 It's not a very good first impression. For a channel that's all about autism and mental health, I seem to get this... God damn it. Looks like I'm going spiky. Autism has a lot of positives. You've got that attention to detail. You've got that extreme passion and concentration. You've got that sticking to routines. You've got all sorts of lovely stuff that make being autistic cool, but all powers come with weakness and today I'm here to talk about one of those weaknesses and that is executive dysfunction. Yes, it's a very flamboyant and scientific-sounding word. Why is executive functioning so difficult for autistic people and what can you do to improve that executive functioning? Executive dysfunction is one of those common things that just seems to pop up in most autistic individuals, or at least that's what I found talking to people on Instagram and Twitter and all sorts of those social media sites. Seems that executive dysfunction is rampant in the autistic community, but why and what is it? Executive functioning is basically your ability to organise, place importance on, manage your life, the different many little niggly things that you have to do in order to maintain a healthy life and maintain a clean life. Think of executive functioning as the centre of your brain, the thing that pulls your life together, like an executive board, like a meeting board, where all the businessmen in the little suits and ties get together and talk about different areas of the company. In a neurotypical brain, this executive function is considered to be normal, you know, I'm going to say it, considered to be normal and normal does not mean good or bad. They have a handle on the sort of little intricacies of that day. Everyone's a little bit different, some people are good at things and some people are more organised than other people and all that kind of stuff. All these little areas of the company work together to form a functioning healthy system. Some of the things that you can expect from an executive dysfunction is difficulties with hygiene, food preparation, hydration, cleaning, exercise, washing up the dishes, sleep, studying and education. For some reason, as autistic we find that imperatively, not the right word, extraordinarily different, difficult, god damn it. When you're autistic, your executive board is a little bit more focused on specific things like, for example, your special interests. Those special interests, for a lot of us, considering most autistic people have either some sort of traumatic experience at school or in childhood and also tend to have a lot of mental health problems, that makes special interests a really big grounding thing for us. It relaxes us, it entertains us, we're excited to do it, we're excited to learn about it and because of that sometimes we can neglect other areas in our life. Now you may be thinking, as I probably am editing this video, why is he rattling so much about boards and executives and companies and stuff? Well I know it's a little bit tedious but I think it's a good metaphor. On my journey to personal development, I've literally gone through the entire list of negative traits related to an autism diagnosis that I had and tried to improve on them. So I went to my socialising, I went to my ability to form relationships. But one of the things that I have been neglecting for a long time is executive functioning. I am absolutely terrible, that's the short answer. I'm absolutely terrible at my executive functioning. I really struggle to get a solid brushing my teeth schedule, I struggle to make food for myself. I do struggle in those areas and it's something that over the year or so I've been trying to work on. Hygiene was the first thing that improved. When I went through a bad breakup I sort of looked at myself and realised just how disgusting I was. So I started showering more often and I started doing my hair up which has obviously gone to hell. Now we're in isolation. There's been times during lockdown where I've decided to work on for example washing my clothes and I've managed to develop a good schedule around washing my clothes and getting them dried and hanging them up, taking out the recycling, taking out the rubbish. I still haven't got to the bottom of the cleaning. One of the difficulties of it is I find that I'm very good when I have one task that is extremely hard and it's something that I have to work on a lot and for long hours. I'm great at doing that. I'm brilliant at doing that. I don't have the documentary like any sort of video or podcast that I do. It's all the many little things that I have to maintain constantly in my environment. I'm sure you can agree that the thought of having a list full of small little things even if they only take a minute or something. It's just so much harder to get through them. It's trying to manage all of those things and organise them and a lot of time for it and know how much time things are going to take you. I'm working myself up just talking about it. So let's get into how we can deal with it. Can you improve your executive functioning? Short answer, yes, but it's going to be really hard. So I've got four or five little points that you can use, just some sort of psychological trick that you can use. I'm not going to say tricks because the idea of tips and tricks videos just makes me want to regurgitate. I don't want to watch those videos. The boring. I'm going to give you three pointers that you can use. Do not get loads of things and say, right, I'm going to work on my executive functioning and do and do everything that you're supposed to do and do and maintains everything all the time. Because if you do that, you're going to overload yourself. You're going to be mega stressed. So it's important to choose one or two things to work on. And also, you know, if you're going to start making your own food, start small. Start with using a microwave. Start with using a toaster and then move up to using, I don't know, like an oven and then move up to using a pan and making your own stuff. For example, one thing that I'm trying to do lately, which I failed at today, is making avocados on toast. It's relatively healthy, maybe not the toast aspect, but the avocado aspect and there is a partial amount of preparation that I need to do for it. But having that one thing to focus on helps you incorporate it into your routine easier. Number two, incorporate things into your routine. Slowly, of course, I've been doing my washing while I've