Latest / JOY LOVING HOME - SAHM, Productivity, Home Organization, Declutter, ADHD Mom, ADHD SAHM, ADHD Brain / 244: From Guilt to Experiments: A Better Way to Love Your Home if You Have ADHD

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244: From Guilt to Experiments: A Better Way to Love Your Home if You Have ADHD · JOY LOVING HOME - SAHM, Productivity, Home Organization, Declutter, ADHD Mom, ADHD SAHM, ADHD Brain

• 0:00
  I want to do something a little differently today.
• 0:03
  I love it when I see people answer their like listener questions,
• 0:10
  but I don't have a super easy way for you guys to ask me questions.
• 0:14
  Although if you ever have any, probably the easiest way is to go over to Instagram.
• 0:19
  I'm on there at joylovinghome and DM me any kind of question.
• 0:23
  I would love to either answer it directly to you or create a podcast out of
• 0:27
  it, which would be great.
• 0:28
  But one of the things I do have is that when anyone joins my free community,
• 0:35
  which you go to by going to bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity,
• 0:42
  I will ask a couple questions that let you in that group.
• 0:46
  And those questions are just for me to get a sense of where you are and what
• 0:52
  you're looking for in sort of being a listener of mine and joining the group.
• 0:57
  But the big question that I ask there is, I say, what is your biggest struggle
• 1:03
  that keeps you from feeling good about your home?
• 1:06
  And I save those for me to get podcast ideas, to see what it is that I'm missing, that I'm not sharing,
• 1:15
  to sort of help how we're feeling about our homes. That's the whole point of this podcast.
• 1:22
  But there was one particular answer that I tend to get over and over again.
• 1:27
  In some various form, but I just had someone join this week,
• 1:30
  and her answer just hit it home again.
• 1:34
  And so I will leave people anonymous because I did not ask whether I could say
• 1:38
  any names, but you might recognize yourself.
• 1:41
  But her answer was, I am always trying to find a system to stay consistent with.
• 1:48
  I just can't seem to not feel behind.
• 1:52
  I want more flexibility and joy, for sure.
• 1:56
  So I'm going to dig into how I want to approach an answer to this right after this.
• 2:02
  A wise person once said, everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its
• 2:07
  ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid.
• 2:12
  Well, Fish, quit trying to climb trees while getting advice from well-intentioned monkeys.
• 2:17
  It's time to jump in the water and learn how to swim with the current of your life.
• 2:22
  I'm Joy, a professional organizer, mom of four, and fellow Fishbrain.
• 2:27
  If you're looking for a place to get understanding, encouragement,
• 2:31
  and ideas for your home, that actually fit how your brain thinks,
• 2:35
  then I'm glad you're here.
• 2:37
  Let's ditch the type A advice and embrace what makes our brains and our homes unique.
• 2:43
  Together, we could have a joy-loving home.
• 2:48
  Personally, I do not follow any sort of set morning routine.
• 2:53
  The one thing that I am insanely consistent about is my cup of coffee.
• 2:58
  But one of the things that I do, because there are various differences in my
• 3:03
  mornings all along, I have two dogs that are very excited about mornings.
• 3:09
  And so I will come downstairs, I'll open the door to our backyard,
• 3:13
  I'll feed them, and then I go about all the things I have to do in the morning
• 3:19
  to either get people out the door or get myself ready to go to a client's house
• 3:23
  or back when the kids were here, getting them out the door in various shifts.
• 3:27
  And then once everything quiets down, I grab that cup of coffee and sit down,
• 3:36
  and give myself a few minutes to start the day in some peace.
• 3:39
  And one day, a few months back, I was sitting with my cup of coffee and suddenly
• 3:45
  started hearing noises that were a little bit disturbing because I was home alone at this point.
• 3:52
  And upon a little bit of investigation, I discovered that there were a pair
• 3:56
  of birds, wrens to be exact, that had decided to fly into the house while I
• 4:02
  left the back door open during what was probably an hour.
• 4:07
  And they were banging around, desperately trying to find a way out. Now, if you've,
• 4:15
  been on my Instagram or my website or anything, you may have seen I have this
• 4:19
  very large sort of statement window in a room that's just off the kitchen.
• 4:26
  And it is literally like the height and width of the wall.
• 4:31
  And these birds were trying over and over again to get out that window. And it is a fixed window.
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  There's nothing I could have done to open spaces for them to get out of it.
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  But I ran around and I opened six other windows and I opened the back door again
• 4:48
  and I was trying with a towel to like shoo them that direction that would help them exit.
