230: Embrace Your ADHD “Fish” Brain and Swim with the Ebb and Flow of Real Life

Stop Trying to Climb the Tree: Why Systems Don’t Stick for Fish Brains

My name is actually Joy Loving, and the podcast name started as a cheeky nod to that. But underneath the wordplay was a real goal: helping women feel less like failures in their own homes, because that particular kind of defeat is uniquely demoralizing.

A home is a feeling, not an aesthetic

What I actually care about in a home has nothing to do with how it looks. It’s whether the people we love feel happy and excited to be there, whether it functions as a real sanctuary. Social media has quietly convinced a lot of us that the aesthetic is the point, and I think that’s exactly backwards. If hospitality has become “what will they think of how this looks” instead of genuine warmth, we’ve lost the plot. Ironically, a home orchestrated to perfection often makes guests feel less welcome, not more, because now they’re worried about messing something up instead of just being there with you.

The fish and the monkey

Here’s the analogy this whole podcast is built on: everybody’s a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll live its whole life believing it’s stupid. We’re fish brains, measuring ourselves against a monkey’s challenge, when the actual answer is to stay in the water and figure out how our own talents work for us, instead of endlessly trying to become tree-climbers.

This isn’t permission to give up on your home. Plenty of us live with actual monkey brains (people who genuinely thrive on structure and consistency) and we still want less chaos and clutter for everyone’s sake. But it does mean naming what’s really going wrong.

The number one complaint isn’t what you think

When I ask people what frustrates them most about their homes, the overwhelming answer, something like 90% of the time, isn’t clutter or mess itself. It’s “I can’t stick to a system,” “I keep failing at routines,” “I can’t build the habit.” Here’s the problem: there was never going to be a perfect system or routine for a fish brain, because fish brains aren’t built for consistency in the first place.

Watch fish in an aquarium sometime. They drift in the current, get pulled forward and pushed back, dart around with no obvious pattern, then go still. There’s no metronome to it, no daily habit performed on cue. That’s not a flaw. It’s just not how fish move. Most productivity advice, including a lot of what the professional organizing industry teaches, comes from naturally consistent, type-A, monkey-brained people. Following it faithfully as a fish brain isn’t a character failure. It’s a monkey teaching a fish to climb.

Riding the wave isn’t failure

Sometimes a new system genuinely excites us, and we stick with it and see real success, until we don’t. That drop-off isn’t proof the system failed or that you failed to commit hard enough. It’s what happens when the novelty that was fueling your dopamine runs out, or life genuinely gets in the way. You rode that wave until it was done. That’s simply how it works for us: real forward energy, followed by a genuine need to drift back with the current and rest.

Those “lazy” or “off” days deserve the same respect as the hyper-focused, everything-got-done days. Both are necessary parts of the same brain. The energy spent beating yourself up over the off days is energy that could’ve gone toward recovering faster and being ready to push forward again.

The monkey’s tree versus the fish’s streambed

Here’s the clearest version of why linear to-do lists fail us. Picture a monkey at the base of a tree, looking up and seeing each branch clearly laid out: reach this one, then the next, then the next, working steadily to the top. That’s a genuinely linear task list, and it’s exactly how a monkey brain operates, priorities rising naturally to the top, working down the rest as needed. If you’ve never experienced that kind of clarity, it’s not a personal shortcoming. It’s because you were never a monkey climbing a tree to begin with.

A fish brain lives in a streambed instead, where the tasks are pebbles scattered across the bottom, encountered in no particular order. You spot one and wonder if a more important one is somewhere else in the current. You get pulled toward a different pebble entirely, then discover later you missed one somewhere behind you. Trying to force that experience into a straight numbered list is trying to make a streambed behave like a tree.

That’s exactly why a pending list, a non-linear list where everything just needs to get acknowledged and eventually decided on, works better for us than a traditional to-do list ever will.

You didn’t miss anything by starting here

If you’re new, or you’ve been jumping around episodes and feel like you landed in the middle of something, you haven’t missed anything essential. Every entry point is the middle. Ebbing and flowing through this is expected, not a sign you’re behind.

Your practical, actionable step

Next time a system or routine falls apart on you, resist the urge to call it a personal failure. Name it instead: you rode that wave until it was done, and that’s simply what a fish brain does. Then rest until the next wave shows up.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.