How to Keep House While Drowning
A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing
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4.6 • 108 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Best Book of the Year | USA TODAY Bestseller
This revolutionary approach to cleaning and organizing helps free you from feeling ashamed or overwhelmed by a messy home.
If you’re struggling to stay on top of your to-do list, you probably have a good reason: anxiety, fatigue, depression, ADHD, or lack of support. For therapist KC Davis, the birth of her second child triggered a stress-mess cycle. The more behind she felt, the less motivated she was to start. She didn’t fold a single piece of laundry for seven months. One life-changing realization restored her sanity—and the functionality of her home: You don’t work for your home; your home works for you.
In other words, messiness is not a moral failing. A new sense of calm washed over her as she let go of the shame-based messaging that interpreted a pile of dirty laundry as “I can never keep up” and a chaotic kitchen as “I’m a bad mother.” Instead, she looked at unwashed clothes and thought, “I am alive,” and at stacks of dishes and thought, “I cooked my family dinner three nights in a row.”
Building on this foundation of self-compassion, KC devised the powerful practical approach that has exploded in popularity through her TikTok account, @domesticblisters. The secret is to simplify your to-do list and to find creative workarounds that accommodate your limited time and energy. In this book, you’ll learn exactly how to customize your cleaning strategy and rebuild your relationship with your home, including:
-How to see chores as kindnesses to your future self, not as a reflection of your worth
-How to start by setting priorities
-How to stagger tasks so you won’t procrastinate
-How to clean in quick bursts within your existing daily routine
-How to use creative shortcuts to transform a room from messy to functional
With KC’s help, your home will feel like a sanctuary again. It will become a place to rest, even when things aren’t finished. You will move with ease, and peace and calm will edge out guilt, self-criticism, and endless checklists. They have no place here.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
More than a self-help book, this read offers an inspiring way to reframe how you think about your daily tasks. Author KC Davis is a licensed counselor specializing in addiction and mental health. At the start of the pandemic, she was also a new mother struggling with a case of postpartum depression that made it difficult to keep her house clean. Her breakthrough came when she realized that not doing the dishes was not a moral failing, but an inability to perform self-care. So in 31 brief chapters, Davis lays out how to reprogram your thoughts from “I can’t do laundry because I’m a mess” to “It will be so nice to have fresh, clean clothes.” Davis’ keywords are “slow, quiet, and gentle,” and her ideas are empathetic. Written in a way that makes it easy to re-read whenever you need a boost, this is a book you’ll want to keep around.
Customer Reviews
🎉 3 cheers for keeping it real !
Helpful advice, relieving words of grace & life-giving kindness is what I discovered through these pages.
Viewing chores as a kindness to one’s self.
The book is written from the perspective of a stay-at-home mother with two children, so its scope is firmly in that purview. This book is going to be most useful for those in that demographic, and a bit of a slog for those who aren’t.
There are some insights here that can be universally applied, but it would have been useful to have more perspectives from people in larger or smaller family units.
Some things are skipped over, like car cleanliness. The chapter devoted to it has the author doing the equivalent of throwing her hands up and giving up on ever successfully figuring out how to get her vehicle clean. It’s odd that there was even a chapter dedicated to it, if that’s the case.
Thankfully most of the book contains practical advice rather than focusing on affirmations, although there are those too. The amount of reframing and re-contextualizing household chores is high, and at times it can elicit an eye roll in terms of how much mental gymnastics are required to make the chores seem manageable.
There is a great emphasis on removing shame or guilt from the equation of household chores, which I think is the most useful takeaway from this book. I don’t experience that much guilt or shame myself when it comes to home maintenance, so it didn’t resonate with me personally.