Want to avoid burnout? Just hire an ‘executive function’ coach

In 2022, Sage Quiamno was in her early 30s and a few months into a demanding DEI leadership role at Amazon when she hit a wall. Cycles of feeling overwhelmed, procrastination, and frantic catch-up were routinely stretching her already long workdays past the 12-hour mark. Burnout was on the horizon. She knew she needed to make a change, fast.

Quiamno found the support she needed from a life coach with unconventional tactics. Unlike many coaches, who guide clients toward overarching personal or professional goals, Quiamno’s coach — whom she came to call an “executive function coach” — focused on helping develop skills to better manage her thoughts, actions, and emotions, optimizing her time and energy. Instead of applying an organizational blueprint to her work life, her coach zoomed in on specific pain points like task management and procrastination, helping her build strategies to confront the habits and feelings that were getting in her way. Three years later, Quiamno, who is now 34 and living in Seattle, still meets one-on-one with her coach every other week, in addition to a monthly meeting with a group of other women who are also focused on honing their executive functioning. “This is a long-term investment,” Quiamno tells me.

Executive function is the blanket term for assorted cognitive skills that help with organization, focus, memory, and self-control. It’s the toolkit that lets you plan a multistep project at work and then deliver it on deadline, or navigate conflict with a friend. Harvard researchers have called it the brain’s “air traffic control system.”

Impaired executive function has historically been associated with neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder. That’s beginning to change. In the past few years, growing numbers of parents, teachers, and universities have enlisted executive function specialists to help stressed-out students get things done, regardless of whether those students have a psychiatric diagnosis.

And now, anxious and overworked professionals are turning to the very same coaches to recoup some semblance of control — and a slew of workplace coaching companies, such as BetterUp and WorkSmart, have taken note and started folding “executive function” into their rhetoric. The trend underscores how, in our age of constant digital distractions, our attention spans and time-management skills just aren’t what they used to be. It also points to much larger problems in the way we live and work today.

Executive function coaching was virtually synonymous with ADHD when it entered the fore in the mid-2000s. It quickly showed promise. In a 2009 study published in the journal Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, college students with ADHD or impaired learning received one-on-one coaching for 10 weeks, focusing on building perseverance, motivation, impulse control, and other executive functioning challenges. Afterward, the students reported greater autonomy and goal achievement, reduced anxiety, and stronger self-regulation. It wasn’t until much more recently that executive function coaching went mainstream. Jesse Ruderman, the executive functioning specialist for the University of Denver’s Learning Effectiveness Program, tells me the university hired its first executive function coach in the spring of 2020 to support students who were struggling amid COVID lockdowns. Other higher-ed institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, George Mason University, and Oberlin College, have since implemented similar programs.

COVID lockdowns taxed adults’ executive functioning because they removed the “scaffolding” of workplace environments that helped designate start and end times.

The pandemic was a turning point for workers, too. J. Russell Ramsay, a clinical psychologist who’s a cofounder of the University of Pennsylvania’s Adult ADHD Treatment and Research Program, explains that the COVID lockdowns heavily taxed many adults’ executive functioning because they removed the “scaffolding” of structured workplace environments that helped designate start and end times. Many people who were previously “struggling but getting by” with undiagnosed ADHD suddenly found themselves unable to cope, Ramsay says. The pandemic also exposed executive functioning vulnerabilities in people who might not meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD but “have many of the symptoms.”

Not coincidentally, the pandemic saw a major spike in the number of adults in the US diagnosed with ADHD and being prescribed medications to treat it. A 2024 JAMA study found that between April 2020 and March 2022, nonstimulant ADHD prescriptions jumped by 81% among 20- to 39-year-olds, while Adderall and other stimulants rose by 30%. A separate analysis found that between 2019 and 2023, medical claims for ADHD grew by 101% among 18- to 44-year-olds, 70% among 45- to 64-year-olds, and 60% among adults over 65.

The end of lockdown did not, however, make people’s struggles go away. Since joining the University of Denver as a coach in 2022, Ruderman reports seeing “significant” year-over-year increases in students seeking his help. He met with 391 unique students in the 2023-24 academic year; last year, that number leaped to 727. He attributes at least some of the jump to the TikTokification of mental health — specifically, a widening pool of content creators who focus on neurodiversity — which has made a lot more people familiar with concepts like executive function. Ruderman says he’s had to shorten his appointment time slots to accommodate rising demand.

A sudden expansion of executive functioning support for workers suggests the corporate world has seen a similar pattern. Kate Broeking, an executive-functioning-focused workplace coach in Seattle, says that in just the past year, she’s noticed more employee assistance programs and coaching companies that explicitly address executive functioning. Some employers, such as Workday, Chevron, and WarnerMedia, are even making these services available to their entire staff as a workplace benefit. Broeking has seen an influx of individual clients in her own coaching practice as well.

