Your Brain’s CEO
Imagine for a moment a busy day at work. Emails and direct messages are flying across the screen while a colleague chatters away about frustrations with a client. Suddenly, your phone vibrates with a message from school. Your child is sick and needs to be taken home. In this familiar scenario, there are multiple forces demanding attention. Some are loaded with emotion, some need to be dismissed or prioritized. What happens next, and how someone balances a typical day of multi-tasking, requires executive functioning every step of the way.
Cognitive flexibility is a large part of our executive functioning skill set. This is essentially the power to swivel between tasks, focus attention on one and selectively redirect attention as needed to another. This helps us with planning, problem solving and time management. From an emotional intelligence standpoint, cognitive flexibility helps us to consider different perspectives, which is the main driver behind empathy.
Our frontal lobe also allows us to navigate daily activities with control and awareness. It supports our working memory, which assimilates new information into what we already know and understand. Inhibition control is another executive function that helps us to manage our responses and suppress emotionally driven behavior. If we think of the emotional load in our scenario: a coworker sharing their problems, a child in need, several digital pings at once, it’s clear there are a host of responses to manage and stabilize. Small children, particularly between the ages of 3 and 5, are still experiencing massive growth in their frontal lobe. New information and new feelings may be both confusing and overwhelming for them and they may act out with impulsivity. Weakened executive functions may also manifest in disorders like ADHD, autism and dementia.
As we age, several reflexes must emerge and integrate to establish the foundation for the highest level of executive functioning. The integration of reflexes like STNR play a role in modulating our nervous system to perform these key functions. By applying RMTi exercises targeting blood flow to our frontal lobe, we’re helping to support those executive functions that drive successful relationships at school, at work and in our daily lives.