• 4:55
  One of them figured it out fairly quickly and the other poor guy was just constantly
• 5:01
  banging himself into that window to the point at one attempt he fell down behind
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  the couch and I was like oh no please just be stunned, please just be stunned.
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  And I, you know, peeked over and saw that after a minute, you know, he was kind of okay.
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  And he got up and tried again until after on much effort in my part,
• 5:24
  I finally helped him find his way out the back door.
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  And then I shut all the windows and the doors and I was like,
• 5:29
  oh, that's what I get for keeping my door open for more than an hour in the mornings.
• 5:34
  But I guess my point of the story,
• 5:38
  as I'm sure you're picking up on, is when I hear her answer to that question
• 5:44
  of what is keeping you from feeling good about your home and her believed answer is,
• 5:50
  I haven't found the system I can stick with yet.
• 5:54
  It makes me feel like this bird flying into this fixed window.
• 6:00
  It looks like the brightest, biggest, easiest answer to its problem.
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  And yet it is, all it's doing is harming. It's just harming.
• 6:12
  And the reason I say that is because we are preached and preached and preached
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  to in the organizing spaces, in the productivity spaces,
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  that we need a morning routine and an evening routine and a housekeeping routine
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  and just all we have to do is be consistent. That's it.
• 6:32
  Like if we will just be consistent, it all will solve itself.
• 6:37
  Which sounds like the answer. It's the big bright shiny window that is clear as day to go fly through.
• 6:44
  The problem is in our brains, that is a fixed window. It does not open for us to fly through.
• 6:52
  It might seem like it's going to work. It might even work for a time.
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  But our brains turn any monotonous, consistent fix into our own kryptonite.
• 7:10
  Our brains seek novelty.
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  What we have to do is we have to be looking for all six of those other exits
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  through the windows that we were open. We have to find the back door.
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  We have to find a creative, different, consistently changing way to do the same
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  thing their brains thrive on.
• 7:34
  It is an absolute difference.
• 7:38
  I am married to what I lovingly refer to as a monkey brain.
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  Even if he doesn't need
• 7:45
  to do something in his morning routine he
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  will still do it because he can't break that consistency that is his crux I
• 7:57
  guess that's his kryptonite and you can look at it either way like he literally
• 8:02
  has to complete everything or he just doesn't feel right about the day.
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  And I have to go seek out different ways to do things all the time,
• 8:12
  which is my kryptonite to deal with. We each have our own.
• 8:16
  The difference is our society tends to praise his consistent steps,
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  even if one of them is unnecessary, because we pat people on the back for being consistent.
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  We don't pat people on the back for being creative and following our own drumbeat.
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  So it's it's something
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  our brains crave either way
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  but one is shamed and one is not so what I'm asking for you and you're like
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  okay great great that you've identified this joy I kind of knew that what what's
• 8:51
  my fix because here I still sit in this house that is frustrating me well let's
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  Let's talk about what really recognizing this about ourselves means.
• 9:01
  One is this listener, and you too if this sounds like you.
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  Can quit beating herself up or wasting time in this pursuit of this perfect
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  routine or system that is going to change everything.
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  Imagine all of the time and energy she could get back if she had resolved that
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  one way, this mysterious, elusive way, was going to actually be the fix.
• 9:31
  What if she also saved up all that energy on feeling bad about it and guilty
• 9:37
  that she couldn't keep up and frustrated herself for having started a new way
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  that seemed to be working,
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  but then a day happened that threw it off and now here I am again, a failure.
• 9:49
  If you could save yourself from all that wasted energy and guilt and shame and
• 9:55
  frustration and pursuit,
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  you could then have the energy to explore what experiment do I want to attempt with my house this week?
• 10:06
  Allow it to be a series of various different experiments.
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  Without the fear of failure, everything you try is then just data.
• 10:17
  I want to look with brand new eyes what I'm trying this week.
• 10:23
  I'm going to look at brand new eyes with something totally different to try next week.
• 10:27
  I am going to focus one week on just the kitchen and entryway.
• 10:33
  And I don't care if the rest of the house falls apart because I'm not trying
• 10:36
  to follow this perfect system that does it all.
• 10:38
  The next week I'm going to shift into the bathrooms are always spotless,
• 10:43
  but it's okay if the kitchen falls apart.
• 10:46
  It is one of those things where if nothing was working because you were stuck
• 10:52
  and you're overwhelmed and you're frustrated and you're just scrolling for answers,
• 11:00
  the act of doing anything is now a lift. It's a bonus.
• 11:04
  If the last time you were able to.
