Ep 12: Understanding AuDHD - Executive Functioning and Daily Life: ADHD, Autism & AuDHD (Part 1)

🎙️ Episode 13: Executive Functioning in Daily Life: ADHD, Autism & AuDHD

Episode Summary

In this episode of The AuDHD Psych Podcast, Aaron Howearth explores how executive functioning shapes everyday life for autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD individuals. Why do tasks that “should” be simple – studying, working, organising the day, or following through on plans – so often feel overwhelming or impossible, even when we know exactly what we’re meant to be doing?

Drawing from both clinical psychology and lived experience, Aaron explains executive functions as the brain’s “mental mechanics”: planning, organisation, working memory, impulse control, sustained attention, and cognitive flexibility. He unpacks how differences in these areas are common across neurodevelopmental conditions and how they influence our ability to start, persist with, and complete tasks in real-world contexts.

Aaron also explores the apparent contradiction between autistic and ADHD profiles – rules, structure, and rigidity on one side; impulsivity, distractibility, and jumping between tasks on the other – and how these traits can coexist within AuDHD individuals. Rather than seeing executive functioning as a fixed trait, he highlights how attention, motivation, and follow-through shift with factors like environment, stress, novelty, interest, and internal state.

This episode offers clarity, validation, and a practical language for understanding why executive functioning challenges show up the way they do, and invites a more compassionate, neurodiversity-affirming perspective on how we navigate daily life with different “mental mechanics.”

Key Themes & Takeaways

• Executive Functions Explained – What planning, working memory, cognitive flexibility, impulse control, and self-monitoring are, and how they operate as the brain’s day-to-day management system.
• ADHD Executive Profiles – How inattention, distractibility, impulsivity, delay intolerance, and working memory challenges affect studying, work tasks, multi-step activities, and follow-through.
• Autistic Executive Profiles – How differences in flexibility and planning show up as routines, rules-based thinking, “rigidity,” and difficulty shifting track in conversations or when plans change.
• AuDHD Internal Tension – Why having both rule-following drives and impulsive, distractible tendencies can create chronic stress, self-criticism, and a build-up of unfinished tasks.
• Working Memory & Everyday Life – How reduced working memory capacity contributes to lost intentions, forgotten items, and difficulties holding and manipulating information in the moment.
• Impulse, Consequences & Social Impact – How acting on impulses without fully projecting consequences can subtly but significantly affect learning, relationships, and self-image over time.
•  Rigidity, Routine & Habit Stacking – How turning cognitive rigidity into structured routines and habit stacks can reduce executive load and make important tasks more automatic.
• Contextual Functioning – How environment, expectations, stress, and internal states influence executive capacity, and why functioning can fluctuate rather than reflect a fixed level of ability.
