Executive Function and ADHD
What is the link between executive function and ADHD? You’ll have seen or heard this term mentioned everywhere. Executive function is a set of cognitive processes that help us plan, organise and manage our time and resources effectively. It plays a critical role in regulating emotions and behaviours, which is important for social interaction and problem-solving.
Executive function skills include:
Self-Awareness: the capability of understanding our thoughts, emotions and behaviours, and their impact on ourselves and those around us. Being self-aware allows us to tell when we are experiencing executive dysfunction.
Inhibition: our ability to pause and consider a situation before acting impulsively.
Non-Verbal Working Memory: the capacity to retain information and images mentally, defer gratification, envision future outcomes and grasp the concept of time. Challenges around this executive function can result in temporal discounting (where we perceive future events to be less rewarding than immediate ones).
Verbal Working Memory: the ability to temporarily store and process information. This is often associated with self-talk or internal speech, which allows you to describe or contemplate a problem, event or situation. Challenges around verbal working memory can manifest as impulsivity, difficulty retaining information and an inability to use self-talk to solve problems and inhibit your actions.
Emotional Regulation: the ability to take the four previous executive functions and use them to manage your emotions and adapt to different environments. This means learning to use words, images and self-awareness to process and alter how we feel about things.
Self-Motivation: a person’s drive to initiate and sustain behaviour for completing a task and reaching a goal.
Planning and Problem Solving: identifying issues and planning to resolve them. This process involves breaking down the problem and recombining the pieces to come up with a solution. Coaching is an excellent tool to support this process.
It’s important to remember that each ADHDer is different and may experience executive function challenges differently. The inconsistency in these challenges can be seen as a consistent inconsistency, as the severity may fluctuate based on factors such as hormonal changes, insufficient sleep and physical activity, and poor diet and nutrition.
ADHDers tend to lag behind their peers by 30 to 40 per cent when transitioning between different executive functions, which means they often act and think in ways considered typical of someone younger than them. ADHD is actually a condition involving executive function deficit that results in difficulties in daily life. For example, ADHDers often struggle with time management, have difficulty prioritising and completing tasks, and often feel overwhelmed.
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