How to Permanently Improve Executive Function
The internet is full of tips, tricks and strategies to help us executive function better on a bad day. But what if there was a way to increase our baseline for executive function?
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
The majority of work I do is in the career and leadership space, regularly working with my clients as they get established into their first leadership role or come across challenging situations in their current leadership. But most of my clients have ADHD, autism or another form of neurodivergence and the first two in particular often come with executive function challenges.
I’m not an ADHD coach, that is to say I don’t spend my day helping people solve executive function challenges because I’m far more interested in the career and leadership space. But working with people who have executive function challenges means that sometimes we do need to spend a bit of time solving them and one day this particular client brought it up.
Except it wasn’t one of the typical ways it comes up where someone presents a challenge and we go through the executive function toolkit of strategies to find one that will get them moving forward. Instead he asked me if I knew any way to train our executive function, which is a very different and very interesting question.
I wanted to go for a brain lifting weights style stock image but unsurprisingly, that’s not a common thing to have a stock image of…
Now one thing I value as being part of a coach is that I am continually learning and frankly I don’t always have all the answers. But the important part is that when I don’t have the answers then I will go away and find them out, so I set out to find what I can on executive function training and this post is the result.
I came across a book called “Cognitive and Working Memory Training”. The paper was published in 2020 so is pretty cutting edge by research terms as well.
I’ve not read the whole book, but the chapter of interest is Chapter 8: “Review of the Evidence on and Fundamental Questions About, Efforts to Improve Executive Functions, Including Working Memory” and the chapter itself is a whole 250 pages long, not including references, so I wouldn’t advise reading all of it and I’m going to be honest and say that I didn’t read every single page - there is a detailed discussion on every single form of intervention they review and I just read the highlights of these rather than the analysis of each paper.
Fortunately the chapter repeats itself a lot so if you want to go and read it yourself then you can read just the introduction and the concluding sections which I kind of wish I’d done because I was exhausted after reading this but I wanted to do my due diligence and read as much of it as I could!
This chapter goes deep. It looks at 179 studies from all over the world and analyses them all from a critical point of view. Before analysing them they laid out nine fundamental principles that are important to executive function. These are:
1) That executive functions can be improved and it is possible to improve across the full lifespan and using different methods. That doesn’t mean you’re too old to improve your executive function, nor can you be too young, and there’s no one way to improve executive functions, although some are better than others.
Our society seems to fixate on the idea of being “too old” for things but there’s very little that we’re “too old” for (as I proved to myself after saying I was “too old” for TikTok!!!). Executive Function training is one of those things that you are NEVER too old for.
2) You only improve on what you practise. So if you work exclusively on working memory, you’ll improve on working memory but it’s likely not transferable to other aspects of executive function. In fact research shows that ADHD symptoms were largely unaffected by training just one aspect of executive function and that interventions targeting multiple cognitive skills were much more beneficial for ADHD.
3) In order to see benefits there needs to be continued challenge. It needs to be something that is hard enough to challenge us and give us a sense of achievement, but not so hard to put us off.
4) Executive Function benefits can last months or years but they do grow smaller as time since training increases, just like you lose fitness if you don’t train for a long time, you lose executive function benefits if you don’t use it.
5) The most behind on executive functions receive the best results. They found that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tended to have worse EFs at the start and EF training benefitted them further than just regression to the mean, thus implying executive function training could close some existing social disparities.
6) Duration is important - keeping it up over a long period of time is more useful than doing it for a month and hoping your executive function is magically improved for life.
7) The dose matters where 30-40 minutes is better than less than 30 minutes (the one exception being Quadrato Motor training which I’d never heard of before but I’ll talk about it a bit more later as it only needed 7 minute sessions!). Anything over an hour was less beneficial.
8) Spaced practises produced better long term outcomes than massed practises which is a general thing that we know about being important for learning. Using an example of my own hobby, it’s better to do a short piano practise session every day than to spend four hours practising just on the weekend.
You KNOW I’m going to take any opportunity to post a picture of me with a piano. I just love my piano.
9) And finally the for the last one benefits are seen most clearly on outcome measures that push the limits of the participants executive function. It kind of makes sense, right? We see most benefit on things that are harder.
So with that in mind, there were a number of different approaches that were studied but we’re going to look at the ones that have most existing research on them already and are the top and bottom of the list: the four that came out on top and the four that came out on bottom. So let’s start with the things that don’t really boost your executive functions that much.
Coming in with last is one that actually disappoints me because it’s been a feature on and off of my life for the last eight years and that is resistance training. There’s just not any real evidence to show that it improves executive functions at all. No study has found any strong evidence and only two studies have shown a small amount of evidence.
Second to last is what they call “plain aerobic exercise”, that is running or brisk walking. Cardio that is there just for cardio and doesn’t involve things like fine motor skills or using your brain. Again, there was little evidence to suggest any improvement in executive functions but there is some interesting context to add to this so I’m going to come back to it after finishing the list.
Third is yoga which is surprising given what comes out on top. Again, I’m going to leave this one here as a teaser that I will come back to.
After being resistant to yoga in my youth, I’m actually a big fan of it now so disappointed to see it so low on the list. But the relationship between yoga and executive function is not straight forward and we will dive into these nuances…
And the fourth is what they call “enriched aerobic exercise”, that’s aerobic exercise that does have fine motor control or using your brain and includes most sports that are out there.
You’ll notice that this entire list is exercise based, and that’s surprising because exercise is know as being good for our ADHD. In fact, the chapter points out that there is ample evidence out there suggesting that people who are fitter tend to have better executive function. So what’s going on here?
One argument is that people need to do aerobic exercise over years, not a short duration of a study to see real benefits. They also pointed out that people who voluntarily do aerobic exercise probably do it because they enjoy it and that enjoyment and cognitive benefit are correlated.
In addition, people who engage in physical activities often have part of their socialising tied up in these physical activities, or a sense of pride and personal achievement and so these social benefits could be very useful to executive function as well.
Taken together, these points could explain why people who are fitter tend to have better executive function, although they acknowledge that it could also go the other way around, people with better executive functioning are more likely to be able to maintain regular exercise and keep fit.
I had the choice of choosing a stock image about exercise again or a stock image about food but searching for a food one made me hungry and this one is in keeping with my brand colours
Now that kind of explains why Yoga in particular is so far down the list, but actually there’s a lot more to it, and they mostly seem to think it comes down to the way that yoga classes in particular are taught and implemented which could lead to yoga being an executive function asset in some cases, and not really making much of a difference in others.
But in order to get into the whys, we need to take a look into the four activities that were most beneficial when it came to improving executive functioning, which is something that we are going to take a deep dive into next week!
So that’s where we’ll leave it for today, having laid the foundation of what is actually important to executive function and looked at some of the surprising things that don’t really help executive function either way. Can you guess what activities come out on top for being most useful?
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.