Is executive dysfunction stopping you from reaching the finale?

After years of wondering why I leave things I'm enjoying halfway through I finally stumbled upon an answer.

I noted with interest this week that the Catalan landmark, “Sagrada Familia”, is finally due to be completed sometime in 2026 one hundred and forty-two years after work began.

I don’t imagine Gaudi envisaged it taking as long as it has, although I have wondered whether the intricacy of his design was an unconscious way of ensuring that the project never reached its end and, if so, it's a desire I can really get on board with.

Researching Executive dysfunction for a completely unrelated piece of work, I found myself on Reddit where, it never ceases to amaze me, you can find someone like-minded however odd you are, and I stumbled upon an explanation for something that's been bugging me for a long time.

I recently started watching “The Dry” on TV which is a comedy-drama about an alcoholic trying to stay sober when she moves back home to Dublin. It’s excellent.

I watched five episodes back to back, and I am not a binge-watcher.

A day later I had stopped watching and lost all interest in it completely, before reaching the end of season one. It’s unlikely I’ll ever go back.

This sudden loss of interest in TV, film and a myriad other projects that lie littered across my haphazard life has become a distinct theme, so when I find others in an Autism subreddit on Executive dysfunction, exchanging their tales of half-finished entertainments, I begin to feel less alone.

When I have thought about Executive dysfunction I tend mostly to consider it in terms of resistance to professional tasks or administrative stuff that others expect us to do. It seems the rebellion can also be aimed inward.

Executive dysfunction makes for a half-finished existence full of baffling habits that are frustrating and often embarrassing.

Take the weather forecast.

If the weather report begins I think to myself, “Great, here’s the weather. Can I put the washing out?” Two minutes later, when it's over, I won't have listened to any of it but instead spent time wondering why those clouds over there look like a nuclear explosion and deciding whether it's worth taking a picture of it.

Later, I'm listening to an interview with Professor Alice Roberts whom I’ve been enjoying watching this week on “Digging For Britain”, until Wednesday when I lost interest.

As she’s speaking about how my grandmother (to the power of x) was a fish I get caught on the word "clavicle" and begin to wonder about its etymology. Is it related to the musical term "clave"? Did it give seed to the early keyboard instrument "clavichord"? It turns out that it comes from the Latin "clavicula" which means "small key" as a description of its shape, and if my grandmother was a fish, how come I can't swim?

By the time I returned to the fascinating interview with Professor Roberts, she'd finished and a newsreader was talking about the resignation of the Taoiseach.

When I started to get into the bones of Executive dysfunction my strange TV-related behaviour began to make sense.

Attention regulation makes sustained concentration difficult, even when something is hugely enjoyable.

I once watched the excellent serialisation of “Parades End” with Benedict Cumberbatch right up until the final episode where I abruptly stopped. Some years later, having often wondered how it ended, I had to buy the final episode from iTunes. I’ve never watched it.

Impulse control makes it hard to resist an urge to stop watching, which has become a self-fulfilling prophecy due to my certain knowledge that I will want to stop and my consequential inability to resist it which grows stronger the more I try to push it away.

Sequential processing difficulty means that maintaining focus on storyline and character development can begin to feel overwhelming to the extent that I just want it to be finished and, if that doesn’t get me, my need for predictability and routine will cause me to find out the ending so that I don’t have to watch it anymore anyway.

This need to know the outcome as a way of easing anxiety is like an overblown version of “Does the dog die?” which I know many other people experience too.

If anything on TV has an animal in it I need categorical assurance that it will come to no harm. This includes cartoon characters and animals that are not featured in the production but only referenced in the dialogue.

When I took my then very young daughter to see “Finding Nemo” at the cinema we held one another's hand for support when Nemo became separated from his father. These days, we’d make sure we knew how things concluded before buying a ticket and therefore be able to watch in relative calm. In other words, we probably wouldn't bother.

This is, I have just realised, probably why I can watch anything based on real-life events or on a book that I have read. There was no jeopardy in Titanic, wondering if the boat would stay afloat, and "One Day" would have broken me had I not read the book years ago, although I'm still three episodes from the end so we both know how that's going to turn out.

The final aspect of Executive dysfunction that plays a part in this particular oddness is time management.

Although Executive dysfunction often causes inaccurate assessment of the time required for a task leading to missed deadlines or unwanted stress, the way it plays out related to me and TV shows is that even if someone tells me something is great I’ll need to know how long it is to work out whether it's even worth me getting started.

My daughter has been telling me for years to watch “The Big Bang Theory” but clocking in at a total of 5 days, 19 hours and 30 minutes means that, for someone who can maintain interest for a maximum of an hour at a time and is assured to abandon something hugely enjoyable after approximately two days, I am unlikely to have enough life left to make a worthwhile attempt at completing it.

In one piece I read there was a suggestion that if executive dysfunction is having a material impact on your life you ought to seek the advice of a therapist which was exactly the sort of “physician heal thyself” bullshit I could do without.

Back in Barcelona, the last time I was there, I remember an enjoyable visit to the Sagrada Familia and, inevitably, overhearing a wise guy saying to his partner, “It will be nice when it's finished”.

I feel that way about most of the TV series I watch, the front gate that has been off its hinges for the past five years, the countless notebooks I’m halfway through before starting a new one, the vegetable garden around August when the thrill of my precious seedlings has worn off and they're left largely to their own devices, and the embarrassing number of gigs I’ve bought tickets to and never attended, but maybe I’ll get the hang of it all eventually.

I’m going to give myself until 2026. At least.

This week on “Sideways” we’re discussing the problem of losing focus. Martin chooses the railway station he’d most like to be named after, and I feel grateful for his DIY advice.

That’s all this week. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you.

Until next time.