• Reframing “Difficulty” – Moving away from moralising language like “lazy” or “disorganised” toward a neurodiversity-affirming understanding of executive functioning differences and how to work with them.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hello friends, welcome back to the Audi HT Psych Podcast. I'm Aaron Howe with Clinical Psychologist, and we are different, not defective. Again, thank you to everybody who has liked, followed, and subscribed. Left us ratings and reviews on streaming platforms, we really appreciate it. And for everyone who's following our Instagram page, we really appreciate that. So if you haven't already, take a chance to have a look at our Instagram or social media. Follow us on there and follow us on your streaming platforms. And if you have a moment, give us a review if you like what we do. So today I wanted to have a quick chat about executive functioning in daily life for many of us in that Audi HD space. Pardon me. Because it really impacts what's going on for us. Neurodevelopmental differences like autism and ADHD are differences in the way our brains develop. So that's necessarily going to impact on our cognitive and executive functioning, those mental mechanics of how our minds work. So can I go on with uh just a bit of a working definition? So what are executive functions? Executive functions are higher order cognitive processes. Their sort of planning skill, their ability to plan, to control impulses, uh, our ability for cognitive flexibility to shift from idea to idea or from one track to another. Um, so planning an organization and working memory comes in there as well. And monitoring what we're doing to keep ourselves on track. So executive functioning difficulties are common across neurodevelopmental differences, quite broadly. They're believed to be transdiagnostic, so uh they're believed to be an element of each neurodevelopmental difference, autism, ADHD, learning differences, etc. Um, and they're really strongly linked to the everyday difficulties and strengths that we actually have. Um so, how can that play out in life? Many of you would have experienced that it plays out in our in our learning, in our work, in our relationships, every single part of our lives is impacted by our cognitive functioning. Um there's a conversation out there around how that's distinct from personality, and that's uh a conversation that I have a point of view on that I will share in a very different uh episode. So, excuse me. Executive functioning profiles in ADHD, autism, and AudiHD. So with ADHD, we we know that these are this is a condition that's underpinned by inattention or distractability and impulsivity or lower than average impulse control. But we also know that in a significant uh amount of research, we see that working memory appears to be impaired either foundationally at the level of working memory that we have, or whether it's being tied up by other things, we can't be too sure. But we do know that working memory on either cognitive testing or in um application in daily life is often impaired compared to my age group and people of my equal intellectual ability overall, so my IQ. With ADHD, there are broader executive weaknesses, so working memory, inhibition, delay tolerance, so that impatience that a lot of us experience, and sustaining our attention. And that predicts the difficulties that we have with engaging in tasks and maintaining our focus and completing tasks. Uh, multi-step tasks are difficult for a lot of us because we skip steps or miss them. Um, persistence, academic achievement, you know, I've said in previous uh reels and episodes, I failed high school twice because I didn't know I didn't have the skills to anchor my attention. But that didn't mean I didn't have the s the intellect to pass. So autism shows that there are executive functioning differences in flexibility and planning are pretty common. And when we talk about autistic people being rigid or rules-bound, or probably even conscientious, we're talking about uh something that either taps into or is underpinned by cognitive flexibility. The ability for me talking about my special interest to be able to change tack when somebody asks a question unrelated, um, and then come back to what I was talking about. If you guys are anything like me and I'm mid-monologue, and you ask me a question that's not directly related to the point that I'm trying to make, I'm not derailed, I follow another rail path down that point of it that point of interest, and I may never come back to the original point until I realise that I haven't answered that question. And that's what we talk about with um cognitive flexibility or inflexibility or cognitive rigidity, and that plays out behaviorally as well, where we take the same path to work, the same tram at the same time to the same place each week. What else do I have in my notes here? I hear you ask. Oh, I'm so glad you asked. Well, uh, the next thing that I have in my notes is um just a bit of a point that everybody's brain is different. Everybody is different, so everybody's cognitive and executive functioning will be different. Pardon me. We have these um somewhat arbitrary, I would argue, uh labels of autism or ADHD, but they are not if you have the autism stamp, you have exactly this level of cognitive rigidity, exactly this level of sensory sensitivity. It's not that simple. Everybody has this