Executive FUnction & Sensory Profiles

---

 Executive function is the set of cognitive processes that give you the ability to self-manage and self-regulate. There are twelve Executive Skills (EF) that neuroscientists have located in specific brain regions-primarily the frontal lobe. These skills help you to decide what information to focus on and what you shouldn’t. They help you to manage emotions and behavior, modify actions and adjust your responses as you move from one activity or issue to the next. 

We all have executive functioning strengths and challenges that affect attention, learning, work, and relationships. However, for the neurodivergent, particularly Autism and ADHD, EF challenges are more severe and more numerous than for those without it. 

The seven major types of self-regulation associated with executive functioning are as follows:

1. Self-Awareness: Having control of where you direct your attention
2. Self-Restraint: Being able to stop yourself when appropriate
3. Non-Verbal Working Memory: Holding things in your mind that help you guide your behavior
4. Verbal  Working Memory: Internal speech that allows you to guide your behavior
5. Emotional: Using words and images along with self-awareness to change how you feel  about things as you learn or experience them
6. Self-Motivation: Motivating yourself to do things when no outside consequences exist
7. Planning and Problem Solving: finding new approaches and solutions that we are able to apply

Understanding how we are pre-disposed to process information, make decisions and react to situations allows us to leverage our strengths and find resources for those skills we are weaker in. 

The Valiant method provides a comprehensive Executive Function assessment, and recommendations to help anyone live their best life!

Click the button above to learn more and schedule your profile.

Our bodies and brains use specialized systems to register all the different sensory information in our environment and piece it together to build a complete picture of: what is going on around us, with our bodies, within our bodies, where we are, and what time of day it is. Sensory processing shapes our experiences in the world and impacts our feelings.

Touch, sight, sound, movement, body position, smell, taste, internal sensation. Each of these senses comes together to build your conscious reality. 

This brain-body process is taking place every second of every day and through the attention, it pays to external and internal information we form our perception of the world, our lived conscious experienced. 

How we sense, experience, and feel the world is critical to safety and helps us move our bodies, complete tasks, make friends, and fall in love. Making sense of sensation is what makes us successful.

The Eight Sensory Systems

Most people are surprised to find out that we have eight sensory systems rather than five. Each of the eight sensory systems contributes to our sense of safety, to mastery of our own body, and the how we act on our senses.

The five basic sensory systems:

1. Visual

2. Auditory

3. Smell (Olfactory system)

4. Taste (Gustatory system)

5. Touch (Tactile system)

The three less known sensory systems:

6. Vestibular system (sense of head movement in space)

7. Proprioceptive system (sense of balance -the sensations from the muscles and joints of the body)

8. Interoception (sensations related to inside the body-i.e., full bladder, hunger)

Understanding our sensory systems and how we use them to self-regulate helps identify what supports are alerting, calming, and triggering so that we can create strategies for each when we need them.

The Valiant method provides a comprehensive sensory assessment, recommendations and a plan to help you or your loved one live their best life!

Click the button above to learn more and schedule your profile.