rosslynpaladin:

thatspooniefeel:

The more I find myself having to explain executive dysfunction to people the more I realise it’s near impossible. There’s a thing. I wanna do that thing, I really do. But no matter how hard I try to tell my brain to do the thing, it won’t do the thing. I can’t tell you the amount of hours I’ve spent scrolling mindlessly through social media wanting more than anything to stop, but I can’t.

This concept is so ridiculously alien to abled/neurotypical people and makes awareness/acceptance for it so hard to achieve. If an abled/nt person wants to, say, have a shower, or get some food, they just up and do it, no second thought. But the amount of mental exhaustion that goes into getting myself to get up and do one of those things can honestly be disabling in itself.

It’s not laziness, or not caring. It’s a total mental block between wanting something and doing something about it. I really wish the concept of this was more widely acknowledged. We are not lazy.

I’ve tried telling people, Look think of it like an engine: the brain has spark plugs to start the fire to the fuel to the engine, and Exec Dysfunction is when your Spark plugs are crappy so the engine won’t turn over no matter how you wrench the keys in the ignition, and you have to research all kinds of ways to get around that and kinda kick the thing into gear, and sometimes even those don’t work but the point is

we’re trying.

sass-is-my-x:

mietteloaf:

enscenic:

mrozna:

hawkeyedflame:

biphobicerasurer:

hawkeyedflame:

t-i-a-r-n-a-c-a-p-a-i-l-l:

If you’re one of those people who thinks executive dysfunction only happens for things we don’t like (school, cleaning,) then please consider the fact that I’ve been meaning to plug my phone in for 20 minutes and I’m now at 2% and still putting it off to write this post ¯_(ツ)_/¯

My anime/video game list consists of over 100 titles, easily, and yet I almost never get around to watching/playing any of them.

Executive dysfunction is not just for boring or unenjoyable things. It’s for everything. Even eating.

What is executive dysfunction? O.o

Put simply, it’s difficulty/inability with initiating tasks. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive functions, like decision-making and impulse control. People with ADHD and other neurological disorders that affect the prefrontal cortex often experience difficulty making decisions and performing tasks, as well as exercising self restraint. Part of why people with ADHD tend to procrastinate so badly is out of genuine inability to begin tasks, even if they’re very important.

It feels, for me at least, like I’m constantly waiting for something and I can’t start X task because I’m waiting. I never know what exactly I’m waiting for, but that doesn’t stop me from wasting hours and days not doing the things I need to do, even if I have a desire to do them.

It feels, for me at least, like I’m constantly waiting for something and I can’t start X task because I’m waiting. I never know what exactly I’m waiting for, but that doesn’t stop me from wasting hours and days not doing the things I need to do, even if I have a desire to do them.

Oh thank god, someone put it into words.

For me it’s also waiting for the “right” time to come to complete the task because for some reason my brain thinks doing the task at any other time is horribly, horribly wrong, weird, and out of order. The “right” time might come eventually, might not. It’s a lottery.

Yes to all of this. I also have a good helping of “you planned on doing it, therefore it must already be done.”

Executive functioning can mean a lot of things: managing attention and memory, planning and organization, self-monitoring (including finding and correcting errors), control of behavior and emotion, problem solving.

For instance, I get stuck on things – I have a hard time shifting from one activity to another, even if I’m trying to move from a boring thing to something I want to do or need to do. I also forget things I’m supposed to do, until something in my environment cues me to do them. But I often don’t notice things in my environment at all. I’m not good at noticing my physical body cues, either; I keep food at my desk so I don’t starve to death, and now I’m training myself to notice when I eat something so that I realize that I might be hungry and should go have dinner.

I also have a history of impulsively buying Everything to do with my current Thing. I have All The Yarn and Way Too Many Books, even after doing a major book purge, and that’s just paper books, and not counting the… ah. 948 books in my kindle library.

You find all kinds of solutions: specific routines, to-do lists, a place for everything and everything in its place, lots of phone alarms, my bag of veggie chips, my husband who just reminded me that I should eat dinner.

People with problems with executive functioning often have problems with decision fatigue – where if you make decisions all day, even relatively simple ones, it becomes harder to do things later in the day. It’s not exactly like the spoons thing – they might be just fine to hang out if someone else decides where to go to dinner and no one asks them to make plans for next weekend.

People with ADHD often have problems with executive functioning as well. People with other mental illnesses often have impaired executive functioning – metaphorically speaking, the mental illness is taking up too much memory and processing space in the brain. And, of course, people with impaired executive functioning sometimes develop anxiety or depression because they feel like they can’t adult or do life like “normal” people.

Different people with executive functioning problems will be affected differently, and even people impaired in the same domain may express their difficulties in different ways.

woah, compulsive buying is a part of the executive dysfunction thing?? i just thought i was just really bad at self-control!