How to clean when it's the last thing you want to do

Sometimes you just don't have the energy to do the dishes and pick up all the dirty clothes from the floor. Therapist KC Davis, author of How to Keep House While Drowning, has developed a framework for keeping up with house cleaning without feeling overwhelmed. This episode originally ran April 2023. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit https://www.instagram.com/nprlifekit/?hl=en Sign up for our newsletter here. https://www.npr.org/newsletter/life-kit Have an episode idea or feedback you want to share? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Support the show and listen to it sponsor-free by signing up for Life Kit+ at plus.npr.org/lifekit http://plus.npr.org/lifekit See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Marielle Segarra?

  You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey, it's Marielle. Raise your hand if you think it's a moral failure to leave dirty dishes sitting in your sink for a day. It's kind of a funny question, right?

• 0:33Speaker 02

  I don't know anybody that would say yes. But if you ask someone, do you feel shame if you leave your dishes in the sink for too long? A lot of people say yes.

• 0:43Marielle Segarra?

  I mean, it's true. Sometimes it feels like the dishes are silently judging me from across the room. Same goes for that dusty bookshelf and the unfolded laundry that's constantly giving me the side eye. That was Casey Davis, by the way. She's a therapist, and she wrote a book called How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing. She says the problem is that when we think of chores as a moral obligation, but we aren't doing them, it's easy to spiral.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  I'm just not responsible. I'm just not mature. I'm just not good enough. I just don't work hard enough. I'm just lazy. When you believe that that's the issue, the only solution to that is try harder, be better. But I have found, just clinically as a therapist and in speaking to other therapist friends, like, that's almost never the issue.

• 1:38Marielle Segarra?

  Maybe you're dealing with a chronic illness, or you have ADHD, or you work two jobs, or you're a parent, or you're just tired from life. The good news, and this is the other message of the book, you don't exist to serve your space. Your space exists to serve you.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Yes, there's still labor that needs to be done, but it takes off the pressure of how it's supposed to look and how it should be done. Because then, the only thing that actually matters is whether my house is functioning and whether I'm able to live the kind of life I want to inside of it.

• 2:13Marielle Segarra?

  And once you understand that, you can start to think of cleaning as a kindness to yourself.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Because everyone, everyone, no matter who they are, no matter what they've done, no matter what they are struggling with. Deserves to live in a functional space.

• 2:30Marielle Segarra?

  On this episode of Life Kit, we're going to walk through a framework from Casey's book called the Five Things Tidying Method. It's informed by this mindset and her work as a therapist, and it'll help you get your space back to functional quickly so it can start serving you again.

• 2:49Speaker 00

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• 3:17Marielle Segarra?

  Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey. Find it on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 4:03Marielle Segarra?

  You have some really helpful, concrete frameworks in the book that can help people, for instance, clean up a room when they're having trouble mustering the energy or when the idea feels overwhelming. And I want to walk through one of them. It's called the Five Things Tidying Method.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:20Marielle Segarra?

  First of all, what is the concept here?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Well, the concept is that if you've got a big mess, we don't know where to start. When we do start somewhere, we feel like we work hours at something to see no progress. It feels, for some of us, like the whole endeavor is just so miserable. It takes a long time to sort of like psych yourself up to do it. And so I came up with this method when I was in my early twenties because I felt all of those things. And I just sort of have to tell myself, like in any room, no matter how many things you think you see, there's really only five things. There's trash, dishes, laundry, things that have a place and things that don't have a place. And for me, if I start at the top of that list,

• 5:05Speaker 02

  and I go category by category, ignoring everything in the room and just looking for that one category of item, it really takes care of a lot of mental blocks that I experience. And I think that's true for a lot of people.

• 5:17Marielle Segarra?

  Okay, so let's say you're standing in the door of your living room. And you are looking around. The first thing you do is you get a trash bag or a trash can and you look for the garbage, right?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I always get the biggest trash bag that I can.

• 5:34Marielle Segarra?

  Okay, and then, so you're just collecting everything and you're putting it in the bag or the can. Are you taking the trash out at this point?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  No, I, because one of the things that gets us stuck is that we get distracted. So if you, the more times you leave that room, the more likely you are to get distracted on some different project. And the other reason is because I, this is gonna get our space livable and functional. Like I can function with a trash bag sitting by the back door. I can't function with too much trash all around the house. And I, maybe it's just me, but like I will have all the motivation in the world to do something and I'll do it for like thirty minutes and then all of a sudden the motivation will fly out of my body like it has been exercised. And so like knowing that like I'm gonna get to a certain point and sort of run out of motivation,

• 6:25Speaker 02

  I wanna get as much done to make the space livable as I can.

• 6:30Marielle Segarra?

  Alright, so step two is dishes, right?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:34Marielle Segarra?