by varying degrees, and the level that that impacts us will vary by the context that we are in, the environment, our internal context, our stress levels, anxiety, and so forth. So it's not a one-size fits all. With the Aud presentation, though, and I say this, I've said this a million times, autism and ADHD intuitively seem to be the opposite. ADHD is known for impulsivity and is underpinned by impulsivity and inattention. So bouncing from one thing to the next, getting halfway through a job and not finishing it, having 63 hobby projects that I started and haven't quite finished. Thank you to all the people in my life who tolerate that. Whereas autism is known for a real rules orientation, a real rules-boundedness. Nope, this is what's happening, and I follow the steps sequentially. And they sound like they can't really exist in the same person, but they can and they do, and those of you who are like me will understand that. That's probably where well, I won't speak for other people, but that's certainly where a great deal of my stress comes from. I know what the rules are that I should be following, and I want to follow them. There is something intrinsic and innate in me that says the rules are this and I must follow it, but then my impulsivity and that distractability means that I do get halfway through the thing, and then I jump onto the next thing. And that means that I then have a series of unfinished tasks, and then I see them as a whole barrier that I can't get over because there's so many of them, and that can become demotivating, and motivation is underpinned by cognitive and executive functions. So I went on a little bit of a tangent there, and I'll bring myself back on track by looking at my notes. Um, so Audi HD, it tends to have both profiles, uh, and the difficulties and strengths. I don't want to call it superpowers, and I don't want to call it disorder, it is a combination of the two, like everything in nature, is both strength, weakness, um, helpful or unhelpful in different contexts. But in the Audi HD presentation, we do see shared difficulties in flexibility, in planning, um, in response inhibition, so that impulse control. And there's a recent study I was reading, and I'm terribly sorry, I don't recall who the uh authors were, I didn't write them on my notes here. But it suggests that executive difficulties are transdiagnostic, as I mentioned earlier. They're not specific to a neurodevelopmental difference, they are more neurodevelopmental differences, neurobrain development, development. So the development of my brain is different. So cognitive functions are the software that runs on the hardware of my brain. So if I have a neurodevelopmental difference, I'm going to have cognitive differences in those mental mechanics. Alrighty, taking a deep breath because I like a noise. So I've already touched on that point that um executive functioning and cognitive profiles are not set and forget one size fits all. They are different for every individual person. They just tend to cluster in certain areas when we make a diagnosis of autism, ADHD, learning difference, etc. How can they show up in daily life? Well, I kind of touched on this already, but I'll give my my own experience, and that is, you know, I am an ADHD, so I didn't naturally have the skills to study. Um I've said it before, I've said it before today. Um I I didn't pass year 12 twice. I started out in primary school. My my intellect is reasonably strong overall, but my attention is not great if there's not something to anchor my attention. Novelty, interest, challenge, emergency. Uh if there's not one of those involved, it's kind of difficult for me to pay attention without noticing that everything else. In primary school, it didn't matter. My brain would pick up enough of the information between staring out the window at the gardener or the teacher walking past or the kid who was in trouble and been sent to stand on the pavement out the front. Um didn't really matter. I could tune in enough to pick up enough information to get through the tests and the exams and do quite well. But as I went through primary school, I missed more and more information. So I had less of the underpinning information. My inner tension didn't change. Uh I got to senior primary school, I went from quite strong grades to mediocre to strong grades, early high school, obviously higher order learning, more complex learning. I'd missed more and more as the years progressed, and my grades progressively dropped as my year levels got higher. That's the attentional side of things. There's also the impulsive side, a really great example of how that impulsivity can impact us in really subtle ways, especially as Audi HD is. I don't know if any of you come from areas where it gets quite cold and dry, and there's a certain type of carpet that if you have a certain type of shoe, you can scuff your shoes on the carpet and you build up static electricity in your body. I discovered this at about eight years old. And I was fascinated, like I couldn't think of anything else, so there was an intentional issue there. And I believe we were in the library, and there was uh a classmate who was uh up until this point a friend of mine, and I was so fascinated, I was scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff my feet, and then I walked up to my friend and I zapped them with my feet, like I touched the side of