By The Way, You Can Improve Your Executive Function. You Can Literally Build It Like A Muscle.

By the way, you can improve your executive function. You can literally build it like a muscle.

Yes, even if you're neurodivergent. I don't have ADHD, but it is allegedly a thing with ADHD as well. And I am autistic, and after a bunch of nerve damage (severe enough that I was basically housebound for 6 months), I had to completely rebuild my ability to get my brain to Do Things from what felt like nearly scratch.

This is specifically from ADDitude magazine, so written specifically for ADHD (and while focused in large part on kids, also definitely includes adults and adult activities):

ADDitude

How to Sharpen Executive Functions: Activities to Hone Brain Skills

Executive functioning skills range from working memory to cognitive flexibility to inhibitory control, and beyond. They power our daily func

Here's a link on this for autism (though as an editor wow did that title need an editor lol):

Kenneth Roberson, Ph.D.

Enhancing Executive Functioning Difficulties in Adults with Autism

Practical Strategies for Enhancing Executive Functioning Difficulties in Adults With Autism - Living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as

Resources on this aren't great because they're mainly aimed at neurotypical therapists or parents of neurdivergent children. There's worksheets you can do that help a lot too or thought work you can do to sort of build the neuro-infrastructure for tasks.

But a lot of the stuff is just like. fun. Pulling from both the first article and my own experience:

Play games or video games where you have to make a lot of decisions. Literally go make a ton of picrews or do online dress-up dolls if you like. It helped me.

Art, especially forms of art that require patience, planning ahead, or in contrast improvisation

Listening to longform storytelling without visuals, e.g. just listening regularly to audiobooks or narrative podcasts, etc.

Meditation

Martial arts

Sports in general

Board games like chess or Catan (I actually found a big list of what board games are good for building what executive functioning skills here)

Woodworking

Cooking

If you're bad at time management play games or video games with a bunch of timers

Things can be easier. You do not have to be stuck forever.

Hi There! List 5 things that make you happy, then send this question to the last 10 people who liked/reblogged one of your posts.

Okay!

Figure skating

Photography (I wouldn’t have made this blog otherwise lol)

Reese’s peanut butter cups/just chocolate in general

Writing

Cute animal videos

Totally didn’t take me 3-5 business days trying to choose what five things to list lol

IF YOUR

CRAYONS

DO NOT SMELL LIKE

crayons

DO NOT EAT IT

It’s not a crayon

My sort of maybe embarrassing “late to the game” thing I’m learning now is how to tell if oil has gone bad.

I feel like most other foods have obvious visual tells like mold or they end up smelling foul and obviously bad. But I was googling about oil and the internet says “if it smells like crayons, it’s bad” which would not have been my first guess. And I tested it out on my somewhat old sesame oil and was like “by god, I would describe this as smelling like crayons”

Anyway protip if your old oil smells kinda like crayons it’s probably no good 🖍️

(I will boop everyone who reblogs this post, for the record 💖)

The water sure was falling