Executive functioning refers to a set of cognitive skills that are responsible for controlling and organizing other cognitive abilities and behaviors. These skills include the ability to:

  1. Plan and organize: This involves the ability to set goals and create a plan to achieve them. It also involves the ability to prioritize tasks and keep track of time.
  2. Initiate tasks: This involves starting a task or activity and following through to completion.
  3. Focus and sustain attention: This involves being able to concentrate on a task for an extended period of time and ignoring distractions.
  4. Regulate emotions: This involves being able to recognize and manage emotions in oneself and others.
  5. Flexibly adapt to changing situations: This involves being able to adjust to new or unexpected situations and to switch between tasks or activities as needed.

Executive functioning skills are important for success in school, work, and daily life. Planning a trip, writing a paper, cooking a meal, and brushing your teeth are all examples of things that involve attention, organization, multiple steps, and self-control. Deficits in executive functioning can make it difficult to initiate and complete tasks, pay attention, and regulate emotions, which can impact performance and social interactions.

Executive functioning skills include self-restraint, working memory, emotion control, focus, task initiation, planning/prioritization, organization, time management, defining and achieving goals, flexibility, observation and stress tolerance.People at all performance levels benefit from instruction around executive functioning, but for different reasons.Executive functioning starts to develop during childhood around the ages of 3-5 and continues to progress well into a student’s mid 20’s.

Here’s a great example of executive functioning in action—I recently came to the conclusion that making smores with young children is a task that involves a LOT of executive functioning, ESPECIALLY if you hope to have any smores yourself. For those who may not be familiar, smores are a campfire dessert where you have to toast a marshmallow over an open fire, then sandwich the marshmallow and a chocolate bar between two graham crackers. Monitoring the marshmallows and the fire to make sure they get evenly toasted and being prepared with the graham crackers and chocolate involves attention and planning. You have to be prepared for a marshmallow to catch on fire or the occasional object that falls onto the ground, and all of the emotions that go along with that. Executive functioning is all of these parts that come together to coordinate all of these processes and abilities to come up with the final product, which is in this case, a smore. It is not for the weak of heart, but it can definitely be worth it.

Autism, ADHD, and other conditions can impact executive functioning, and many people can benefit from learning strategies or participating in coaching or therapy to enhance these abilities. If you are having difficulties in these areas, you might consider looking into strategies that enhance executive functioning.

Dr. Jessica Myszak has had over 10 years of experience performing psychological evaluations with children and adults. She offers both in-person and telehealth evaluations. In addition to seeing clients on the Chicago North Shore, she is able to work with families who reside in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, West Virginia, and Wisconsin! If you are interested in learning more about potentially working with her, you can visit her website here to get the process started.