their arm and all that static electricity discharged and zapped them. I had the impulse to do that to that person. I didn't have the capacity to consider how that would be received at the time. So the impulse, the impulse or the lack of impulse control, very ADHD, but I also lacked theory of mind is something that we often see in um autism literature, um, where we don't have the same capacity to imagine what other people, their perspective might be. So that came into play to some degree. I didn't think that my friend wouldn't find it as fascinating as me. Unsurprisingly, they unexpectedly got an electric shock, and we weren't friends after that. So there's ADHD and autism playing out together to impact not just my academic space, because I was then in trouble with the teacher, that impacted my learning for the afternoon, but also my social functioning, because I impulsively did this thing that had a negative impact on somebody else that I didn't foresee. So, where was I in my notes? I'm so glad you asked. Um I have no idea, and now I'm sort of scooting back down to try and find it. Um, with us. Um, other examples. Um I'll go through more specifically, actually. So, working memory and holding information in mind. What's working memory? I sort of like to describe working memory is if we think of a computer system, for those of you who know computers, there's the RAM, the that kind of part that is tied up by all the apps that we're running. And then there's our hard drive, which is more like long-term memory. The RAM, that working part, is equivalent to human working memory. It's where we hold and manipulate the information that we're using at the moment. So if I'm an ADHDR and I have less capacity for working memory in everyday use, instead of being able to hold a shopping list of ten items, I might only have capacity to hold five items. Which means that if non-ADHD me and me, I, go to the shop, non-ADHD me will get all eight items on the list. I'm likely to forget what three of them were, maybe guess one of them but get two of them wrong, go back with six of the eight and two unrequ uh not necessary objects. So that's our working memory. It's that sort of that mental space where we hold and manipulate information. That I think yeah, I've I use my learning examples um often and I use that shopping example, but again, if I'm paying attention to what the teacher's saying and they're giving a significant amount of information and I can't hold all of it in mind, I'm not gonna learn that very well, and I'm not gonna be able to hold all of that information in mind to then encode it and store it in the filing cabinet that is my long-term memory. And if I can't file it in my long-term memory cabinet, I'm not going to be able to recall it later on. So that impacts my learning, it impacts my day-to-day functioning, getting my shopping list. It impacts me remembering to buy a birthday present for somebody that I love or a Christmas gift, or often even to get Christmas cards to send out to people. So, and I'm sure many of you are will have had this, and I've certainly had it since I was, I remember it as an early teenager, of walking into a room and just having no idea why I was there, pottering into the kitchen with a book in one hand and I don't know, a pillow in the other, and just go, what am I doing here? There was a reason, I just it popped out of working memory when I noticed the things that I was passing on the way. So again in the ADHD space, we have that inhibition and impulse control, or impulsivity and inhibition, uh, inhibition, impulse control, same thing. Um, whether we have more impulsivity, more impulses to do things than the average person, or less capacity to control them, or a combination of the two. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, and I beg your pardon. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head. But it's basically that uh what I described before, I have an impulse, and usually the average person might think through each impulse the thing that they want to do, and not do a series of them because they recognize the repercussions. We have an impulse to do the thing, and we don't forward project, we don't forward plan, we just do it. And then there are the repercussions, like my friend who was no longer my friend after being zapped. Um and that delayed gratification uh comes into that, you know. Our impatience in traffic and waiting in line are really good examples of that. Um when I have a random thought when I'm talking to you about impulse control, and I start talking about that thing, that is actually an impulsivity or impulse control difference because I in my mind I see the deviation, and instead of going, oh no, I won't explain that, and I'll stick on the path of what I'm talking about, I actually start explaining that thing, and then probably segue four or five times off that also. Cognitive flexibility and cognitive shifting. So this is that uh often we talk about it more in the autism space, um, where I have the set way that I must do things, or the set way that I go from one place to another, or set patterns of thought that I have around things that I find really difficult to change. Um I once had a very beloved friend of mine I worked with in the Navy, and they are an amazing human. And I recall they said to me one day, When you have a point to make, you're like a dog with a bone. And that mental