You know what you need to do. You could explain it to a friend in thirty seconds. And still, the email sits unanswered, the form stays half-filled, and the first sentence of the paper never gets written.
For me, it has always been text messages and emails. When they pile up, I feel overwhelmed and I avoid them. As days pass, the avoidance turns into anxiety, guilt, and shame, because the people I care about aren’t hearing back from me in a reasonable amount of time. Then the shame fuels more avoidance. It is a loop I know intimately, and one I suspect many of you know too.
That gap between knowing and doing is where I live and work. This newsletter is about that gap: what is happening in the brain, why so many of the systems around us make it wider, and how to build a life that helps close it.
Who I am
I’m Jennifer Lauren, a developmental researcher and executive function specialist. I have always recognized executive dysfunction in others, and it is what drew me to graduate school. I kept noticing how closely executive dysfunction tracked with other mental health struggles, and three questions followed me: What are the neurobiological underpinnings of executive function (EF) development? What biological and contextual factors impact EF development across the lifespan? And what can we do about executive dysfunction?
I didn’t study this from the outside. Large projects were always hard for me to start. They felt enormous, I wasn’t sure where to begin, and so I avoided them until a hard deadline forced my stress response into gear. Over time, I became reliant on adrenaline to focus and get work done. I later learned that in brains like mine, the reward and motivation system works differently, which helped explain why the usual motivation never seemed to show up for me. (Full disclosure: I still get the most done on adrenaline rather than the dopamine-friendly strategies I teach. But it is enormously better than it used to be.)
For decades, no one saw any of this, including me. I was skilled at perception management, so from the outside my life didn’t look painful. On the inside, I carried a persistent sense of otherness and inferiority. I believed that if people truly got to know me, they would stop seeing me as smart and capable. I was certain I was fooling everyone. The stories I told myself were familiar ones: I was lazy, I didn’t try hard enough, maybe I was even fake.
None of those stories were true. I’m a late-identified neurodivergent woman, and finally getting answers was profoundly cathartic. I understood, for the first time, why life had felt so hard. My struggles were never character failings. I was a neurodivergent little girl navigating her world the best she could. That realization changed my life, and how I show up in my work and in my relationships.
The funny part? When I shared this with the people who know me best, not one of them was surprised. Their collective response was some version of, “Yeah. No kidding. We know.” That was its own kind of validation.
A word about masking
I am very good at masking, and it has come at a significant cognitive cost. Masking requires constant hypervigilance, and I have spent years unlearning that vigilance so I can set it down in places where it isn’t needed.
Still, I don’t think masking is inherently bad. Plenty of people mask, not just those of us who are neurospicy. Masking gets a bad reputation because it can look disingenuous. The mask I wear at work is something different: it is the deliberate effort to slow down, stay present, notice, listen, and truly hear the person in front of me. None of that comes naturally to me. It also keeps the focus where it belongs, on my clients, so there is room for them to show up honestly. What matters is choosing when, where, and with whom the mask comes off, and building relationships and spaces where it isn’t needed at all. Those spaces give back an enormous amount of bandwidth.
Why “The Surrogate Frontal Lobe”
Long before I understood my own brain, one of my coping strategies was overfunctioning. I built systems and collected every tip, trick, and workaround I could find so I could get through graduate school, be a good partner and parent, run a household, and run several businesses.
Over years of working with people across the lifespan, I started using the phrase “surrogate frontal lobe” with parents of children with executive dysfunction. It always landed, because that is exactly what those parents feel like. It helped them feel seen (and it usually got a laugh).
Much of my work with parents involves helping them step back and stop functioning as their child’s surrogate frontal lobe, so their child, whether in early childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, has room to build those skills. But I have learned that you can’t simply remove the scaffolding without replacing it with something. So when a parent or partner steps back, I step in. I build scaffolding only where a person’s functioning is weaker. Then I help them identify their strengths and use those strengths to navigate the harder areas.
That strengths-based approach helps people rebuild their identity, not around brokenness, otherness, or pathology, but around their strengths, gifts, and talents. It is also where my slogan came from: Borrow mine while I help you build yours.
What you’ll find here
Read the Research With Me. I walk through studies in plain language, including what they don’t show. Much of the popular advice about the brain rests on weak or outdated evidence, and you deserve to know the difference.
The Executive Function of Institutions. Universities, healthcare systems, and workplaces quietly hand their organizational work to individuals: the portals, deadlines, forms, and follow-up calls. For people with the least executive function to spare, that hidden load is often the real barrier.
Be Your Own Scientist. Practical ways to test what works for your brain. Research tells us what works on average; careful self-tracking tells you what works for you.
This isn’t therapy or medical advice. I’m an executive function specialist, not a clinician, and nothing here replaces care from your own clinical team. When I make a claim about the research, I will cite it, and when the evidence is thin or contested, I will say so.
Why I’m writing this for you
If you’ve found your way here, I want you to feel seen first. Then I want to gently challenge the story you’ve built about yourself. When you understand the neuroscience behind your struggles, you can let go of the belief that they reflect a moral or character failing. They reflect how your brain is wired.
And then I want you to feel empowered, because once you understand your brain, you can learn to operate it. Together, we’ll identify your strengths and how to put them to work in the parts of life that feel harder.
You are not broken. Let’s write the user manual for your brain.
If something here resonates, I hope you’ll subscribe, and you’re always welcome to reply with what you’d like me to explore next.