Developing Executive Functioning Skills to Combat Anxiety

Have you ever been overwhelmed with tasks to the point that you feel paralyzed? When things stack up and all you need is to engage fully, do you find yourself feeling stuck? Chances are, you’ve experienced this at some point in your life.

At TGLearn, we witness this phenomenon frequently as we work with students, especially those with executive function weaknesses (executive function refers to the skills needed for an individual to plan, monitor, and successfully execute their goals). And when these feelings of anxiety and paralysis occur, they often lead to procrastination which causes tasks to stack up even more–a vicious cycle.

So how do we help students break this vicious cycle? How do we coach them through these overwhelming times so they can move forward toward their academic goals? Below you’ll find a few tried and true strategies we use to help students manage the ever-evolving demands of school, work, and life in a balanced and effective way.

Use a Visual Planner

Students often feel overwhelmed or paralyzed when they perceive that they don’t have enough time to get everything done. This is why we always advise our students to use an agenda where they can write out and visualize their weekly schedule, assignments, and due dates and allot specific blocks of time for each task.

It’s amazing to see how simply putting these elements on paper immediately eases anxiety– not only can the student visually see that there is enough time to get everything done, there is also now a designated time for each task.

The angst of having too much to do and too little time is mitigated and the student is left with doable action items and a specific schedule to complete them. Check out our FASE It! Planner which we developed specifically for students struggling with executive functioning skills.

Shop the FASE It! Planner

Identify priorities

Chances are, not everything on a to-do list needs to be done immediately. We help students think critically about the tasks on their list and to identify those that are the highest priority.

How? We do this by asking two simple questions: Is it important? Is it urgent?

By asking these questions, students practice determining the importance and urgency of tasks. For example, a project worth 20% of a student’s grade is more important than a homework assignment worth 2%. A paper due tomorrow is more urgent than a project due next week.

The ability to prioritize is a key executive function skill that will remain important throughout the course of a student’s adult life. By correctly assessing priorities, students obtain a clearer direction of how to spend their time in the present by focusing on those tasks that are both urgent and important first.

Focus on one task at a time

In many cases, students feel overwhelmed because they are trying to do too many things at once. In these cases, we encourage students to set aside time to focus on one task, cross it off their list, and then methodically move to the next task. We may even suggest they set a timer based on the anticipated time a task will take, and focus only on that item until the timer is up.

We’ve found that when students employ this strategy, they are often more focused and more efficient—tasks they thought would “take forever” weren’t actually that bad. By practicing the skill of focusing on one task at a time, while resisting the temptation to follow other impulses, students build two other key executive function skills: sustained attention and impulse inhibition.

Break Down Overwhelming Tasks and Set Your Own Deadlines

Especially in college, students are often assigned a project, given a rubric, and expected to work on it over the course of the semester. This self-directed task can be extremely difficult for students with executive function deficits for a number of reasons.

For example, a student may put off this assignment simply because they don’t know how to approach it, what steps to take or where to begin. If this is the case, we help the student break down large, overwhelming assignments into smaller, more manageable steps.

Consider a research paper. A student may visualize only two steps: 1) write the paper and 2) turn it in. However, “writing the paper” is quite ambiguous and slightly overwhelming—two qualities that make it a prime target for procrastination.

We help students see that writing a research paper requires a series of smaller, more manageable steps—identifying a topic, formulating an opinion, developing an outline, finding several sources, etc.

By identifying these steps and setting a timeframe for the completion of each, the student is empowered to focus on completing just one doable step at a time, rather than attempting to conquer the whole paper in one sitting.

These are just three of many strategies to combat academic anxiety and procrastination. Check back later as our next blog will cover additional strategies!

By: Courtney Price, Intern