Today, something clicked.
It started with what seemed like a simple conversation about everyday life. People weren’t talking about motivation, laziness, or even food. They were talking about what happens between deciding to do something and actually doing it. Somewhere along the way, one decision became fifty. I don’t think we talk about that enough.
Imagine you decide to eat healthier. Your brain doesn’t hear “eat healthier.” It starts solving: What does healthy actually mean? Should I cook more? If I cook more, I need recipes — how many? What if I don’t like them? Should I meal prep? Fresh food goes bad, so maybe frozen vegetables are okay — wait, are frozen vegetables actually healthy? Everyone online disagrees. Should I be eating more protein? Less gluten? Am I supposed to buy organic? What if I spend all this money and still do it wrong?
By now, you’re hungry. So you eat whatever is easiest.
From the outside, that can look like a lack of discipline. Inside your brain, something entirely different happened: the decision collapsed under the weight of its own complexity.
Maybe your version isn’t food. Maybe it’s cleaning the kitchen, answering an email, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, starting an exercise routine, making a phone call. The task changes. The pattern doesn’t.
Some brains naturally zoom in on complexity — not because they’re trying to make life harder, but because they’re trying to make sense of it. One decision connects to every other decision. Every variable feels important, every exception feels relevant, every future consequence wants to be considered before you move. By the time the thinking is finished, the original task has nearly disappeared beneath everything attached to it.
I’ve started calling this the hidden cost of complexity. Not because complexity is bad — because complexity creates friction, and friction makes action harder.
I think this is where we’ve misunderstood behavior change. When someone struggles to follow through, we assume they need more motivation, more discipline, more accountability. But what if the task is simply asking the brain to manage more complexity than it has capacity for in that moment? That’s a very different problem — and different problems require different solutions.
This reframes what supports are actually doing. Meal plans, checklists, visual reminders, prepared snacks, calendar reminders, body doubling — these get treated as productivity tools, tricks for getting more done. But that’s not really their function. They work because they reduce unnecessary complexity. Each one takes a decision that would otherwise branch into ten smaller decisions and makes it smaller — small enough for the brain to actually move on.
That’s the piece I hadn’t connected before. I’d been teaching the same idea all along. I just didn’t have a name for it: dynamic scaffolding.
When people hear “scaffolding,” they usually picture something temporary — you use it while learning, then remove it for good. But real life doesn’t work that way, because support isn’t static. The amount your brain needs shifts as the relationship between your capacity and your demands shifts. Some weeks you cook, clean, and pack lunches without thinking twice. Other weeks — you’ve slept poorly, work is overwhelming, your kid is sick — the exact same tasks suddenly feel impossible. Nothing is wrong with your brain. The equation changed: your capacity dropped, or the demands rose, usually both.
Dynamic scaffolding is the practice of intentionally adjusting support to match today’s version of that equation. When demands increase, support often needs to increase too — ordering groceries instead of shopping, eating the same meals on repeat, following a written checklist instead of relying on memory. As life settles, many of those supports become unnecessary again, not because you forced yourself to stop, but because your brain no longer has to work as hard.
One of the biggest stories we’ve inherited is that healing means needing less support forever. I don’t think that’s true. Stress happens. Burnout happens. Illness and grief happen. A bridge doesn’t get weaker because engineers add extra supports during a storm — they’re responding to changing conditions. Our brains deserve the same logic. Adding support during a hard season isn’t failure or regression. It’s adaptation.
I think we’ve misunderstood resilience the same way. Resilience isn’t functioning without support — it’s knowing how to adjust your support when life changes. It’s noticing your capacity has shifted and responding with curiosity instead of shame: What would make this possible today? instead of Why can’t I do this the way I did last month? That’s a completely different question, and a much healthier one.
The goal was never to become someone who doesn’t need support. It was to become someone who knows which supports to reach for, when to use them, and when to let them go.
Support doesn’t reduce growth. It reduces unnecessary complexity so growth can happen. It shouldn’t ask your brain to become someone else — it should respond to the brain you have.
That’s not lowering the bar. It’s building a bridge.
This is exactly the kind of thing I don’t want you figuring out alone. It’s why I built SOLA — a neurodivergent education and learning community for people who want to live a life that supports their brains, bodies, and values, instead of fighting against them.
SOLA has three parts: a Learning Community session where we learn together, a Community Circle where we talk, ask questions, and support each other, and a Practice Lab where we put what we’re learning into action, together.