How to Keep House While Drowning Quotes

“Dancing for Dopamine There is an old saying that “neurons that fire together wire together.” It simply means your brain can start associating feelings with certain experiences. For example, dance every day to the same happy song with your baby, or your pet, or a friend on facetime. After a week, play that song while folding laundry or doing dishes. Your brain has now associated happiness with your song and will provide the same dopamine reward when you hear it.”
― KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help

“Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a YA author tweeted: One time, I was at a Q&A with Nora Roberts, and someone asked her how to balance writing and kids, and she said that the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Being unwell and struggling do not make you unworthy of kindness.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Let yourself use 5 percent energy to do 5 percent of the task. 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

“Even if we understand that doing everything perfectly is impossible, most of us still have a hard time shaking the constant guilt about how things should look.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“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: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“why clean when it will look like this tomorrow? A really common defeating message that we say to ourselves is “What’s the point of picking up? It’s just going to look like this again tomorrow.” I find this stems from that binary view of care tasks that they can be only either done or not done and that done is the superior state. But keeping everything done isn’t the point. Keeping things functional is the point because here’s the thing: it will look like that again tomorrow only if I clean it today. If I don’t clean it, it will be even more messy because we live here and we create mess. And if tomorrow’s mess on top of today’s mess is going to make my space not function for me, then it’s time to reset the space. I tidy things up not because it’s bad that it’s messy but because it has reached the end of that cycle of functionality and I need to reset it so it can have another twenty-four hours of it serving me.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“You do not have to wait to care about your body to care for your body.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“There is an old saying that neurons that fire together wire together. It simply means that your brain can start associating feelings with certain experiences. This means that if a person was in an abusive situation either as a child or in a domestic partnership where cleaning or mess was used as punishment or was the subject of abuse then that person is going to have post-traumatic stress around housekeeping and they may avoid it because it triggers their nervous system.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“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 if prioritizing a few good things that really matter to you and aiming for good enough with the rest of it lets you come out at the end of the day healthy and able to experience joy—now that’s an excellent life.”
― KC Davis LPC, How to Keep House While Drowning

“We all have seasons of life when we are capable of contributing more or less than the people around us.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

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

“You can live a joyful life and be just good enough at care tasks,”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Research shows that people who report feeling burnout can take months or even years before they start feeling recovered from the damage of that psychological stress. Your body might need that extended time to process and rest and be.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“When we believe our worth is dependent on completing the never-ending list of care tasks, we are unlikely to let ourselves rest until everything is done. Even when we manage to shame ourselves into action, we find that those”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

“Environmentalism is important. But we are not going to fix the earth by shaming people with mental health and neurodiverse needs out of adaptive routines they need to function.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“The impact that you could have on the world when you are fully functioning far outweighs the negligible negative impact that one household’s disposable plastic or extra water usage will have.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“The truth is that it’s not waste if you are using something to function.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Feeling shame for not being sustainable, for eating meat, or for purchasing fast fashion when you are fighting to get through the day is not going to cause you to magically gain the ability to do something different. Shame is a horrible long-term motivator. It is more likely to contribute to dysfunction and continued cycles of unsustainable practices.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“it’s not failure. It’s laundry. Keeping it morally neutral actually helped me get it done.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“In our society, care tasks have historically been left to women. Unfortunately, as the role of the daughter, wife, and mother has widened to allow for personal ambitions, careers, and equal partnership in the working world, the pattern of placing the main responsibility for a family’s care tasks on the women in the family still remains. This leads many women to be overloaded with never-ending work”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“It’s helpful when seeing your dirty floor to replace “I just can’t keep up” with “I’ve de-prioritized floors for a more important task right now.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“It’s just going to look like this again tomorrow.” I find this stems from that binary view of care tasks that they can be only either done or not done and that done is the superior state. But keeping everything done isn’t the point. Keeping things functional is the point because here’s the thing: it will look like that again tomorrow only if I clean it today. If I don’t clean it, it will be even more messy because we live here”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“remember that upgrading your laundry system can only increase your functioning, not your worth.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“Task initiation barriers usually present themselves as difficulties in transitions.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“life would be better with clean clothes, and you would like to be able to do the laundry you’ve been staring at for hours but just can’t seem to make yourself do, that’s not a lack of motivation. That is a problem with task initiation.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“not a moral failing, tidy is simply a preference, organization is functional, and you deserve to function.”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising

“In the end, the approach that you are motivated to do and enjoy doing is the most “efficient,” because you are actually doing it and not avoiding”
― K.C. Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising