What is Executive Functioning?
Executive functioning is the use of multi-layered cognitive skills to manage and support activities of daily living, including learning, social relationships, executing plans and problem solving. These skills include:
- Paying attention
- Regulating emotions
- Demonstrating mental flexibility
- Initiating tasks and conversations
- Inhibiting behaviors
- Organizing, planning, prioritizing
- Self-monitoring
- Using working memory
How does executive functioning impact daily living?
Every person has strengths and areas of need in regards to their own executive functioning. This is what makes each person unique. However, some people find these deficits to impede their success in home, work, or school environments. These challenges may include:
- Managing transitions between activities without stress
- Following simple routines and/or multi-step directions
- Judging the amount of time needed to complete a task or to get to an event/school on time
- Cultivating peer or professional relationships
- Identifying what about a task is easy vs. hard
- Attending to tasks in order to complete them
- Organizing thoughts for coherent conversations with others
- Making a plan and gathering materials to complete assignments, projects, or tasks in the home, school or work environment
- Working with others on a team
- Getting dressed/ready in the morning
- Altering plans when the first plan isn’t working (i.e. thinking of, and moving on to “Plan B”)
- Getting started on preferred and less-preferred tasks
- “Keeping your cool” in stressful situations
- Reducing impulsive behaviors or responses
Who may be impacted by executive functioning deficits?
Executive functioning disorders vary in degree of severity and may be experienced by people with or without a diagnosis. However, the following diagnoses frequently include a component of executive functioning deficit:
- Attention deficit disorders (ADHD, ADD)
- Autism Spectrum Disorders
- Traumatic Brain Injury
- Learning disability or difference
- Gifted and Talented
- Social-Pragmatic disorder
- Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)
- Expressive-Receptive Language disorder
- Reading Disorder
“Thinking outside of the box allows you to get rewards outside of your reach.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo