How to clean when it's the last thing you want to do
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And once you understand that, you can start to think of cleaning as a kindness to yourself.
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.
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.
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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. Yeah. First of all, what is the concept here?
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. Right. It feels for some of us like the whole endeavor is just so miserable.
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