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Sometimes about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best.
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This is true. This is true. Mysteries, have every size each week, this American life, wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to LifeKit from NPR. Hey, it's Marylle. 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 your 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 a 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 LifeKit, 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 is a therapist, and it'll help you get your space back to functional quickly. So it can start serving you again.
One of the world's most famous art detectives was on the hunt for a stolen van Gogh. He turned to an unlikely source for help. You have born soccer players, born teachers, born policemen, I'm a born burger. On the Sunday Story, how an art thief and an art detective set out to recover a missing masterpiece.
Listen now to the Sunday Story from the Up First Podcasts on the MPR app.
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Starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow it's been a minute wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll break down the zeitgeisty topics that are filling your feed. Every story from shortwave and pair of science podcasts starts with a question.
“Like, why do we have nightmares? How does AI affect my energy bill?”
At NPR, we are here for your right to be curious about the world around you. Follow shortwave wherever you get your podcasts, because the more you ask, the more interesting the world gets. 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 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
Miserable.
up with this method when I was in my early 20s, 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, 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. 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? Yeah. And I always get the biggest trash bag that I can. 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? 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 want to get distracted on some different project. And the other reason is because I, this is going to 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 30 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 going to get to a certain point and sort of run out of motivation, I want to get as much done to make the space
“livable as I can. All right. So step two is dishes, right? What am I doing with the dishes?”
You just put them in the sink. Okay. Now let's say this is a living room. A bunch of like dirty cups and stuff. Maybe some plates. I'm bringing them to the kitchen. 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 these dishes, like if you want to 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 hard cardboard on top of it and then just put a basket on top of that and roll that sucker right on and collect all those dishes. 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 they're going to be ways of doing things that make you feel 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. Totally. Well, you have a a tip for dishes. Once you are doing your dishes later on, it's the dirty dish rack, right, and this works really well for you. Yes, so I realize 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 mixed with all the gutty water and that 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 plate. Oh, this is all organized. Oh, it would take me just a few minutes to load this up into the dishwasher. And 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. Coming up, we'll talk about laundry and how to make it a less overwhelming chore. Every week on our series, if you can keep it, we tackle the biggest political
stories and why they matter for our democracy. Join me, Jen White Mondays on the One A podcast from W.A.M.U and N.P.L. There have been some fantastic movies released this year and we know you can't see them all. So we're recommending some great films that might have flown under the radar, add to your watch list. Listen to pop culture happy hour via the N.P.R. app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
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?”
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 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 hamperness getting washed. I don't care if I were at once. I don't care if I were a thousand 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 instead of on the chair. I have to in my mind, things have to be one step. And those step is, if it's not hung up, it's going into the washers
getting washed again. And that really simplifies things for me. Got it. Yeah, so it sounds like in generally, like that might work for some folks or maybe some folks will want to like pick things out, but maybe in the triage method, they walk around the room. They collect the laundry in a basket, probably. Yeah. And then they put it in the corner for now. Yeah. And they move on to things that have a place. And this one seems pretty straightforward, like put the stuff in the place.
All right. Do you do that right away? Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it depends. The house that I used to live at, we had, so our living room dining room, which we were using as a playroom, and our kitchen, we're all in 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. Right. So, and now I live at a house that the layouts a little differently. So,
I'm not going to walk all the way across the house for something. Right. I'm going to put it in a little basket of, of where it goes. 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 kind of 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 this stuff that
doesn't have a place? This is always sort of my check-in moment where I kind of 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 really kind of feeling like, "No, I want to tackle this. I want to get this done." 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 don't need or get rid of?" And then I go, "Okay, is there anything in here that kind of like has cousins or or close friends?" And what I mean by that, you know, is if I have a pair of scissors 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. 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 pile up the things that don't have a place in the corner if you don't have it the energy. And then you're looking at the five things that you've collected. You throw away the trash, right? Yep. You bring the laundry to like your washing machine or
if you if you do your laundry to laundry back, maybe you just put it by the door or something. Yeah.
Maybe you do the dishes. I almost never do that. I almost never do that. 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 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. You talk in the book about care tasks as a potential kindness to your future yourself. Like, that's one more reason to do them. 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 going to do something to make that happen.
“I think so often we clean reactively as if having to clean our space is a punishment for having”
lived in it. It was great to have that dinner party, but ugh, I have all these dishes. All right,
I did a project, but now I have to clean up after myself.
that care tasks are always cleaning up after ourselves. I want to start thinking of them as
forward-facing tasks. 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 be able to just have a clean dish to eat off of in the morning. 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, things start to change. And sometimes I say, "I'm not going to even touch these dishes because I deserve rest." And I do that out of kindness too. I'm going to go let myself lay down on the couch. I'm going to put some of this stuff into action in my life, seriously. It's one of those things that shifts your perspective. Well, when you do,
“just remember that there's no way to fail at this. You do it 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 want to go pick that tool up again." Are you like hearing the voice in my head or something? I have the same voice that's how I know. 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 caretask, think about why it's hard for you. Are there changes you could make ways you could do it
“differently? Might make things easier? Lastly, remember that a messy house is not a moral failure.”
The dishes aren't going to come alive and save judgmental things to you or make you a ten-course meal. You've been watching too many Disney movies. 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.
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Download the NPR app and let's keep talking. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Mia Venkat. Our digital editor is Malika Greb and our visuals editor is CJ Rikalan. Meghan Kane is our senior supervising editor and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Clare Maresh Niter, Margaret Serino, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Jimmy Keeley. I'm Mary Elstegarva. Thanks for listening.
This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. Don't miss my interview with Comic and Storyteller Ali Sadik. We talk about fatherhood, healing, and how prison changed him. He's been out 29 years, but he says the psychological wounds are different than my physical wounds. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, every day on our first NPR's
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