• 11:08
  Deep clean a bathroom was months ago, and now you do it once a month,
• 11:14
  you've just shifted into something that's a huge improvement.
• 11:18
  So that when it's time to dig out for company coming or an event happening,
• 11:24
  or you just know everybody's sick of it, it's less to dig out because only a month has ever gone by.
• 11:32
  You have this effort and energy to not worry about doing it right and starting
• 11:42
  to experiment with just different things at different times.
• 11:45
  That's the flow a fishbrain needs, a flow of attempting a lot of new novel stuff in succession.
• 11:54
  Even if something does work, if you
• 11:57
  keep at that particular one it will
• 12:00
  lose its luster that is why we're always chasing
• 12:03
  the shiny object and that's okay as long
• 12:06
  as you're chasing different things to experiment with that
• 12:09
  are all working towards an end that helps you feel better about your home the
• 12:14
  other big piece of this is you have to recognize the state of life or the phase
• 12:23
  of life that you're in If you are in the new baby phase,
• 12:27
  your only pursuit should be prioritizing sleep.
• 12:32
  Everything feels heavier and worse and more overwhelming when you're exhausted.
• 12:38
  And that is literally what that new baby phase is.
• 12:41
  You're just exhausted all the time. So every little thing seems magnified.
• 12:46
  What if you just acknowledge, like, it is what it is.
• 12:49
  They're not in the infant stage for all that long. They just aren't.
• 12:55
  If you're in the toddler phase, and you're at this point where you're like,
• 12:59
  I feel like all I do right now is brush my teeth while eating Oreos when I attempt
• 13:04
  to clean my house, because if I get one space organized in an order or cleaned
• 13:09
  up or just picked up for the bare basics and turn around,
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  they have completely destroyed the space next to what I was working on.
• 13:17
  Okay, welcome to toddlerhood. Welcome. It doesn't last all that long either.
• 13:23
  If you are in the phase where all you do is drive kids from event to event to
• 13:29
  practice to school to therapy to all the things,
• 13:34
  and you're like, how can anybody be productive in the car? My life is in the car.
• 13:38
  Then acknowledge that your life is in the car.
• 13:42
  Nobody is expecting you to have what takes hours to do in a house done when
• 13:51
  you actually live in the car you chose the priority of the kids activities and
• 13:57
  that's okay because again that's a season so what do you lean into during that season.
• 14:02
  Try really hard to turn the devices off during that time.
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  Sing songs, play games, talk, focus on the fact that you have this undivided
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  attention with your kid and enjoy that time.
• 14:17
  And if you want to, attempt to pack a little bag of things that could be done
• 14:22
  in the car if you're just sitting waiting at a practice.
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  Are there emails you can go through? Are there, you know, your calendar and
• 14:30
  all the papers that just got home from school that you can plug in?
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  Are there, you know, brainstorming dumps that you can do with your brain so
• 14:39
  that later you know that piece of it's done?
• 14:42
  Are there 500 post-it notes you stuck around the house that you can gather up,
• 14:47
  shove into a bag, and while you're waiting for them to come out,
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  you consolidate them into a list so that you have a place to think that's all in one spot?
• 14:58
  If you are an approaching empty nester like me,
• 15:03
  and it seems like all of your excuses are gone, I'm not chasing kids to places,
• 15:08
  I'm not cleaning up after toddlers, I'm not driving everybody in the car, what's my enemy now?
• 15:15
  My enemy is not enough deadlines or accountability.
• 15:19
  And I know that sounds luxurious. It does.
• 15:24
  It's awesome. and it's a great trap because I have the false belief that time
• 15:30
  is on my side, which makes time way easier to waste.
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  So we're all in a space and a time that we have to figure out.
• 15:42
  And that's why I will forever push on this podcast a whole lot of different ideas to try.
• 15:47
  You will not hear me say this is the way, this is the fix.
• 15:52
  Thank you for tuning in. I have the answer to all your problems.
• 15:56
  My answer is to accept your brain for what it is and to let's work with it.
• 16:02
  Let's give it lots of interesting ideas to tackle.
• 16:05
  Let's give it things to think through and try. But let's eliminate the failure
• 16:09
  and the shame and the exhaustion of the word consistent.
• 16:15
  All right, I'm going to stop there. It didn't sound as joyful. I felt very preachy.
• 16:20
  But it was intended to just ask you to relax on the fact that what you may have
• 16:28
  been attempting to do all this time is fly into a window.
• 16:33
  But start looking for side doors. They can be lots of fun. Until next time, continue to choose joy.