What is executive functioning?
Executive functioning describes a set of mental abilities that allows you to adapt your behaviour to manage different situations, connect with others, and achieve your goals (Barkley, 2020).
Executive functioning abilities include maintaining attention, switching between tasks, starting new tasks, planning, organising, prioritising, decision-making, working memory (holding information in your mind), tracking and managing time, monitoring your behaviour and its impact on others, controlling urges and impulses (inhibition), and managing your emotions.
These abilities begin to develop in early childhood, and this continues into adulthood. However, your unique profile of strengths and difficulties in executive functioning is largely (99%) genetic (Friedman et al., 2008). This means that members of your family might share similar strengths and challenges to you.
No matter how well-developed your executive functioning abilities are, whenever the demands of a situation are greater than your capacity, you will feel stressed and overwhelmed. And, because these skills all work together, when one or more aspects of executive functioning are overloaded, the other aspects of executive functioning will be under strain, too.
Every person has a unique profile of strengths and difficulties. It can be helpful to understand your profile, because you can then identify strategies that can make your life easier. You can find free, valid assessments of executive functioning here.
References:
Barkley, R. A. (2020). Executive Functions: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Evolved. Guilford Press.
Friedman, N. P., Miyake, A., Young, S. E., DeFries, J. C., Corley, R. P., & Hewitt, J. K. (2008). Individual differences in executive functions are almost entirely genetic in origin. J Exp Psychol Gen, 137(2), 201–225. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.137.2.201