Executive Funtion: assessing, prioritizing, assigning mental functions, tracking multiple activities, reflecting

These are all characteristics that a good executive performs daily. They are also the tasks that emanate from your brain’s prefrontal cortex. This region of your brain is the one that sustains the most damage from prolonged periods of stress.

In our fast-paced daily lives, as we multitask throughout the day, we are running on adrenaline. Our bodies were never designed to constantly pump adrenaline. It is the product resulting from that “fight or flight” syndrome and is helpful in protecting us from danger. Prolonged production of adrenaline leads to physical damage.

To limit sustained harm to your brain’s executive functioning, you need to find ways to lessen daily stress that can result from multitasking. Even though you think you are very capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously, the truth is that you cannot do it. It may feel that you are performing activities together, but reality is that you do one, closely followed by another, rather than simultaneously. When you have varied activities vying for attention, you create a mental traffic jam in that prefrontal area, forcing them to line up and jockey for position.

To counter this need for multitasking:

• Write down everything so that you are not storing extra information that you don’t need right now. Short-term memory has a limited number of slots.
• Work on grouping similar activities together, such as making all of your phone calls in one block, then shifting to email, then filing papers, instead of bouncing back and forth among the different types of work.
• Set up a block of time each day (one or more hours) where you limit phone and email interruptions and focus on just the more detailed work you have.

If you must multitask:

• Don’t try to learn something new. It makes the brain switch activity regions from memory building to short-term habit-making.
• Do things where mistakes are not important.
• Make at least one of the two things something you do all the time.