been working on my media stuff. I use the washer as like a timer. I'll set it on and use the washes for about two and a half minutes. And I use that as a signal to have a break because I will just go the entire day working and I'll burn myself out. This doesn't have to be specifically to do with washing up, but it's just an example that I've used. And maybe there are some other areas of your life that you can do the same with. Tip number three is tying something that you're interested in with something that's productive and with something that's mandatory, one of those aggressive functional things that you need to do. One of the ways that I do it is I start off with something that I like and I do something that's mildly productive, but doesn't require much attention. So, for example, the thing that I'd be interested in is playing RuneScape, you know, doing a bit of woodcutting, fishing for some lobsters with a cage, you know, all that exciting stuff. I have started to listen to an audiobook while I'm doing it. So it's got me used to and I quite enjoy listening to audiobooks. So now if I want to do some washing up, I stuck on an audiobook, a wash-up, and I'll, you know, I'll get something out of it because I'll be interested in the book. Another thing that you can do is use, you know, I could listen to an audiobook while I'm exercising just to get me out of the house to do a run. By tying it with things that are productive and only doing it with things that are productive is a good way to incentivise you to do it. Another thing that I've been doing is I've been watching a short educational video while I'm brushing my teeth in the morning. That's a good way to get into brushing my teeth because I find it absolutely horrific. I don't like the feel of it. And if I don't have something to distract me while I'm doing it, it's going to be very hard to get myself to do it. The last point is give yourself a reward. Give yourself something positive. Being able to focus on being healthy in the long run with a little bit of a treat now and again, just to keep going. It's going to be better. And you can even get people around you, like your family or your partner to incentivise you doing stuff. They might even want to help you out, learn new skills and do something together. It might be a more of a social thing, you know? You've got to tie things in to make it more appealing to do. Or else your dopamine system is going to be like, hell, no, I'm not doing this. I'm going to go play RuneScape in my room all day. OK, so in conclusion, the bottom line, improving your executive function is always going to be difficult. It's going to be a long, slow process that you're going to have to work on constantly for a long period of time. You've got to ease yourself into it or else you're just going to give up. That's the bottom line, or at least it's going to throw your life into chaos and get rid of all your routines and stuff. There are a lot of benefits to, you know, having good executive function. You'll feel more independent. You'll feel more self confident. You'll have a healthier mind because you'll be eating right. You know, if you get some exercise in there, do a bit of education, you know, feed the brain, all that kind of stuff. And you fancy having a girlfriend or a boyfriend. It's attractive being able to take care of yourself. And it's something that I've been lacking in. And I'm sure many of you out there would struggle with. Executive dysfunction. It's hard and there are a lot of negatives to being autistic. And you just got to deal with it and you've got to deal with the cards that you don't just play them very well. Just don't compare your soft over people. So imagine like the autistic brain is like this intricately coded, specific computer that's designed for a certain set of tasks. But it does it so God damn well. So God damn well, that's up. Does all the things it needs to do, shuts down. But you've got to leave some of that processing power for maintenance. You know, you've got to keep those cooling fans on. You've got to do all of the regular tasks. You've got to have, you know, a few apps that let you organise things and structure things out and all that kind of jazz. You know what I mean? It's different. You're different. And that's OK. Thank you very much for watching. Yes, the t-shirt is coming out once again. The Asperger's Grave Merchant that I sort of store is available now. It's pretty cool. It's down in the description if you want to check out the link. This is my favourite t-shirt so far, but we've also got three others, including one that has both the back and the front. This one's just one sided. We also have some mugs and some bags and some stickers that you can order. I'm not expecting many sales. And to be honest, I'm just doing it for you guys, just in case you want to have some Asperger's Grave stuff, have some things that to do with me. Why would you want that? But it's pretty cool anyway to get a t-shirt. Of course, I will be trying to upload on a better schedule. You can expect videos at least once a week. Still waiting to hear back from the National Diversity Awards, but I'm hopeful and there's a lot of good stuff happening, guys. Like, at some point, we're going to break into the mainstream. At some point, we're going to have an impact on things. I'm going to try and bring as many of the autistic advocates on the Instagram community and on YouTube with me to try and make a change in our society, try and improve the mental health services available for all you lovely people. Try and integrate children more at a younger age so that we don't have all this bullying and social isolation and all those horrible experiences that are so common to autistic people. You know, if you want to follow my journey, you know, you can find me on pretty much all social media, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All Asperger's Grave. So if you fancy looking a bit more behind the scenes and stuff, then consider giving me a follow. Absolutely awful out there now. And I have promised myself that I'm going for a run. So I promise you that I'm going for a run because that seems to hold more of a weighting in my mind. So I'm just using you to go for a run, basically. Stay cool, stay fresh, hydrate yourself, hashtag hydrate the aspies. And I'll see you in the next video on the Asperger's Grave channel. But on the same way, bye. Don't know why I have to sneak my name in there. You know who I am. I'm the man.