What is it and why does the body do it? It seems like the mind is telling the person to do something but one cannot get themselves to actually do it.
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Hello Executive Dysfunction! For me it presents in a few different ways.
1. I need to do the thing. I *know* I need to do the thing. Why the hell can’t I make my body *go do the damn thing??* It’s like the motivation to begin and complete a task is simply absent, despite understanding the need to complete it.
2. Oh man, the thing I need to do looks big and super complicated, and I don’t even know where to begin. Even though I know it mostly doesn’t matter where or how I begin because the momentum to push through to completion will build up on its own, I still feel powerless to begin because I feel as though I need some sort of plan or system to attack this from, but that feels like too much work so….I never start.
3. It’s currently 8AM. I have an appointment in 6 hours at 2PM. I must do absolutely nothing else for the entire 5.5 hours before I get ready for that 2PM appointment or I will miss it.
Now, to my understanding, the *physiological* explanation for this is a mal-development of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for processing executive functions, such as planning and consideration of the consequences of ones actions. If I remember right (and someone may correct me on this if I’m wrong), I believe this mal-formation of the prefrontal cortex is something that can actually be seen in a scan. Which, by the way, if that’s true then it makes no sense to me why psychiatrists and doctors don’t take ADHD seriously enough during diagnosis to run said scan and squash the back-and-forth a lot of people experience when trying to seek help for it. But I digress…
Again, my understanding is that it’s common among many people with ADHD that by the time they get to their 30’s and 40’s, they outgrow certain aspects of the condition as that portion of their brain develops over their lifetime. Dr. Barkley talks often about how the average age equivalence of many with ADHD is roughly 30% less than their actual age. So someone at the age of 30 may think and behave more like someone in their very early 20’s. And anytime I bring this up with people during in-person discussions it’s like a lightbulb turning on as they think of someone they know who has it.
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