K.C. Davis > Quotes

“Imperfection is required for a good life.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“here is the great news: You do not have to care about yourself to care for yourself. So many of us have the cart before the horse here: you think you must first like yourself to start being kind to yourself. It actually works the opposite way: caring for yourself is the greatest tool for learning to care about yourself.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Any task or habit requiring extreme force of will depletes your ability to exert that type of energy over time.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Most people fear that if they embrace this type of self-kindness, it will simply enable them to stay unfunctional forever. I think this fear is unfounded. I don’t believe in laziness, but even if I did the good news is that self-kindness is extremely motivating. It might be that when you first start giving yourself full permission to rest without guilt you find yourself resting a lot. Maybe that’s what your body and mind need. Research shows that people who report feeling burnout can take months or even years before they start feeling recovered”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Self-care was never meant to be a replacement for community care.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Maybe you keep going. Maybe you don’t. That’s okay. Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Being kind to yourself while eating ice cream is healthier than hating yourself while eating a salad.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“A support deficit is not always someone’s fault. There are just some seasons of life we have to limp through.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Organization means having a place for everything in your home and having a system for getting it there. “Tidiness” and “messiness” describe how quickly things go back to their place. A tidy person typically returns things to their home immediately whereas a messy person does not.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“If I viewed a day of screen time and not doing any scheduled care tasks as a failure, it would be a lot harder to “get back into routine.” But I didn’t. Trolls and pj’s day was a day when we were being gentle with ourselves, allowing ourselves to take it easy and rest—a day of kindness. Framing it as kindness instead of failure was the key to being able to wake up and choose to get things done the next day.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“the gulf between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts is often an insurmountable distance. In that moment, I couldn’t help but absorb that lie that my inability to keep a clean home was direct evidence of my deep character failing of laziness.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“On a foundation of compassion and rest, with the view of care tasks as morally neutral, rejecting shame and perfectionism, you can begin to explore ways of caring for your body and space that best serve you.”
― KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help

“All of the thoughts in your head come from you. Sometimes you have angry thoughts about yourself such as, “God, I’m so worthless!” and sometimes you have sad thoughts about yourself like, “I really wish someone could help me and I feel alone.” This exercise is about purposefully preparing to respond to any angry thoughts—either in your mind or in a journal—with something that is kind, the way you would with a friend. If a friend said, “I am so worthless,” you might say, “I think it’s pretty normal to make mistakes. That doesn’t mean you aren’t worthy.” When you think sad thoughts, you can respond the way you would comfort a friend: “I’m sorry you feel alone. It’s okay to cry.” Even though you know it’s still you saying it to yourself and even if you don’t believe it yet, the exercise begins to help you decrease the number of distressing thoughts you have over time.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Please do not bully yourself into doing care tasks. Shame is a horrible long-term motivator. Most of the time it is paralyzing, compounding the barriers one already has to completing care tasks. This sets up a cycle where the uncompleted task creates shame, which in turn saps motivation and energy, often leading to avoiding the task altogether”
― KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help