image stuck with me because I just think of all of the dogs that I know who love a bone, and if you try to take it off them, they're like no, and it's a mad wrestle for it. And that's probably a really nice metaphor with the thing that I'm focused on being the bone that I can't let go of, and cognitive flexibility is the capacity to let go of the bone, to let go of the thing that my attention is on, the thing that I'm thinking about right now, the way I do the thing. How is that impacting us in day-to-day life? In some contexts, it's really, really helpful. Um, some parts of that were really useful for me in my 23 years in the Navy, you know, in a military context, uh very structured, very authoritarian, was very helpful in some ways. But in other contexts, when I'm just engaging in social interactions, uh I love people, I particularly love neurodivergence, so I will talk about this for days, hence starting this podcast. But it's not everybody's thing. And if I just talk at you about my special interests or my favorite interests, and don't change track when you want to change the conversation, I will not make too many friends or I will not keep too many friends. So that's sort of the really simple way that cognitive inflexibility or difficulty with set shifting is how that can play out in daily life. Planning, organization, and problem solving. Now, I actually believe that problem solving is often a strong skill for an Audi HD brain, and I think it's the same brain that I've spoken about in a previous episode where our autism loves the details and does not like gaps in the information. We like to have all the information, all of the details, and then we understand the system of whatever the thing is. But ADHD is inattentive, it likes to jump from thing to thing. Tangentiality is a thing that we talk about in uh ADHD conversations, for example. I can equally solve problems by tangentially jumping to a detail that might not seem related, but actually is the way I fix the fault. But I can also apply that same cognitive mental process to find problems that might not be there if my anxiety wasn't overlaid on that thought process. So problem solving, I think many, not all, but many Audi HD brains are actually really good at both problem solving and problem finding if we overlay anxiety or stress on our cognitive processes. Having said that, some structured problem solving requires step by step. I do this and then I do this, and then I check this thing, and then I check two, three, four, five, six. But if I'm inattentive or impulsive, I might impulsively jump to a new idea before I've gone through all of those steps, and it may impede my ability to solve a problem in a structured way. Planning and organization obviously require holding information in mind to plan and organize. I might have a goal of going on a holiday, and planning requires keeping in mind where I'm going, the dates that I'm going, the flights that I need to book, the accommodation if I'm going to book accommodation, the things that I'm going to do. So to plan and organize that trip, I need my working memory, a processing speed is another foundational cognitive ability that we have, and that impacts how much information I can process at any given point in time. That will influence cognitive uh I beg your pardon planning and organization and problem solving. Breaking things down into small parts is something that we don't naturally do as well as the average person, but that can also be a way for us to overcome some of the difficulties that we have, and I'll come back to that in a little while. Just checking my timer, I've allowed myself about another 15 minutes, so I'll speed up a little bit. Sustained attention and goal directed persistence. So that is keeping my attention on task and staying there. Related to, but not the same as motivation, which many of us have difficulties in. What is that exactly what it sounds like? Like. It's I put my attention on the thing and I hold it there. Inattentive ADHD is actually the difficulties that arise out of my difference in ability of doing that. My lower than average ability to keep my attention on task without an anchor. We all know that we can do it at the last minute when the deadline is due in two hours, or when we've got a manager standing over our shoulder waiting for us to finish that job. Or if it's really interesting, or if it's challenging in that really positive way, but it's when there's not one of those centrally innate anchors for us that's when it becomes a bit problematic for us to keep our attention on task. Self-monitoring and error awareness. So this is one that comes up quite a lot, particularly in the ADHD space, in my experience, and that is we can look outwards, but we're not great at looking inwards and monitoring what are the steps that I need to be doing right now to get this work goal, study goal, finish this assignment, get the holiday planned. And if I'm not able to monitor what I'm doing or what step I'm up to in the process that I'm engaged in, then I'm more likely to deviate off it and not realize because I'm not monitoring what I'm doing right now versus the goal that I had in mind. And that's a really common difficulty that many of us, myself included, have often. So tracking progress in what we're doing, noticing errors as we do them, as we make the mistake, pardon me, and then adjusting what we're doing and our