Why the continued surge in executive dysfunction? The short answer is that modern life is stretching everyone’s mental capacity to the brink. The experts I spoke with point to the endless interruptions and cheap dopamine hits of our digital devices as one obvious culprit. Research suggests that the digital world can warp our perception of time, which would logically affect how well we manage it.

All the while, the increase in ADHD diagnoses has made more people aware of what executive functioning is in the first place. “The term has become quite prevalent,” Ruderman says, noting that people have begun talking about executive dysfunction on TikTok. That prevalence has fed broader self-recognition. “It’s really easy to self-diagnose — to identify that one has perhaps some executive dysfunction,” he adds.

On top of everything else, the pandemic introduced a new age of employment uncertainty that has far from let up. In some key respects, it’s only gotten worse.

Over the past few years, common wisdom about how to achieve success and security has largely flown out the window. Highly educated domain experts, new MBA holders, and freshly minted Ivy League graduates are among the millions of Americans struggling to land jobs, and the country isn’t even in a recession. The tech industry is now in its fourth consecutive year of sweeping layoffs across every level of the corporate hierarchy. Generative AI has destabilized entire white-collar career trajectories, already prompting some employers to reduce head count on the so-far unsubstantiated promise of human-caliber automation. All the while, students and workers face mounting pressure to accomplish more and better with less time and support.

“Humans don’t like uncertainty,” Ramsay says, adding that people with executive functioning challenges tend to like it even less. That’s because living with unpredictable focus and feelings can create a lot of self-doubt, which makes external ambiguity even tougher to tolerate. But a heightened sense of uncertainty can also inhibit executive function, even in those who otherwise thrive under pressure. In an era when an ever-increasing slew of distractors constantly threaten executive functioning in work and school — not to mention side hustles, extracurriculars, caregiving duties, and the basics of being human — this vicious cycle can be catastrophic for people’s well-being.

Burnout costs companies $4,000 to $21,000 per employee each year — a $5 million annual price tag for the average 1,000-employee company.

For employers, poor executive functioning can also be expensive. Chronic stress and feeling overwhelmed are known risk factors for burnout, which drives up sick leave and lowers engagement in workers. New research in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the fallout adds up to $4,000 to $21,000 per employee each year — a $5 million annual price tag for the average 1,000-employee company in the US.

And employee leaves of absence appear to have been on the rise. In a 2024 survey by AbsenceSoft, a leave-of-absence software provider, 57% of HR managers reported increased employee leave requests over the past year — the third year in a row that the majority reported an increase. While most workers cited illness or injury as the reason for their absence, nearly half named mental health challenges. Perhaps relatedly, a May 2025 analysis of Glassdoor postings found that employee discussions of burnout were at their highest since 2016, showing a 32% increase from last year. Many workers seem to be hanging on by a thread.

Although anyone can fall prey to burnout, research suggests workers with ADHD, autism, and other neurodevelopmental disorders may be especially susceptible. Some companies made strides to bridge these gaps in the years leading up to the pandemic, designing targeted well-being programs that could function as reasonable accommodations for employees with relevant ADA-qualifying diagnoses. Broeking, the work coach in Seattle, led the charge in building Amazon’s work wellness coaching program in 2018 before going on to help Microsoft and Google establish similar coaching programs of their own. These interventions were modeled on vocational rehabilitation programs — services designed to help workers with disabilities find and keep jobs — and focused largely on executive function skill-building to boost worker engagement and prevent medical leaves of absence. In larger companies, Broeking worked with as many as 300 employees a year.

Workplace wellness initiatives, however, aren’t a silver bullet. A 2024 article in Harvard Business Review pointed out that while nearly 85% of major US employers offered wellness programs, worker burnout showed no sign of slowing down. Among other reasons, the authors suggest that well-being programs fall short by focusing on individual outcomes instead of the organizational causes often at the root of employees’ distress. Workers want work-life balance and flexibility, clear goals, and consistent metrics for charting progress; research shows that organizations see improved employee health and output when they implement structural changes that better support those needs.

Although personalized executive functioning guidance isn’t a cure-all, workers still stand to benefit from it. “It doesn’t take too much to knock us off track, and executive functioning means knowing how to shield yourself from distractions,” Ramsay says. He’s writing a book in which he recommends that employers provide executive functioning support for all staff, which he argues would be an asset to everyone — not only those with official diagnoses.

Coaching may prove especially handy for navigating the tides of change and uncertainty that now define many workers’ reality.

When Amazon rolled back DEI programming early this year, Quiamno — the former DEI leader and coaching client — found herself back at the drawing board for her professional road map. She knew she couldn’t rely on an employer to steward her career development; she would have to do it herself.

Quiamno, who now runs her own consulting business for women-led startups, credits coaching for helping her build the confidence to move forward. “With a one-on-one coach who knows your strengths and your blind spots, there’s always something new to learn,” she says. “It’s an accountability mechanism — a commitment to myself and my growth as a leader.”

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She’s based in New York City.

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