Executive Function Difficulty

Here is what www.additudemag.com has to say about Executive Function Disorder:

Executive Function Disorder in Adults and Children. These seven executive function skills are critical in managing everyday life and long-term goals:

-- Self-awareness: Simply put, this is self-directed attention

-- Inhibition: Also known as self-restraint

-- Non-Verbal Working Memory: The ability to hold things in your mind. Essentially, visual imagery — how well you can picture things mentally

-- Verbal Working Memory: Self-speech, or internal speech that people think of this as their “inner monologue”

-- Emotional Self-Regulation: The ability to take the previous four executive functions and use them to manipulate your own emotional state. This means learning to use words, images, and your own self-awareness to process and alter how we feel about things.

-- Self-Motivation: How well you can motivate yourself to complete a task when there is no immediate external consequence.

-- Planning and Problem Solving: Experts sometimes like to think of this as “self-play” — how we play with information in our minds to come up with new ways of doing something. By taking things apart and recombining them in different ways, we’re planning solutions to our problems

When a person’s executive functions fail, he has trouble analyzing, planning, organizing, scheduling, and completing tasks. People with EFD commonly lack the ability to handle frustration, start and finish tasks, recall and follow multi-step directions, stay on track, self monitor, and balance priorities. Fixing the area of deficit is key to fixing academic or occupational difficulties. Common signs and symptoms of EFD in adults include:

-- Forgetting to complete tasks
-- Inability to keep track of personal items like keys and cell phones
-- Trouble following conversations
-- Losing train of thought
-- Difficulty remembering steps in a multi-step processes
-- Inability to remember names
-- Often late
-- Problems breaking big projects into steps
-- Trouble meeting deadlines
-- Unable to multitask
-- Difficulty remembering abbreviations and acronyms

Identifying symptoms can help adults set up external supports to supplement areas where they struggle.

If you or your loved one seem to suffer from any of the above, you should set an appointment with us. We have specialized therapy and treatment programs that can help.