  What am I doing with the dishes?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  You're just putting them in the sink.

• 6:38Marielle Segarra?

  Okay, now let's say this is the living room, there are a bunch of like dirty cups and stuff, maybe some plates, I'm bringing them to the kitchen?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can do that, you can also get a, I like to have laundry baskets that don't have holes in them. Because it doubles as lots of other things, and one of the things that works well with is dishes, like if you wanna carry around a laundry basket and put all the dishes in the laundry basket, you can do that. You can get a small rolling hamper and just pop a piece of uh hard cardboard on top of it and then just put a basket on top of that and roll that sucker around and collect all those dishes. Um, you know, depending on what works for you, what kind of makes your brain feel like it's on a greased track. The reality is, there are going to be ways of doing things that make you feel

• 7:25Speaker 02

  like you are grinding gears with no oil, where every step of the process kind of feels miserable and and you have to force it. I think you should find the way to put the smallest amount of energy to get the most functional result.

• 7:39Marielle Segarra?

  Totally. Well, you have a a tip for dishes. Once you are doing your dishes later on, it's the the dirty dish rack method, right? And this works really well for you?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yes, so I realized that it's really overwhelming to me to look at a sink full of dishes that I really dislike from a sensory perspective, putting my hands and having to get the utensils from the bottom where they're like mixed with all the yucky water and that um I couldn't use my sink, like I couldn't get a pot underneath to turn the water on. And so I thought, okay, well, I would really like a way to make some of these things easier for me. And so I got this dish rack and what I started doing was whenever I had a dirty dish, I would stick it on the dish rack, dirty. But what happened was at the end of the night, when I would go to my sink, not only could I use my sink all day, but I'm looking at this very organized dish rack where it's like plate, plate, plate, plate.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Oh, this is all organized. Oh, it would take me just a few minutes to load this up into the dishwasher. And I I it was just smoother, it was easier, I felt less resistance, less procrastination, less avoidance. And that became like a life changer for me when it came to dishes.

• 8:55Marielle Segarra?

  Coming up, we'll talk about laundry and how to make it a less overwhelming chore.

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• 9:51Marielle Segarra?

  Casey, let's talk laundry. There are often, in a given room, I feel, various types of laundry. Like, there's clean, but not in the drawer. There's dirty, definitely dirty, not gonna wear it again. And then there's somewhere in between, you know? Maybe I'll wear it again, but maybe it's not clean enough to go back in the drawer. What do you do when you walk around and you see all this stuff?

• 10:19Speaker 02

  So I'll tell you what I do, because I am all about simplifying things for my brain. So I've got ADHD. That presents some problems with executive functioning. And one of those things is, like, too many decisions, too many steps, too many, like, my, my brain goes into gridlock really easily. So here's what I do. I don't have all those categories. And I'm not saying that I don't, but like, I don't. I just, if it's on the floor, it's going into the hamper and it's getting washed. I don't care if I wear it once, I don't care if I wear it 1,000 times, I don't care if I didn't wear it at all, I just thought I was going to and I brought it into the living room and set it on the chair. I have to, in my mind, things have to be one step. And the step is, if it's not hung up, it's going into the washer, it's getting washed again.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  And that really simplifies things for me.

• 11:07Marielle Segarra?

  Got it. Yeah, so it sounds like in general, like that might work for some folks, um, or maybe some folks wanna like pick things out. But maybe in the triage method, they walk around the room, they collect the laundry in a basket, probably.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:24Marielle Segarra?

  And then they put it in the corner for now.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:27Marielle Segarra?

  And they move on to, uh, things that have a place. Uh, and, and this one seems pretty straightforward, like put the stuff in the place, right? Do you do that right away?

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and, and sometimes, so it depends, like, the house that I used to live at, we had, um, so our living room, dining room, which we were using as a playroom, and our kitchen were all on one floor. And that's where we did almost all of our living. And so, you know, I didn't, if I, if something belonged in the kitchen, it was three steps to get to the kitchen. Right?

• 11:59Marielle Segarra?

  Right.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  So, um, and now I live in a house that the layout's a little differently, so I'm not gonna walk all the way across the house for something, right? I'm gonna put it in a little basket of, of where it goes.

• 12:11Marielle Segarra?

