How Intersectionality Changed the Way I Understand Executive Function

Cover art from Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, found through a public online image search. Its hallucinatory colors and fluid shapes feel aligned with the kind of empathy that grows when we make space for complexity and difference.

Over the years, I've something in many of my clients: a tendency to blame themselves when executive function feels difficult—assuming it’s just a personal flaw, a lack of discipline, or something they “should” be able to fix. What often gets overlooked is context: the ways identity, environment, and lived experience shape what shows up as EF challenges.

I used to think of executive function mostly as a set of cognitive skills to be strengthened. Now, I see it as something inseparable from context—shaped by history, by social pressures, and by the quiet calculations someone makes every day to stay safe and be seen. Executive function, as I understand it now, isn’t just how someone manages time or tasks. It’s how someone has learned to manage themselves in the world they live in.

Why This Matters

Executive function is usually framed as a matter of discipline or strategy. But when someone’s nervous system is persistently tracking for cues—Is this safe? How am I being read? What will this cost me?—their EF isn’t simply “overloaded.” It’s being rerouted toward survival.

Some clients can name this outright. Others have never considered that the chronic monitoring they do is anything but “how everyone lives.” Either way, the toll accumulates quietly. Chronic vigilance doesn’t announce itself. It simply narrows the available bandwidth for memory, focus, and flexibility.

This is why understanding intersectionality is not a political exercise—it’s practical, and essential for supporting my clients’ wellbeing and self-compassion.

Setting the Context

Bronfenbrenner described people as shaped by the systems they move through. People aren’t just navigating tasks or time—they’re navigating layers of context: family, peers, culture, institutions, and societal systems. Each layer quietly shapes what feels safe, possible, or acceptable, and that in turn affects how attention, planning, and memory show up. The world many of my clients inhabit—racialized, gender-policed, economically unstable—requires the sort of constant adjustment that rarely gets named as labor.

To survive those systems, the nervous system does exactly what it’s designed to do: it prioritizes threat detection over reflection. It shifts resources toward endurance and away from deliberate thinking. Executive function doesn’t disappear, but it becomes inconsistent—something that can only emerge in the gaps between stressors.

Two dynamics show up repeatedly:

• A chronically activated nervous system makes access to the prefrontal cortex unreliable (learn more through Porges' polyvagal work here).

• Chronic stress makes ordinary tasks disproportionately effortful (Woo et al, 2021).

1. Survival Mode and the Prefrontal Cortex

Threat, for many of my clients, isn’t theoretical. It’s a daily, low-level hum—being misread, overcorrected, underestimated, or made responsible for other people’s comfort. Their amygdala responds before they consciously do. And in that moment, the brain reallocates resources: first safety, then everything else.

Hypervigilance becomes a sort of involuntary apprenticeship. People learn to read tone, microexpressions, and power dynamics with an acuity that borders on art. But it comes at a cost. The very skills that keep someone safe slowly drain the cognitive fuel required for planning, remembering, and starting.

This isn’t “overreacting.” It’s adaptive. It’s the brain doing exactly what it learned it must do to stay intact in a world where their full self is not always welcome.

2. Running on Empty: Masking and Code-Switching

Once safety is assessed, another layer of work begins. Masking. Modulating voice. Changing posture. Adjusting language. Holding back emotion. Compartmentalizing pain until later—often much later.

It takes a ton of energy to do all of this day in and day out. And the more identities to navigate, the more complex the pressure to perform becomes.

Minority stress research captures this well: stress doesn’t sum; it compounds. For someone who is neurodivergent, BIPOC, and/or LGBTQIA+, the brain is often working overtime to protect, soothe, and anticipate. What looks like “executive dysfunction” is frequently the residue of that protective labor.

I’ve watched clients who are brilliant, self-aware, and exceptionally capable lose their working memory the second they walk into a stressful situation. Not because they lack skill—but because the nervous system pulls them back into management mode.

Bringing It Together

Over the years, I’ve come to see executive dysfunction not as a personal failing, not as evidence of disorganization or laziness, but as the natural outcome of living in a body that has to do more work just to feel okay.

This shifts my approach to coaching. I’m not here to help people optimize their productivity as much as I’m here to help them reclaim access—to moments of ease, to supportive structures, to strategies that align with how their brain actually works.

We work with the nervous system, not against it. Some days that means breaking tasks into gentler steps. Other days it means acknowledging that the work is impossible without first restoring a sense of safety. All of it is grounded in the understanding that executive function cannot flourish in survival mode.

When clients begin to see this, something softens. They realize their struggles make sense. And for many, that recognition alone is its own form of regulation.

Takeaways

• Survival mode makes higher-order thinking inconsistent.

• Hypervigilance and masking consume enormous cognitive energy.

• What looks like EF “weakness” is often the cost of protection.

• Restoring executive function begins with restoring safety.

• Affirming environments aren’t optional—they’re liberatory.

Reflection Questions

• When has your attention, memory, or planning felt harder than usual? What was happening around you (or in the world) at the time?

• How can you tell the difference between an EF skill you’re still building and a moment when your energy or context is limiting you?

• What might change if you viewed your EF challenges as shaped by your environment and identity, rather than by personal flaw?

Recommended Reading

• Parenting at the Intersections by Jaya Ramesh and Priya Saaral

• Our Polyvagal World by Stephen Porges and Seth Porges

• Teaching When the World Is on Fire by Lisa Delpit

• Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devon Price