← Thriving Kids
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Thriving Kids podcast from the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families experiencing mental health and learning disorders. I'm your host, Dr. Dave Anderson. This is the second episode in our series on the transition from high school to college. In part one, we focused on why this transition can feel so difficult, even for capable, motivated students. In this episode, you'll hear our clinicians dig into what's happening beneath the surface when students struggle with organization, time management, follow through, and procrastination. We'll talk about executive functioning, why these skills are still developing during the college years, and how stress and avoidance can quietly get in the way of academic success. Understanding these patterns can help students and families respond with more clarity and less frustration. I'll hand it back to my colleagues, Dr. David Friedlander, Dr. Adam Zamora, and Dr. Morgan Eldridge to continue the conversation.
- [00:55]
B
I'd love to kind of dig deeper into what's happening behind the scenes when students are struggling with things like organization, time management, focus, and to start with you, Adam, I know you specialize in executive functioning. Can you help explain to us what executive functioning actually means? Because I know we hear this term a lot and why it's so central to student success in college?
- [01:22]
C
Sure. So executive functioning is a term that's used to describe a whole set of cognitive processes that help us to manage our responsibilities, engage in goal directed behavior, things like task initiation, following through on something from start to finish, planning ahead, organizing and breaking down tasks, thinking flexibly instead of having like a rigid one way of doing things, keeping our impulses in check, keeping all the steps of our tasks in our head so we don't forget about them, monitoring our progress and our work accuracy, regulating our attention and our emotions. These processes all fit under the executive functioning umbrella as students progress through school learning, ideally transitions with brain development. So when you're in early elementary school, a lot of learning is basically just you're taught a concept, you memorize it, you apply it, you're taught a concept, you memorize it, you apply it, and those concepts build upon each other and you have like this nice foundation of tools you can tap into for problem solving. And then when you get to middle school and high school, school starts to tap more into these EF skills, these executive functioning skills. It's a lot about integrating and regulating our thinking processes and applying them in like an effortful way to engage in a task. So students who have executive functioning challenges, it's not so much that they can't do the task, it's that the sustained effort that is required to envision all the steps that are that are needed in order to complete the task, that effortful and applied thinking is harder for somebody with executive functioning challenges. And EF skills are managed by our prefrontal cortex, which is the last part of our brains to fully develop. So when students are going to college, you know, our prefrontal cortex is usually not fully developed until we're about 25. And some people it might be fully developed a little earlier and some people a little later. So you have these young adults who are entering college with a variety of prefrontal cortex development. Some are more comfortable utilizing their skills than others. And certainly if you have something like adhd, for example, that impacts your, your executive functioning skills, that can have an even bigger effect on your success. And by the time you reach college, ultimately, like a lot of success can be supported by intellect, by logic, by reasoning. That's why you got there in the first place. But college success really relies upon our ability to properly prioritize things, manage our time effectively, make use of of all that unstructured time that you have, make decisions and reflect upon them after the fact. Keeping track of what to do when, and sometimes just getting started on something is the hardest part. And once you can get that out of the way, everything else can maybe take place. But it's executive functioning skills are essential, essential for college success.
- [05:04]
B
Thank you. I'm curious, like to talk more about procrastination, right? This universal student struggle. And if I'm being honest, even in a struggle for some of us adults, certainly myself, so what's really going on when students procrastinate? And you know, relatedly, how does executive functioning play into all of that?
- [05:27]
C
So we all procrastinate. Let's get that out of the way. You don't need to have ADHD or any other performance or learning challenge to procrastinate. Everybody does it. But it's important to understand why. And the reason why you might procrastinate or I might procrastinate is going to be different and for different reasons. So when we think about a new assignment or a task, we're reminded of times in the past when we had difficulty completing that assignment or experienced some frustration or were ashamed of a grade that we got on a similar kind of assignment. So then thinking about that task or activity or test leads to more stress or more discomfort, and this brings on an urge to avoid or procrastinate. Just like David was saying earlier, we have a little bit of a visual that kind of outlines this vicious cycle that we can get into when we're engaged with that. So when you procrastinate, you likely experience temporary relief from the discomfort or the anxiety or distress or whatever you want to call it that's associated with an assignment, with a task. Unfortunately, this proves to your brain that that discomfort was justified. Thinking about this task made me uncomfortable, and doing something else made me feel better. So as a result, the next time you think about the task, you're likely to feel even more discomfort. And the cycle begins again and again and again and again. And the more you put it off, the greater that discomfort is and the more likely you're going to procrastinate. So in general, things like feeling unsure about how to start or how long something's going to take, what the likely outcome of your efforts are going to be. Over underestimating the difficulty or the time commitment of something, stressing about how others are going to judge us for the completed product. These are all linked to executive functioning skills. And they're often the root cause of what procrastination actually is. And sometimes all it takes, as I was saying a couple minutes ago, is getting started to feel like that task is less daunting, because then you can begin to visualize the next steps and maybe even the end goal a little better. The more mystique that we can take away from that thing that we're dreading, the less power it has to scare us. And impact, like our clarity of thinking and our confidence to move forward. And the easy, the easier it then becomes to, like, visualize our own success. Success breeds motivation and more success. So we can almost turn this cycle on its head if we move forward, break it, and replace that dread with the assignment for feeling like we've actually made success towards it. And then when we think about that kind of assignment, we think about how well we did the last time we did it, or at least the progress that we made. So an important step towards fighting procrastination is often just recognize that we're doing it in the first place. The more we know ourselves and our motivations and what's underneath our procrastinating, our procrastination, the better we can work towards our goals.