  Okay. And then last one is things that don't have a place. What do you do with those in the moment? Do you just kinda pile them up? Or do you find a place for them? Like, at this point, you still haven't thrown away your trash, you haven't put the laundry in the laundry room, you haven't done the dishes. So like, yeah, what are we doing with the stuff that doesn't have a place?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  This is always sort of my check-in moment, where I kinda check in with myself and I go, okay, how are we feeling? What else is on the agenda today? How motivated are we? What's our body feeling like? What's our concentration level? Because sometimes I just put it aside in a basket and have to do other things, go, you know, throw the trash away. But if I'm really kinda feeling like, no, I wanna tackle this, I wanna get this done, um, then I will sort of look inside and you have to make some decisions. So sometimes the easiest thing is to go, okay, sometimes things don't have a place because like you don't need that thing. Is there anything that I can purge or donate or get rid of? And then I go, okay, is there anything in here that kind of like has? Cousins or or or close friends. And what I mean by that, you know, is if I have a pair of scissors

• 13:14Speaker 02

  and I don't really have a place where these specific scissors go. Well, is there a place in my house where I'm keeping similar items? Like, do I have a drawer where I keep my box cutters? Because I could just add the scissors to that.

• 13:28Marielle Segarra?

  If you're coming to the end of the five things and like you've checked in with yourself and you're like, all right, I either have the energy for this or I don't. So maybe you maybe you pile up the things that don't have a place in the corner, if you don't have the energy. And then you're looking at the five things that you've collected. You throw away the trash, right?

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:50Marielle Segarra?

  You bring the laundry to like your washing machine, or if you if you do your laundry at a laundromat, maybe you just what, like put it by the door or something?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:58Marielle Segarra?

  Yeah, um. Maybe you do the dishes.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  I almost never do. I almost never do. That's always the thing that I leave. And people are different, right? Like, some people, they really need to do the thing they dread the most first. And then they kind of feel free, like, oh, now now I'm not dreading this. I'm the opposite. If I know that I have permission to not touch those dishes, I will do everything else in my house.

• 14:22Marielle Segarra?

  You talk in the book about care tasks as a potential kindness to your future self.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:30Marielle Segarra?

  Like, that's one more reason to do them. If you, if it's the evening and you're like, you know what? I don't really feel like doing these dishes right now, but I know in the morning it would be really great to have an empty sink. So I'm gonna do something to make that happen.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  I think so often we clean reactively as if having to clean our space is a punishment for having lived in it. You know, it was great to have that dinner party, but, ugh, now I have all these dishes. All right, I, you know, I did a project, but now I have to clean up after myself. I want to flip that. Instead of thinking that care tasks are always cleaning up after ourselves, I want to start thinking of them as Forward facing tasks. You know, I'm going to clean for myself. I'm going to put two dishes into the dishwasher because it would be a real kindness to morning me to to be able to just have a clean dish to eat off of in the morning.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  I want to put my slippers next to my bed at night because I have tile floors and my feet are cold in the morning. And what a kindness it would be to myself to be able to wake up and put those slippers on before having to walk across the tile. And when you start doing things out of kindness, um, things start to change. And sometimes I say, I'm not gonna even touch these dishes because I deserve rest. And I do that out of kindness too. I'm gonna go let myself lay down on the couch.

• 16:04Marielle Segarra?

  I'm gonna put some of this stuff into action in my life, seriously. I it's one of those things that like shifts your perspective.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Well, when you do, just remember that there's no way to fail at this. You do it and and it makes your life better. And then maybe you fall off or you don't do it and then you go, oh, yeah, let me, I wanna, I wanna go pick that tool up again.

• 16:23Marielle Segarra?

  Are you like hearing the voice in my head or something like?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  I have the same voice, that's how I know.

• 16:31Marielle Segarra?

  Okay, time for a recap. You don't exist to serve your space. It exists to serve you. With that in mind, do your housework and self-care in ways that make sense for your brain and your body in general. If you're doing the five things method, go through all the steps before you put away the trash or do the laundry or the dishes. And if you find yourself struggling to do a care task, think about why it's hard for you. Are there changes you could make, ways you could do it differently, that might make things easier? Lastly, remember that a messy house is not a moral failure. The dishes aren't gonna come alive and say judgmental things to you or make you a ten-course meal. You've been watching too many Disney movies.

• 17:18Marielle Segarra?

  That's our show. By the way, do you love Life Kit? Then why not hang out with us on the NPR app? It's the best way to catch every episode. And if you turn on notifications, we'll let you know the second a new conversation drops. Download the NPR app and let's keep talking. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Mia Venkat. Our digital editor is Malika Gharib and our visuals editor is CJ Riekele. Megan Cain is our senior supervising editor and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marie Schneider, Margaret Serino, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Jimmy Keely. I'm Marielle Segarra. Thanks for listening.

• 18:02Speaker 03

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• 18:31Speaker 07

  Oh, Kevin, it feels good to be back. It sure does, Casey. And what a time. The world is talking about AI and what's going on in Silicon Valley. And we are here with a new show to tell you all about it. That's right, Kevin. On our new show, Machine Gods, twice a week, we'll be bringing you the biggest news in tech and bring you unmatched access to the real titans of this industry. You can find Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.