What is executive functioning?
- John Cuturilo
- Jun 18
- 2 min read
Welcome to the February 2025 edition of the Your Listener Counselling newsletter! This month, we are exploring a psychological phenomenon called executive functioning. Executive functioning is essential to understanding our functioning and essentially all mental illnesses, yet accessible explanation of it appears absent in much psychotherapy and mental health education. This is why I so frequently discuss it in my content and with my clients when counselling.
Executive functioning is what allows the brain to direct us to accomplish goals. Whether we know it or not, the brain undertakes numerous complex processes in directing us to complete what may seem like simple routine tasks which we take for granted. Whether we are cooking dinner, changing bed sheets, brushing our teeth, having a difficult conversation with our spouse, building a kennel for our dog, sculpting, consulting with a client, or a surgeon performing a complex operation, we owe these human abilities to executive functioning. To accomplish these feats, the brain must absorb information about the situation, retrieve necessary information from memory to inform how to proceed, analyse the costs and benefits of the different choices we could make, and then upon deciding, direct the body to act to allow us to accomplish the intended goal.
What is often not explained well is that a number of psychological challenges, including mental illnesses, are associated with impeded executive functioning. For example, if we have anxiety and "freeze" when not knowing how to respond to an event, have depression and feel "so sad we can not do anything", or experience "brain fog" when we can not think, we are experiencing an executive dysfunction. The condition is actually affecting our brain's ability to retrieve and process information in a way that is necessary for us to complete the tasks — hence seemingly simple tasks are difficult or impossible to accomplish. Unsurprisingly, people often find it difficult or impossible to describe this to their therapists. The facts invalidate the ethos of "toughen up and get over it"; to argue that an unwell state of mind is a choice is equivalent to arguing that a person should be able to function normally with their brain removed. This fact also challenges certain theories of psychotherapy which characterise mental illnesses as being constituted by "irrational" or "unhelpful" thoughts which can be challenged with logic and corrected. While well-intentioned and still exceptionally useful in part, these are incomplete explanations of problems and we best serve our clients by providing accessible but more comprehensive explanations of how the brain operates in these states.
As a counsellor, it is important for me to identify when a client may be experiencing executive dysfunction so that I can educate them in a way that is accessible, as well as help them plan for their safety if it makes them vulnerable to danger. This type of education is one of the components which differentiates a temporary solution to one problem, from empowering someone to understand themselves and develop skills to independently solve a variety of problems in the long term.