188: Tips for Balancing Life with ADHD

Motion, Not Balance: A Better Word of the Year for ADHD Brains

Every January, people pick a word for the year, and balance is a popular one. I want to dig into what that word actually means for a fish brain, because I don’t think it means what most people assume.

Balance the noun doesn’t exist, balance the verb might

Balance as a noun, an even, steady distribution where everything feels equal, is unachievable for anyone, fish brain or monkey brain. Nobody lives there. But balancing, the verb, is different. Think of someone on a tightrope. They’re not standing still in perfect equilibrium, they’re constantly correcting, catching themselves as they start to tip one way or the other, all while still moving forward. That’s a much more honest picture of what we’re actually trying to do.

The two ways we fall off the wire

For fish brains, falling to one side means being understimulated, starved for enough dopamine to get moving because there’s no real deadline, urgency, or novelty pulling us forward. Falling to the other side means being hit with so much coming at us that our executive function can’t sort or evaluate any of it, and the overwhelm paralyzes us just as completely. Here’s the strange part: both sides look almost identical from the outside. Whether you’re stuck from too little stimulation or too much, you end up in the same frozen, ostrich-like stillness, unable to move even toward things you genuinely want to do.

If you live with a monkey brain, their well-meaning help usually misses the mark on either side. “Why don’t you just…” suggests an activity to get you moving, or “make a list and prioritize” hands you the exact executive-function task that’s the actual struggle, not the solution. It’s handing a fish a tree and saying start climbing.

Where I’ve been lately

The past couple of weeks I fell off on the overwhelm side, and it was good stuff causing it: new membership activities starting, new and existing clients needing things, family matters happening at the same time. I found myself ostriching and knew it, but couldn’t figure out how to step back out of it. This very podcast episode is actually how I did it. Podcasting has become my easy, reliable foothold. Behind the scenes I’m also working with an online business manager to build out processes I need, purposely hiring in monkey-style support for the monkey-shaped parts of running a business, because I need that scaffolding to move forward. But from the outside, all anyone sees is that I disappeared for a while, and I hate that.

If you’ve fallen off on the overwhelm side

Find anything you’d consider the easy thing, something that gets your foot back on the wire, and do that first. This ties into the Y planning framework I introduced a couple episodes back: the W stands for doing something you want to do. Motion is the antidote to paralysis, and it doesn’t have to make logical sense to anyone else, or even fully to you. It just has to be motion.

If you’ve fallen off on the underwhelmed side

Try to spark some artificial urgency, deadline, or novelty. This might look like abandoning a half-finished paint project to suddenly reorganize an entirely different room because you needed one basket from it, which will absolutely confuse your monkey-brained loved ones. That’s still motion, and it still counts.

Why monkey brains don’t get to judge our coping mechanisms

Interestingly, monkey brains get overwhelmed too, they just tend to cope by cleaning and creating order, which gives them a sense of control over their environment. Society praises that particular coping mechanism, the ultra-organized planner, the spotless house, without ever calling it what it also is: a coping mechanism. Ours doesn’t get the same praise, but it’s just as valid. You’re allowed to use whatever gets you moving again, even if it makes no sense in a monkey-brained world, and nobody gets to shame you for it.

Your practical, actionable step

If you’re stuck on the overwhelmed side, reach out to someone, a friend, an accountability group, anyone, and ask them to look at your situation and tell you what they’d do first. If you’re stuck on the underwhelmed side, revisit episode 186’s brain dump approach and pick one thing you actually want to do as your starting point. Either way, chase motion, not balance.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.