tl;dr: Improving your physical health will improve executive dysfunction. Your sleep, nutrition, hydration, and fitness are all important parts of physical health.Managing them can be difficult, but doing it substantially helps your executive functioning. For extra tips, check the end of each section in the article.
When dealing with executive dysfunction, it’s easy to rely on quick tips and tricks. Many of these are very useful and understanding why they work gives you a great foundation to help yourself. But, you should never underestimate the basics! Your physical health really matters, and I’ve collected a vast amount of information for why it matters. Beyond that, I’ll share a few general tips for how to improve on it.
- What’s the big idea?
- Sleep and Physical Health
- Nutrition and Physical Health
- Hydration matters too!
- Fitness and Physical Health
- Body and Mind
What’s the big idea?
Physical health is extraordinarily important for improving executive dysfunction. Interestingly, while it does come up occasionally, there isn’t typically a clear explanation about why it matters in general. Fortunately, there is a simple model with a clear analogy explaining why physical health is so important.
Imagine yourself trying to carry a load of groceries back from the store. You have different strategies available to help. You could get help from other people, but they aren’t always available. Or, you could carry smaller loads one at a time, but this takes more time and you might get distracted. Or, you could use bags to carry more at a time, but you will still be limited by your strength. All of these approaches have downsides and limitations.
Working on your physical health is different. If you become stronger, you can carry more groceries in general and don’t always need to rely on other strategies. In other words, improving your physical health makes all of your other tools and strategies better. Not only that, sometimes you’ll find that you don’t even need them! Because of that, improving your physical health is one of the best ways to help executive dysfunction.
Sleep and Physical Health
In almost every article suggesting ways to improve executive dysfunction, getting regular sleep is one of the first recommendations. They aren’t wrong. Your cognitive abilities and sleep duration are strongly associated. This only tapers off a little bit once you reach 60 years old, but even then it’s important to reduce cognitive decline.
There are a few important notes to keep in mind for proper sleep. Most important is sleep duration. Research consistently shows that 6-8 hours of sleep is beneficial and 7 hours of sleep is ideal. Across every group of people, every single hour outside of that range actively decreases cognitive and executive functioning. Though, if you have been sleep deprived recently, getting an extra hour of sleep for a week can help you recover.
Sleep quality is also important, as inefficient or fragmented sleep will make your sleep less restful. Not only that, but it makes estimating your sleep duration much harder. Most people typically think of their time spent “trying to sleep” or “in bed” as their actual time spent sleeping. Unfortunately, this isn’t true. Fragmented sleep makes it even worse, as waking up in the middle of the night is often easy to overlook. On the plus side, taking even a 6 minute nap can help with the impact of poor sleep! So, don’t be afraid to nap on your 15 minute work breaks if you need it.
Finally, it’s worth recognizing a few other important aspects of sleep. For example, your ideal sleep time might be different than others depending on your genetics, age, or environment. Using a sleep mask or earplugs can help reduce some potential interruptions to sleep such as lights or noises. Your fitness and nutrition will also impact your sleep, making them very important to manage as well.
Nutrition and Physical Health
Nutrition is also a critical part of maintaining your physical health and executive functioning ability. Many studies support the importance of good nutrition throughout childhood. However, even beyond childhood, good nutrition still correlates with cognitive flexibility and good executive functioning. Fortunately, while there are a large amount of questions around nutrition, the basic important parts are relatively simple.
In general, it’s important to get a good amount of protein, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. However, these are not as common in more easily available foods such as snack foods and delivery foods. Instead, these easier foods tend to have large amounts of salt, sugar, fat, and carbohydrates. These are important, but excessive amounts are unhealthy. The ideal is home cooking for balanced nutrition and potentially following the mediterranean diet as it supports cognition.
Unfortunately, executive dysfunction and poor self-regulation makes it a lot harder to maintain healthy eating habits. Cooking is a task with many steps and is surprisingly demanding on your executive function! Fortunately, learning to do meal prep will help this substantially. Healthy snacks can also help bridge this gap. Simply make sure you focus on eating and use smaller dishes instead of multitasking.
Hydration matters too!
While hydration doesn’t help provide nutrients for your body, it is an incredibly important part of keeping your body healthy. Hydration isn’t limited to water either, but also involves making sure you get enough electrolytes: Potassium, magnesium, and calcium. In general, maintaining hydration and electrolyte balance is important for cognitive functioning. However, there is an important additional note here.
Becoming dehydrated doesn’t necessarily make your attention and executive functioning worse, though it can in some cases. However, rehydrating yourself and staying hydrated seems to be beneficial for executive functioning, in addition to preventing other harmful effects. Because of this, getting a drink to rehydrate can be a sort of “pick-me-up” when you’re having trouble.
Fortunately, there are many small things that can help you stay hydrated. First, prioritize low-sugar drinks such as tea, lightly flavored water, or just plain water if you can. However, if you can’t adjust to that immediately, even fruit juices and sodas are better than nothing. Secondly, keep a drink in a water bottle with you wherever you go! The easier it is to access your drink, the more likely you are to drink it.
Fitness and Physical Health
The final and definitively most commonly neglected part of physical health is fitness. Easily accessible entertainment, app addiction, and lack of walkable city infrastructure makes exercise and fitness far harder to maintain. At the same time, maintaining fitness is one of the most important ways to improve executive functioning.
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t get enough exercise. Fortunately, exercise especially benefits people who have sedentary lifestyles or who have less effective executive functioning. There are also many possibilities for exercise, and any exercise is helpful even if it is low-intensity or even low-frequency. The most beneficial exercises seem to focus on balance, flexibility, and agility, such as yoga and pilates. Aerobic exercises are also helpful, and short-duration high-intensity exercise is a good option for people with less free time.
Even if you don’t regularly exercise, exercising still helps executive functioning for a period of time afterwards. However, to really make it easier to exercise, its always better to make that exercise into a daily habit. Even better, since any exercise is better than none, you can choose more enjoyable exercises! Mobility exercises are particularly good and can be flexed into just a few minutes by following like these.
Body and Mind
Here are a few final thoughts to consider. Your body and mind are not separate, but are both part of you. Your mind controls your body, but is also controlled and supported by your body. Physical problems often cause stress in the form of pain or tension, along with other mental problems such as anxiety. Unsurprisingly, these begin to cause additional problems with executive functioning.
It can be easy to give up early when trying to make physical changes, as well. Many conditions and situations causing executive dysfunction also cause feelings of helplessness and teach you that change is too difficult. It is extremely important to remember that even small changes can have large impacts by making future steps easier. When you try to make physical changes to improve, you are taking important steps forward and deserve to respect yourself. Good luck!
If you found this article interesting or helpful, please consider donating to my ko-fi! Every bit helps, and monthly contributions in particular will help me continue writing articles like these every week.
Alternatively, I provide inexpensive personal coaching for managing executive dysfunction and would love to help you if you need it! I also have a wealth of experience supporting people with ADHD, Autism, and those from the LGBTQIA+ community. Remember, coaching is not therapy, but is focused on specific actionable steps to improve symptoms. It works best in tandem with therapy for working on causal problems. If you would like to work with me, you can check my prices here and contact me here. I look forward to hearing from you!