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Comment by kosma | Hacker News Reader

Side note: executive functioning is greatly impaired by stress, anxiety, lack of sleep, depression, etc. Those are very common in autistic people (due to lack of support and an unfriendly environment, not because of autism itself), making the symptoms much worse. Being unable to perform the basic planning & tasks causes even more stress & anxiety. It's a vicious cycle. There's still a huge blind spot in the way we approach autism, where we try to address the symptoms without having a critical look at the person's environment.

(I'm autistic myself; and with proper support and environment I have very little executive functioning problems. Without them, I struggle with the most basic planning & tasks.)

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> executive functioning is greatly impaired by stress, anxiety, lack of sleep, depression, etc.

This 1000 times over! Took me ages to realize that once you get "down" enough (either depressive or overwork-burnout or scared-to-death-by-social-anxieties), you can't think and plan right anymore so you just sink lower and lower down a spiral unless you get some outside help, stimuli and feedback.

EF-malfunction is insidiuous because you just don't realize "how broken your mind really is", you just make bad decision after bad decision on all planes of life, health, finance, business, social etc. thinking you're one step away from "finding what works for you".

But you can't successfully find "what works for you" with a broken-EF-brain, because you're mainly randomly sampling the possible space of behaviors and attitudes and your chance to find a 'right' set of such things is practically zero! Most things in the world don't 'work for you' and without planning and discipline you can't navigate your life and mind to what works!

This sounds disturbingly familiar.

You try, but it ends badly repeatedly, sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes suddenly and catastrophically and in public, until the memories of those times plus fears of everyone's second-guessed reactions put you off doing anything; you go so long without succeeding at planning and discipline that even trying seems alien and scary; add the two together and you're well into "learned helplessness" territory.

As you say, sampling the space of behaviours and getting apparently random, mostly negative results back and wondering why your mental map of cause/effect and effort/outcome makes no sense whatsoever.

So... what does one do, when in broken-EF state for so long?

> So... what does one do, when in broken-EF state for so long?

Seek help from other humans. Get medication (because at this point it's usually an untreated depression & anxiety), get therapy, but most importantly: have support in your life, sometimes with the most basic things like cooking, keeping your sleep schedule healthy, cleaning your apartment, job seeking, etc. Removing the biggest stressors (usually related to school, work, family, relationships, etc.) is also essential, and sometimes very hard to accomplish.

And yes, it's easier said than done, especially if you didn't have a good support network to begin with - which is usually the case for both autistic people and people with mental health problems.

I think that generally humans cannot recover from being "in broken-EF state for so long" alone - that's why we invented society, as horrible and oppressive and stressing and annoying as society can be! Get connected to "functional" and "positive" people. Be open and not defensive to any kind of feedback from them - even if the feedback is very negative, treat it as "technical feedback". Change/get a job/relationship. Seek therapy.

Even if the puzzle-solving-logical-thinking can still work with a broken socio-emotional brain, the part of your mind that does planning, execution and motivation/energy for action needs well balanced social and emotional parts aside to work properly.

Oh, and do it fast... one can recover later too, as long as there's a will there's a way etc., but... you never recover that lost time when you could've been productively solving important problems and positively connecting with others!

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