Executive Functioning and Emotional Regulation

Most of our Participants have at some point in their lives been told that they lacked common sense. That term, common sense, has been used as a weapon, as in, “Why don’t you just use your common sense?!” While I don’t dispute that there are somethings that we might be able to consider “common sense”, my experience tells me that not only is it not useful, it also takes away the agency of the person who is struggling to navigate the world. Let’s take a minute to break down what common sense means, what it implies, and why it might not be a useful term to describe what’s going on for our young people. 

First off let’s look at the definitions of common and sense. Common implies that everyone knows it, and sense implies that you are born with it, like sight and touch and taste. Couple problems here. First off we are born as babies with practically no ability to take care of ourselves or to think critically. We are extremely dependent on our caregivers to help us solve problems and get our needs met, all for really great biological and evolutionary reasons. What that means is that everything that we would consider “common sense” is taught and learned and not preprogrammed into us at birth. We rely on our parents, grandparents, extended family, caregivers and teachers to teach our children what they will need to know in order to be successful in adulthood. 

Increasingly we rely on our school systems to do a lot of the heavy lifting of teaching our kids how to navigate the world and be prepared for the modern economy. Problem is schools don’t actually teach life skills. The movement to college-prep as the ultimate goal of secondary education, along with standardized testing, has resulted in our kids being really great at test taking and regurgitation at the expense of creativity and problem solving. In our Executive Functioning group at AIM we go through a list of skills that are necessary to be a functional adult. For example, learning how to personally budget and save, how to rent an apartment, how to buy or lease a car, how to meal plan, grocery shop and cook for ourselves, how to make friends, how to advocate for ourselves at work, how to change a tire, fix a toilet, respond to messages in a timely manner; almost none of which is actually taught in school. A quick test of this is to ask your kid to name the Pythagorean theorem or the order of operations, I would wager they could answer it, then ask them what information they need to have in a car in case they get pulled over and wait for the silence to follow. 

The reality is that all knowledge, like politics, is local, and that what may be common to you might not be common to someone else. Be that in your own country, state, or even town. The reality is that we need to be taught how to do these things, and that calling it common sense instead of recognizing executive functioning for what it is, a set of learned skills, taps right into our shame about ourselves. In order for our Participants to learn these skills, we need to invite them to want to learn them, help them believe in their ability to learn these skills, recognize that failure is a necessary component of learning, and continue to give our Participants opportunities to practice these skills in the real world. 

It has been my experience that right behind almost every executive functioning challenge is an emotional regulation challenge. The parts of our brains that handle executive functioning rely on the other parts of our brain that regulate our emotions. Without being regulated, making even basic decisions can be really hard. Easy example is trying to decided where to eat when you’re already hungry, shouldn’t be hard to choose pizza or burrito, but if we are emotionally compromised or under resourced, then that decision becomes much harder to make. This is a long way of saying that if your loved one has a hard time keeping a calendar, or sticking to a budget, that instead of your first impulse being to give advice or help solve the issue, it might be more effective to get curious about how they are feeling and to ask if they want help or if they just want you to listen. If we can work to validate and help co-regulate our loved ones feelings but just listening and being supportive, we send the message that we trust them to figure it out, and almost as important, we trust them to fail and to learn from it.