Tl;dr: Improving your mental health will improve executive dysfunction. Most “mental health management” involves reducing stress to a manageable level, but managing mental health conditions is also important. Each section will address a component of mental health and include some tips for how to manage it.
The importance of mental health is hard to understate with executive dysfunction. At the same time, it’s easy to lose track of why it’s important and what that means. Often, we fall into the same pattern of using tips or tricks to make things easier right away. But these are tools and don’t necessarily help us on a more fundamental level. So, today we’re going to talk about the fundamentals of mental health and improving it. The better your mental health, the better your executive functioning will be!
- Stress and Mental Health
- Cleanliness and Mental Health
- Social Interaction and Mental Health
- Touching Grass (but like, really)
- Mental health conditions need managing too!
- Mind and Body
Stress and Mental Health
Effective stress management is arguably the most important component of mental health, period. While there are other factors involved in mental health, the impact of stress is almost impossible to understate. Naturally, this also applies to executive dysfunction.
Executive dysfunction and stress feed into each other. In fact, executive functions and stress regulation use the same parts of your brain. This has very understandable consequences. The more stress you need to regulate, the less power your brain has to handle executive functions. We can use the cognitive overhead analogy of groceries here. If you’re trying to carry groceries home (executive functioning), carrying an armful of rocks (stress) will definitely make it harder.
Additionally, chronic stress has a major negative impact on executive functioning abilities. Since executive dysfunction causes more stress, it is ultimately important to cut off the feedback loop. Improving executive functioning is one way, but reducing sterss directly is also important. Most aspects of improving mental health are ultimately targeting this goal, so let’s go through some now.
Cleanliness and Mental Health
Cleanliness comes in two main flavors: Personal hygiene and tidiness. Both types of cleanliness have their own benefits, but in both cases they also help manage stress substantially. The process of cleaning can take some effort itself, but it is worthwhile in both cases.
Personal hygiene is often difficult to manage, for a variety of factors. Sometimes it can be an issue of routine, sometimes culture, sometimes peer pressure, or sometimes stress. However, good hygiene helps keep your immune system and body less stressed and less likely to get sick! It also helps you maintain good social relationships with other people, another important part of mental health.
Meanwhile, messy and cluttered environments cause multiple distinct problems in your life. Messes make it more difficult to plan and organize yourself, while also reminding you of unfinished projects. Even if you have an “organized mess” that you can navigate yourself, it can still frustrate others. You also might feel ashamed of your space and afraid of building relationships with others as a result. These factors all add onto stress and make executive functioning more difficult, since your brain has to compensate for them.
Fortunately, there are several ways to help improve cleanliness of yourself and your space. Self-compassion is always important, changing “personal failings” into challenges to overcome and taking responsibility for working on them. Try using common strategies to get started or work on building habits to make it easier. You can also try to make it fun by using tools with fun designs, playing music, or trying new products.
Social Interaction and Mental Health
It’s easy to push social interaction aside when it feels like your life isn’t together. It’s also easy to find them difficult when your mental health isn’t stable. Unfortunately, executive dysfunction does make this more difficult, also making it less appealing. Despite that, the effort is still extremely worthwhile and making time for social interaction will help quite a bit.
Firstly, it’s important to understand some of the social challenges that come with executive dysfunction. You likely know how you’re supposed to act in social situations, but have difficulty applying that knowledge. Different causes of executive dysfunction can come with different specific challenges, but awareness of the possible challenges can help. For example, problems with working memory can make it difficult to focus on conversation topics or understand perspectives of others. Less flexible thinking can also make it harder to understand others’ perspectives, or to change your behavior in response. Worse self-control can make it easier to be aggressive or try to “take revenge” when frustrated. Any of these make social relationships more difficult.
Fortunately, simply having friends and social connections has many benefits for mental health and executive functioning. Not only can friends provide support through body doubling, but friendships protect against stress and mental health problems. Higher quality friendships are especially positive, particularly when the friends are more supportive and capable people. In fact, closer friendships cause brain activity to become similar, meaning capable friends directly make you more capable. Fortunately, even if you don’t have many friends or any who are locally available, that isn’t the end of the story.
Touching Grass (but like, really)
Going outside and talking to strangers is an excellent way to make new friends and develop your social skills. In the same study about friendships, relationships with acquaintances and even strangers were studied. As it turns out, these “weak social ties” also help improve happiness and life enjoyment while reducing stress.
While it often seems scary to people who aren’t used to socializing much, interacting with strangers is surprisingly easy. You won’t be perfect, especially dealing with executive dysfunction, but it can be a very good way to learn. A good way to start is by commenting on something interesting going on around you. Alternatively, you can comment on something interesting about the other person, such as something they’re reading or wearing. In fact, despite being autistic and dealing with executive dysfunction in my own life, I’ve made quick friends while traveling in this exact way!
Fortunately, going outside to socialize has other benefits! Not only do you get some exercise from walking, but you get exposure to fresh air and greenery. Indoor air is much more likely to have contaminants, while fresh outdoor air can reduce stress and anxiety. Not only that, but spending even 20 minutes in a natural environment (such as a park) reduces your stress. In other words, one of the best things you can do regularly is go outside, touch grass, and chat with some strangers!
Mental health conditions need managing too!
This is the biggest one. Unmanaged mental health conditions will cause a large amount executive dysfunction. ADHD, PTSD, Autism, Bipolar, Depression, Anxiety, any of these have far-reaching effects on your mental health and executive functioning. They each deserve an article of their own, but there are a few brief points that deserve mentioning here.
Firstly, better executive functioning actually helps protect against developing mental health conditions and helps with managing them. For example, people who have been through trauma without developing PTSD have better executive functioning than average. People with PTSD from the traumatic experience, on the other hand, have worse executive functioning than average. “Remediation” for executive functioning also helps support daily life for people with bipolar disorder.
Secondly, since unmanaged symptoms cause executive dysfunction, it’s important to manage these symptoms. This means taking medications for conditions like ADHD and bipolar disorder, making it so coping strategies handle the rest properly. It also means reducing stress in other ways, such as using noise-canceling headphones for PTSD, ADHD, and Autism to deal with uncomfortable or triggering sounds. There are many possible ways to manage specific symptoms in different conditions, but managing them is always important.
Mind and Body
It’s very easy to think of your mind and body as separate. Many cultural stereotypes exist to separate the two, such as the “nerd” and “jock” stereotypes in high school movies. Sometimes we’re even told about art coming from misery, disorganization, or stress. But ultimately, living well requires stability and taking care of your own health, both mental and physical.
Your body is important since it carries and supports your mind, but your mind controls a lot about your body. Mental problems and especially stress will cause many physical problems such as tension or pain. Without taking care of your own mental health, your physical health will also suffer, creating a feedback loop. Ultimately, your executive functioning suffers as a result.
It might be easy to give up when trying to make life changes to improve your mental health. Many parts of it can take a long time before you feel the impact. Executive dysfunction also makes it harder to commit to changes long-term. Fortunately, even small changes can have a large impact over time and make future steps easier. Any steps you take are important and deserve self-respect, no matter what size they are. Good luck!
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