avoid making major decisions during the most activated part of the reaction. Give your nervous system time to settle, identify what actually happened, gather additional information, and return to the conversation once you are more regulated. If intense emotional reactions are creating significant distress or risk, consider working with an appropriately qualified mental health professional.
Start with accountability rather than justification. Explain what happened, acknowledge the impact of your behavior, discuss what you interpreted in the moment, and identify strategies for responding differently in the future. ADHD can provide useful context without eliminating responsibility.
ADHD can involve significant impairment, but people with ADHD may also have valuable individual strengths such as creativity, curiosity, pattern recognition, enthusiasm, unconventional problem-solving, and intense engagement with meaningful interests. These strengths are not universal, and acknowledging them should not minimize the challenges ADHD can create.
The Takeaway
If you have spent years believing you are too sensitive, too emotional, too inconsistent, too loud, too intense, or simply too much, the answer may not be to become better at suppressing yourself. It may be time to get curious about which parts of you are actually creating difficulty and which parts you learned to hide simply because they made other people uncomfortable.
Understanding ADHD is not about excusing everything your nervous system does. It is about having enough context to make different choices, build better systems, repair when needed, and begin trusting yourself again.
Sometimes the first step is simply allowing yourself to ask a question you may have stopped asking a long time ago: Who am I when I am not trying to make myself easier for everyone else?