“Sometimes you may not get up even with the change in self-talk. But you know what? You weren’t getting up when you were being mean to yourself either, so at least you can be nice to yourself. No one ever shamed themselves into better mental health.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“When barriers to functioning make completing care tasks difficult, a person can experience an immense amount of shame. “How can I be failing at something so simple?” they think to themselves. The critical internal dialogue quickly forms a vicious cycle, paralyzing the person even further. They are unlikely to reach out for help with these tasks due to intense fear of judgment and rejection. As shame and isolation increase, mental health plummets. Self-loathing sets in and motivation vanishes. Sadly, this is often compounded by”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Care tasks are morally neutral. Being good or bad at them has nothing to do with being a good person, parent, man, woman, spouse, friend. Literally nothing. You are not a failure because you can’t keep up with laundry. Laundry is morally neutral.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“But when you actually break down the amount of time, energy, skill, planning, and maintenance that go into care tasks, they no longer seem simple. For example, the care task of feeding yourself involves more than just putting food into your mouth. You must also make time to figure out the nutritional needs and preferences of everyone you’re feeding, plan and execute a shopping trip, decide how you’re going to prepare that food and set aside the time to do so, and ensure that mealtimes come at correct intervals. You need energy and skill to plan, execute, and follow through on these steps every day, multiple times a day, and to deal with any barriers related to your relationship with food and weight, or a lack of appetite due to medical or emotional factors. You must have the emotional energy to deal with the feeling of being overwhelmed when you don’t know what to cook and the anxiety it can produce to create a kitchen mess. You may also need the skills to multitask while working, dealing with physical pain, or watching over children. Now let’s look at cleaning: an ongoing task made up of hundreds of small skills that must be practiced every day at the right time and manner in order to “keep going on the business of life.” First, you must have the executive functioning to deal with sequentially ordering and prioritizing tasks.1 You must learn which cleaning must be done daily and which can be done on an interval. You must remember those intervals. You must be familiar with cleaning products and remember to purchase them. You must have the physical energy and time to complete these tasks and the mental health to engage in a low-dopamine errand for an extended period of time. You must have the emotional energy and ability to process any sensory discomfort that comes with dealing with any dirty or soiled materials. “Just clean as you go” sounds nice and efficient, but most people don’t appreciate the hundreds of skills it takes to operate that way and the thousands of barriers that can interfere with execution.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Task initiation barriers usually present themselves as difficulties in transitions. So I’m sitting in a chair and I need to go do dishes, but it’s very difficult to initiate the transition from sitting comfortably in my chair to getting up to do dishes.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“If you are in a season of life when there are simply more care tasks to be done than time or energy available to you and you have the means to afford help, it is the most functional thing to do. Does embarrassment stop you? “I could never let a housekeeper see the state of my home” is about as logical as “I could never let a doctor see the state of my health.” And so what if the housekeeper judges you? It is not their mental health you are responsible for but your own.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“watched my house crumble around me. I tried every day to figure out how to take care of both babies’ needs at once, and I went to bed every night haunted by my failure.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“chapter 38 your weight is morally neutral feeding your body is a care task. Resting your body is a care task. Taking medication to control health symptoms is a care task. Moving your body is a care task. Physical therapy and other healing activities are care tasks. It’s a wonderful thing to investigate what foods and nutrients help your body function and feel best. But making or keeping yourself thin is not a care task.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Interestingly enough, the subtle shift from obligation to option created motivation for me.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Framing it as kindness instead of failure was the key to being able to wake up and choose to get things done the next day.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“you can’t save the rain forest if you’re depressed”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“marie Kondo says to tri-fold your underwear. The admiral swears making your bed will change your life. Rachel Hollis thinks the key to success is washing your face and believing in yourself. Capsule wardrobes! Rainbow-colored organization! Bullet journals! How many of these have we tried? How many did we stick with? If you’re like me, the answer is probably none.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“An Ode to Baskets Big baskets, little baskets, clear baskets, wicker baskets, baskets from the Dollar Tree, baskets that I got for free. Baskets of shoes, baskets of books, baskets in all my crannies and nooks. And here’s the key, here’s the trick: the baskets go where the stuff already went. Laundry that ends up on the dining room floor, put a basket there and there’s mess no more. The stress of a cluttered counter easily ends when you put it all in a box or a bin. If you’re feeling fancy you could purchase a basket’s cousin such as a tray or a lazy Susan. My organizational system is, on its face, just putting a basket in the right place.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“But sometimes the “right” way of doing something creates barriers for certain executive functioning skills.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“You can see this when a thin, white, rich self-help influencer posts "Choose Joy" on her Instagram....Her belief that the decision to be a positive person was the key to her joyful life reveals she really does not grasp just how much of her success is due to privileges beyond her control.”
― KC Davis

“Not everything has to be clean at the same time.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning