The Solve It Grid: A Color-Coded Approach to Building Your Balanced Energy Diet
Do your days feel like a relentless cycle of urgency followed by complete collapse? You're not alone. Many of us—whether we have ADHD, are navigating postpartum life, or work in caregiving professions—find ourselves constantly burning out without understanding why. Dr. Tamara Rosier's book Your Brain's Not Broken introduces a powerful tool for understanding where our energy goes: the Solve It Grid. This color-coded system helps us see not just what we're doing each day, but how those tasks are affecting our energy levels—and why some days leave us completely depleted while others feel surprisingly manageable.
Understanding the Four Colors
The Solve It Grid divides our daily tasks into four categories, each represented by a color that reflects its impact on our energy and emotional state.
🔴 Red: Urgent and Stressful
Red tasks are the fires we're constantly putting out. They're urgent, stressful, and often feel like emergencies—the bill you've been avoiding that's now heading to collections, the diaper blowout in the middle of a grocery store, the client crisis that demands immediate attention.Here's what makes red tasks particularly draining: they create just enough panic-driven dopamine to get us moving. That adrenaline rush can feel like motivation, but it comes at a cost. Red tasks burn through our energy fast, spike our cortisol levels, and leave us feeling exhausted when the urgency passes.The problem? Many of us—especially those with ADHD—have learned to rely on red as our primary source of motivation. We procrastinate until tasks become urgent because that's when we finally feel the push to act. But living in constant crisis mode is unsustainable.
🟡 Yellow: Mundane and Low-Dopamine
Yellow tasks are the unglamorous necessities of daily life. Folding laundry before you run out of clean clothes. Paying bills on time instead of waiting for the red notice. Scheduling that dentist appointment. Filing paperwork. These tasks are boring, repetitive, and offer virtually no dopamine reward.For ADHD brains especially, yellow tasks are incredibly difficult to initiate. There's no excitement, no urgency, no immediate payoff. So we avoid them—until they transform into red tasks. That bill becomes a collections notice. The laundry pile becomes an emergency when you're out of underwear. The routine oil change becomes a breakdown on the highway.The key to managing yellow tasks isn't forcing yourself to power through with willpower alone. Instead, try:Pairing them with something enjoyable: Listen to your favorite podcast while folding laundry, or play upbeat music while cleaningBreaking them into smaller steps: Instead of "clean the kitchen," try "unload the dishwasher" as a single, manageable taskSetting a timer: Commit to just 10 or 15 minutes, knowing you can stop when the timer goes off
🟢 Green: Meaningful and Energizing
Green tasks are the sweet spot—activities that are both fun and emotionally stimulating. Meeting a friend for coffee. Working on a creative project you're passionate about. Playing with your kids in a way that feels genuinely connecting rather than obligatory. Reading a book that captivates you.Green tasks create dopamine naturally and actually give you energy back, even though they require effort to initiate. They tend to align with your values and leave you feeling fulfilled rather than depleted.The challenge with green tasks is that when we're overwhelmed, they're often the first things we sacrifice. We tell ourselves we don't have time for the walk with a friend, the creative hobby, or the activity that actually recharges us. But cutting out green entirely makes it nearly impossible to maintain the energy we need for everything else.
🔵 Blue: Low-Effort but Depleting
Blue tasks are the activities we turn to when we're running on empty. Scrolling social media. Binge-watching TV. Taking an extra-long shower. These activities require minimal effort and feel like they should be restful—but they rarely actually recharge us.Blue becomes problematic when it dominates our downtime. After a day spent in red—managing crisis after crisis—blue is often all we can manage. You collapse on the couch and scroll for hours, thinking you're resting, but you're actually just running on empty.This is what's known as the "red-blue slide": spending your day in high-stress urgency, then sliding straight into passive depletion. There's no actual recovery happening, just temporary numbness.
What Does a Balanced Energy Diet Look Like?
The goal isn't to eliminate any particular color—red tasks will always happen, and blue has its place. The goal is balance: not clustering too much of one color in a single day.When your day is all red, you'll crash hard into blue by evening. When it's all yellow, you'll procrastinate until things turn red. When you cut out green entirely, you lose the activities that actually sustain you.Here's what balance might look like for three different people:
Miranda, who has ADHD:
Responds to urgent emails 🔴
Sets a 20-minute timer to pay bills 🟡
Meets a friend for lunch 🟢
Tackles a creative project she loves 🟢
Tidies the kitchen while dancing to a playlist 🟡
Watches a favorite show to wind down 🔵
Brooke, a postpartum mom:
Navigates a fussy feeding and a blowout 🔴
Takes a long shower while MIL has the baby
🔵A slow walk outside with the stroller
🟢Folds onesies while texting with her sister
🟡Handles a call with the pediatrician
🔴Reads a few pages of a novel after bedtime 🟢
Emily, a therapist:
Reviews session notes and prep 🟡
Holds back-to-back client sessions 🟢🔴
Lunch away from her desk, no screens 🟢
Completes insurance paperwork 🟡
Attends a team consultation she finds energizing 🟢
Takes a long drive home to decompress 🔵
Notice that each person's day includes all four colors, but none of them is dominated by a single one. There's variety, breathing room, and intentional space for green.
Evaluating Your Own Energy Diet
Take a moment to think about your typical day. Can you identify tasks in each category?
Ask yourself:
Am I manufacturing urgency to get things done? Do tasks only get your attention when they've become red?
Am I caught in the red-blue slide? Do you spend your day in crisis mode, then collapse into passive activities that don't actually restore you?
Where is my green? What activities energize you, and when was the last time you made space for them?
How am I handling yellow? Are there strategies that make mundane tasks more manageable, or are you avoiding them until they become problems?
It's also worth noting that the same task can fall into different colors for different people—or even for the same person in different contexts. Playing with your kids might be green when you're genuinely engaged and connecting, but yellow when you're exhausted and just going through the motions. A work project might be green when it aligns with your strengths and interests, but red when it's urgent and overwhelming.
How Therapy Can Help
Understanding the Solve It Grid conceptually is one thing. Actually building a balanced energy diet that works for your brain, your life circumstances, and your specific challenges? That's where therapy comes in.A therapist can help you:
Identify your patterns. It's hard to see your own cycles when you're in the middle of them. A therapist can help you spot when you're relying too heavily on red for motivation, when you're stuck in the red-blue slide, or when you've completely eliminated green from your life.
Understand what makes tasks fall into each category for you. Your red isn't the same as someone else's red. Your yellow might be someone else's blue. A therapist helps you understand your unique energy landscape.
Develop practical strategies. Whether it's executive function support for ADHD, processing trauma that keeps you in hypervigilance (perpetual red), or navigating the unique challenges of postpartum life, therapy provides personalized tools for building balance.
Create accountability and support. Changing ingrained patterns is hard work. Having someone in your corner who understands what you're working toward makes all the difference.
At Roots & Branches Wellness, our therapists work with clients navigating ADHD, perinatal mental health challenges, trauma, and burnout. We specialize in helping you build systems that work with your brain, not against it.If you're tired of the chaos-and-collapse cycle, we're here to help you find your balance.
Schedule a consultation to see how therapy can help you build your balanced energy diet.
