Executive Functioning
When spring winds come in it’s time to sweep away winter habits and start afresh. It’s a time when you start looking at routines and finding what works for you and what doesn’t. When you notice that something isn’t working for you anymore it’s time to make a change. The struggles that you can encounter when attempting to make plans and changes may be due to a deficit in executive functioning skills.
Executive Functioning Skills are foundational to work, academic, and daily life tasks. These are the unspoken skills that allow us to plan, engage, and execute goals that we establish. These skills are not typically taught explicitly in schools, but develop over time starting at infancy and through young adulthood. These skills are believed to be generated in the prefrontal cortex, or, the ‘thinking’ part of the brain. There are a few conditions that can also trigger issues with these skills, ranging from dementia, developmental delay, brain tumors, Alzheimer’s disease, to stress, loneliness, or lack of sleep.
Executive Function Disorder (EFD), or executive dysfunction, can appear in many different ways. The symptoms may appear similar to ADHD or Autism and are often first discovered during childhood or in a school setting.
What are Executive Functioning Skills?
Attention: Focusing on what's important and ignoring distractions
Working memory: Remembering information for a short time
Organization: Putting things in order
Planning: Setting goals, using effective time management, and making detailed plans to achieve goals
Problem-solving: Finding solutions to problems or thinking around the problem
Inhibition/Impulse control: Managing thoughts, emotions, and actions instead of allowing impulses to take over
Emotional regulation: Controlling and managing emotions
Motivational regulation: Ability to focus on concerns, rather than hyper focus on unnecessary items
Cognitive flexibility: Adaptability to change
What can you do?
If you lack some skills that can be categorized as executive functioning skills there is a lot that can be done to help. Children that have interventions applied during childhood can reach full potential by adulthood. Adults can also learn these skills through recognition and practice in daily life.
Common strategies that can be discussed with your therapist include: chunking work, externalizing information, using to-do lists, habit stacking, brain priming, notepads, fostering accountability with a support person, blocking access to distractions, and using rewards.
Some Apps that can assist with executive functioning skills
Goblin Tools (https://goblin.tools/) - This is my favorite resource on this list. It can help break down tasks into smaller bits. It is interactive and can help create checklists and assignments. It also has resources for helping with cooking and adjusting your written communication (like emails) to make it sound more formal.
Todoist (https://todoist.com/ ) This is designed for task and time management. It can also be used in a team environment, allowing for groups to utilize the task breakdown features.
Habitlist (https://habitlist.com/) This app is designed to help you establish new habits and work on habit stacking. It works with reward systems to encourage the formation of new behaviors.
ADDitude Magazine, https://www.additudemag.com/ This magazine has recent topics and some basic information for general introduction into ADHD.