strategy to compensate for those, their difficulties that many of us have. And you know, I don't know about uh you guys out there, but I often will have a reminder come up, or somebody will send me an email about something that I will realise has kind of fallen off my radar until it's due or until I receive that reminder. And that's been a common thing throughout my life that I work really hard to manage now. Alright, what's on my next page? Oh, it's a fun question, and when I move this page, I'll probably know. So emotion regulation and as linked to executive functioning processes. So uh I like to describe our emotional experience as, and this is my working model of emotion, as our integrated experience of our body's response or lack of to our cognitive appraisal of our context. So I go about my world and I experience the world through my senses, and then I process that cognitively, and if I need to respond to that, then my body has a physical response. If I need to fight, I've made a cognitive appraisal that there is a challenge in the environment, I've made a cognitive appraisal that there is that challenge is a threat, it's not something that I can I'm excited about. And I've made then a cognitive appraisal that either I have resources to overcome it or not. If I have resources to overcome it, then if I'm stronger than it, then I'll move into fight anger. If I don't, if I think that it's stronger than I am, I'll probably move into flight, freeze, fawn, or flop. Um flight is an appraisal, I have enough resources to get away. Freeze is I have enough resources not to be seen. Fawn is I have the resources to beg for my life, and flop is that sort of hopelessness, I don't have the resources to escape this threat to my safety. So um went on a little bit of a psychoed tangent there, that wasn't necessary, but here we are. Why did I tell you that? Because when we're talking about emotions and we consider it through that cognitive appraisal lens, we can see how in neurodivergence with increased minority stresses, how executive functioning will influence our emotional experience. If I have difficulty holding all the details in my working memory, I may not be able to process all the relevant information to have an adaptive or a helpful emotional response, and I will just process the most threatening elements of my context, internal and external. When I say my context, I'm also talking about my internal experience and our relationship to our external environment. So if I can't hold all the details in mind, I'm going to see the ones that are most salient to my safety, and that's probably going to lead me to having an anxiety or a fear response or an anger response, where perhaps if I had my working memory was able to hold more information, I might be able to actually see more details and then not have that fight-flight fear, oh, sorry, fight, flight, freeze, fawn-flop response. And the same is true, I think, with excitement and the impulsivity that can underpin that. Sometimes we get so excited about something, and because we don't plan, forward project, we don't uh we don't reduce that excitement or control that excitement. Excitement is underpinned by motivation and impulse, also. And so we jump into things impulsively. Uh, I know lots of people, and I'm not going to lie myself included, who impulsively used to spend money in the in Australia. We have pokies, I think America calls them slot machines. Uh, just impulsive, I'll just put another$50 in or another$20 or whatever it was, without thinking the thing through, because the flashing lights and the pretty sounds were exciting to my brain. But long term it was really unhelpful. Um, if I'm not thinking forward about, oh, I've got that bill coming up, or oh, I was saving for a holiday, then I'm not going to have all of the information in mind to control that impulse. I'm not going to have the balancing information to go, oh, I want to do this impulsive thing, but here's the reason not to. And if my working memory is smaller or less effective than everybody else's or the average person's, I might have that information, but I might not be holding it in mind right now because I've got all the stimulus of the pretty lights and all the pretty sounds and all the people around me. So impulse control. If I am frustrated and I'm overstimulated by perhaps sound, noise, busyness, my frustration's going to increase. And if my impulse control is impaired or you know not as strong as everybody else's, I'm going to have difficulty controlling the impulse to fight or to fly or to freeze. So my emotional regulation is inherently underpinned by my cognitive and executive functioning. And that's why we see so many of us having, to use that language, to having meltdowns, having emotional dysregulation and emotional difficulties. And the second order effect of that, or the cognitive functioning, first order effect, emotional regulation, second order effect, social relationships is a third order effect. My academic and professional functioning is a third order effect from those cognitive functions that are founded in our neurodevelopmental, our brain development differences. I've kind of touched on this already, but how do these cognitive and executive functioning differences impact us in daily life? They impact us across all of life in different ways. I've used my education history ad nauseum, but it was not a dissimilar