Question about executive dysfunction

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Maggiedoll wrote:

Aha!

ROTFLMAO!! !! !! !!

~Maggiedoll's mom

(ps. I have been separated from the flylady for about a year now. I think perhaps you you have convinced me to consider a reconciliation.)

Remembering facts, especially interesting ones, is easy. Keeping one's life in order requires a lot more thought. You have to figure out
1. What needs to be done.
2. All the steps that need to be taken to get things done.
3. The order that those steps should go in.
then you need to be able to put that knowledge into practice.

Think about something that you think of as an easy part of your daily life. Work out exactly how many steps it takes to do it (for example, if you were cleaning, and you needed to get a mop from an outside cupboard, that would be at least 4 steps: go outside, go to the cupboard, open the cupboard, get the mop). Imagine that you have to think consciously about all these steps, and that you have to really concentrate to keep them in mind. Now do you see why "simple" things can be difficult?

I see your point, but unfortunately remembering facts is difficult for me too.

very interesting. my life is really organized. i meet deadlines (bill paying, etc) on time, complete most projects, can multi-task, etc... but i can't remember anything in "learned" in school and facts fly out of my head quickly. my aspie house mate always says i have a bad memory. this is true- for facts and interest-related details. i can't remember the titles of movies i saw last week.
but i can remember all the day-to-day things that keeps life organized: appointments, projects, homework, errands, jobs stuff, bill paying, car repairs, groceries, etc. that he can't manage.
i feel hurt and pissy when he says "you have a bad memory" because i can't remember the name of every head of state from every country on earth ...or the order of the presidents and the years they served in office, etc...
but my house mate can't even manage to return his dad's emails.
he criticizes me alot without seeing his own challenges.

I am the same as Who_Am_I in the particular sense that I remember facts well but have executive functioning problems.

For me, have difficulty with housework because even if I see a sink of dishes, when I look at it I see about 1000 tasks to complete.. every scrub, lift of dishes into sink, every little movement is a task to me as it takes up a lot of mental energy to focus to do it, and my dyspraxic muscles want to do things a lot slower.

Typing I find to be a horrible set of tiny tasks, and vacuuming is truly awful because I can feel every resistant fibre in the carpet, it takes me half an hour to do just one room.

I see people just tear through office work and housework and cannot understand how they can do it and make it look so easy... when at the best of times I just bumble slowly through it, getting constantly sidetracked.

I guess I just dont have the same mind as them. If I were to go flatting again I would make sure to live with some messy people so that I dont feel guilty about not being so tidy.

If you dont like him perhaps remember he is someone you are sharing a space with, not a friend. You could even move into another place? Its no fun to live with someone you dont get along with.

Okay thanks, that clears it up a bit. I think it might have some degree of executive dysfunction (I'm not shortening it to ED ), seeing as I have huge difficulties in carrying out a long list of instructions. It's even worse if they were given verbally, because I can never keep track of long lists of instructions. That's partly why I sucked at Chemistry at school - I was always 2 or 3 steps behind everyone else when we did practical experiments. Fun times...

Glad it was of help.
Long verbal instructions are a good way to make the day fail. Mostly because I don't notice when I already forgot the first part of the list when somebody floods me with more and more.
I am lucky enough to be a fast reader, so I had the habit to read the written instructions most of my teachers provided before they even started explaining them. I also read the coursebooks in the first week of a new term, just out of curiosity.
What I didn't learn to cope with were educational videos.
Processing auditory information can be a lot easier while you are walking at a reasonably fast pace. (So fast that you have to use the part of the mind that usually would wander off to concentrate on keeping the pace and not stepping in dog poo, and everything else decides that you could actually try to listen to what you are hearing, seeing that it already is provided.)
And I'm a big believer in neuroplasticity and in training your weakest skills until they stop dragging you down.



zen_mistress, start out with simple tasks. If a full sink is too much to manage, clean three cups and then leave it be. Or one, if you're having a bad day.
The important thing is to repeat this until your motor memory kicks in. (It sounds as if you also might have trouble transferring tasks from conscious movement to motor memory, but that might just be my impression)
If cleaning a single cup right now consists of twenty sub-tasks or so, with practice you can reduce it to maybe three tasks (cleaning, drying, putting away) in a way that one part of a subtask automatically triggers the next without you having to think about it.

(God who am I to give advice, haha.)

Thanks, it is welcome advice, believe me, especially about starting out simple.

As for motor memory, well that is exactly my problem with housework. I basically dont have much of a motor memory. I find it hard to remember sequences of movements and imitate others ie learning dance steps. Washing a cup always feels like many, many movements, I cant break it down, and I feel so tired and irritable afterwards. But I have to do all this stuff, I have no choice.

I can't copy dance moves either.
Find something that makes fun, if there's a chance. I'm lucky enough that I had a friend when I was 11 to 14 with whom I spent a lot of time playing games that helped our motor skills (jumping over things, playing horseback riding without horse, juggling. I also never had any problem with things that only involved moving a single part of my body like my hands) and everytime something went bad we just laughed about it, and then tried again and again until we got it right.

I think my problems are a bit more complicated than that. They involve fine motor a lot more than gross motor.. I can do some thing with gross motor, at school I wasnt too bad at high jump and gymnastics, but I had the handwriting of a 6 year old throughout high school. No computers either then, we had to write all our assignments.

Anyway I think I need to start doing yoga again. I find that very helpful, as having stronger limbs and better endurance does help things a little bit.

Yup. I didn't mean to assume that your problems were easy to solve (otherwise you would have solved them by now!) but as I said, I am a big believer in neuroplasticity. And I am a big believer in using intrinsic motivation and timeboxing to get better at something.
The thing is that the more somebody knows/is able to do, the easier it is for that person's brain to use that knowledge or skill to come up with a solution for a similar challenge.
And training is most effective when training itself has a high potential of being enjoyable, because that means that you are learning at a pace that you will be able to sustain for enough time to see results. And what I meant to mention is that I am re-learning one thing that seems natural to all children: The belief that they can learn anything other people can do when they just don't give up trying (and maybe wait a bit until they are big enough).
Yoga is great, Tai Chi as well. Trying out new things (as long as curiosity is higher than stress) is very good and getting enough sleep is essential for the brain to actually make the training last.

Yes, if only 10% of the brain is used by us I guess we likely have some influence over things we didnt realise.

That's a myth basing on the observation that only ever parts of the brain are active. It's kind of like being surprised that we do not need to move our feet to be able to write.