experience for my first of my early years in the Navy. I didn't control my impulses super well, and so I went off and I did the drinking things. And then I didn't function particularly well at work because I was impulsively doing those things. I wasn't paying attention to some training that I had. So I didn't learn things as well as I could have foundationally, and then I had to backfill that knowledge later on, which obviously impacted my functioning in the workplace because I was trying to learn stuff that I should have remembered from a course. Should have. I don't like the word should that I didn't recall from a course because my brain just functioned differently. Work and career, daily living and independence, those cognitive and executive functioning. The reason I use the language mental mechanics is because it's really like that. If we don't have tires on our car, our car can still function in some ways, but not in the way that typically works well in the usual environments. And our minds are very much like that. We have a requirement in the typical world to control our impulses in most things that we do, to pay attention in most things that we do, conversation, the work, the study, the friends, the birthdays. And when we're not able to apply those at the same rates as everybody else, it impacts every part of our life. If I can't remember to do my grocery shopping, then that's going to impact my diet and physical health. If I don't have the energy going in, that's going to impact my energy levels and my capacity to exercise. And if I'm not eating well and not exercising well, my physical health is likely to be impacted. And that will then have flow on and circular effects to my cognitive functioning. My impulsivity is probably going to be higher, my impulse control lower, my cognitive rigidity will be higher. But we can also harness our capacities in positive ways. I can, when I fight through the struggle of setting a new routine using habit stacking or something like that, a strategy like that. Once I set a routine, my cognitive rigidity is this is my thing now. I don't need to motivate for that. And so a great example that I'll use that I love because this impacts my life daily. I have a dog, my dog's name is Yoda. And Yoda and I have been friends for many, many years now, a decade or so. Yoda's about 16. And I used to struggle to get out of bed in the morning and take Yoda for a morning we and a walk. So without realizing it, long before I was a psychologist, I habit stacked that to waking up. The first week or two was very effortful, and I had to remind myself before bed what I was doing. I've got to get up in the morning and take Yoda for a walk, otherwise he's gonna be there for an hour while I get ready for work. But after that couple of weeks, it just became a part of my routine, a part of my habit. Why is that important in the context of cognitive and executive functioning? Because for me to unawares decide to do a thing. For me to go, I'm going to take my dog to the Mornington Peninsula. There's a lot of things that we've spoken about already there. There's planning an organization. I need to plan my times, where I'm going to go, what the traffic's going to be like. I need to consider all of those things which requires working memory. I need then to motivate myself to actually get the things ready, find Yoda's harness and take food and treats and water and things for him so that he's got everything that he needs. Remember to take my wallet, find the car keys wherever I've not hooked them up on their hook. There's executive functioning required. I need to keep my attention on track while I'm preparing to leave the house and take Yoda to the new place. But with habit stacking, I did that, it was effortful for the first week or two, and then it wasn't. Then it was a part of my routine. So that cognitive rigidity that this is just the way my life is now. I habit stacked waking up, rolling out of bed to throwing on yesterday's clothes and immediately walking out of the home and taking my dog for a walk. There is zero motivation required for that. I don't think about it. So my differences in cognitive and executive functioning do not impact me taking my dog for a walk to so that he can have a wee and a sniff and a be a menace just generally in a good way. I don't have to work at that. My cognitive and executive functioning no longer comes into play in an effortful way because this is part of my daily routine. So those differences that we do have can be bane or boon. They can be wins or losses depending on context. It's just a matter of understanding what our particular levels of them are and then being able to use them in ways that serve us. Sometimes that is learning how I can anchor my attention, learning how I can distract myself from the impulsive thing that I want to do. Sometimes it's learning that actually this rather arbitrary, socially ascribed norm about that thing isn't something I have to internalize and live by. I don't mind being tangential in conversation. And in fact, I work with so many people who are and who apologize, and I I always respond or try to respond with this is not a space to apologize for being tangential. That's how nonlinear thinking and neurodivergent, many neurodivergent brains converse and engage. And that tangential, seemingly unrelated detail might be unrelated to an onlooker, but it's not unrelated to me in my internal experience. And so I don't think we need to apologize for that. When we dispense with these arbitrary ideas that we have to get from point A to point B in the fastest and quickest possible route, when we let go of that when it's not helpful to us, it can actually help repair our self-esteem, which helps impact on our emotional regulation and emotional control, which in turn helps our cognitive and executive functioning. I went on a tangent there and I'm just trying to think back to what I was actually talking about. The application of our cognitive and executive functioning. So they can be positive, helpful, and they can be unhelpful. And it's context-specific. We can apply them in ways that serve us. We can change the expectations of ourselves, we can change the environment around us, either making accommodations for ourselves or advocating for accommodations in workplaces, academic settings. And if you if you have a counselor or a GP, often we as clinicians will advocate for you if it's not something that you have capacity to do, whether that's confidence or other barriers. We can write letters advocating for you. We often organizations have well-being teams who will also advocate for those things for you. So we can make physical accommodations and social accommodations in workplaces, social settings, academic settings. We can also choose good fit environments. And in doing that, recognizing how to min-max, uh, how to minimize the difficulties associated with my differences and maximize my strengths. And at the same time, if I recognize that I'm different, not defective, I don't have the self-esteem difficulties that we have. I don't have the impaired self-concept that so many of us do. And if my self-concept isn't impaired and my self-esteem is strong, I'm less likely to lean into impulsive things like substance and alcohol misuse to manage the emotional difficulties that come with my cognitive differences and the social repercussions and academic repercussions and professional repercussions that can follow through from those, which lead to emotional difficulties, which lead further into cognitive and executive functioning differences, and that can become a really unhelpful maintenance cycle. And that really taps neatly into, I touched very briefly on diagnostic levels. Those cycles can amplify themselves and change me from being autistic without any support needs in a perfect world to autistic with level one support needs, requiring support. More emotional difficulties, increased cognitive impairment from those emotional difficulties, and perhaps physiological, physical health, well-being issues, leading to perhaps level two or level three support needs, even though my underpinning cognitive characteristics at a foundational level might be the same as somebody else who has level one support needs. Well, I have chatted away for quite a long time now, so I think I might wind up for today. But I guess just in summary, what we've talked about today is really the cognitive and executive functioning and functions and processes that underpin neurodivergence. I've touched on how they can how can they show up in daily life and what they are, how they can influence our emotional experience, which and both can influence my physical health, be it through diet, exercise, stress impacts on physical health, which I didn't really touch on, but is there, and how that can impact on my cognitive and executive functioning and flow through to my support needs. My impulsivity has led me to make decisions in my life that other people might not have made and might not have acted on. That's yielded really positive results for me. I impulsively bought a house to renovate that I've never renovated before. It was a test bed. I learned so much on YouTube. Thank you, YouTube. Uh, not a paid product placement. Um because of that, I then sold that house and it gave me the resources to be able to change career. To leave the Navy, that was a career that I really enjoyed so many parts of it, and it felt good to serve my community in that way. But I was able to let that go and move into a career like psychology where I get to sit one-on-one and chat to people and try to be helpful in people's lives. So my impulsive decision to do this thing that I had no background in yielded a career change and a contentment in life that I had not experienced before because everything I do now is values aligned, and because I made an impulsive decision. Because of that, my emotional situation is better, my stress level is lower, I'm not I'm not neurotypical, so I can't apply my cognitive executive functioning in the same way as the average person. But I'm better at knowing myself and applying them in ways that serve me and my goals, the goals that I impose on me, not that are arbitrarily ascribed by the group around me. So I should wind up there because I said I was going to finish and then I kept monologuing and tangenting. But thank you all very much. I hope this was helpful today. And if you have any questions, please uh pop them into Instagram, send us an email, um make a comment on your streaming platforms. We really do appreciate it. Um, and if you have a chance again, please like, follow, subscribe our social media and on your streaming platforms. It really helps us get the word out there. Thank you very much, and we are different, not defective. I'll see you next time.