Keeping house while drowning

Published: 2026-05-12

As you might have gathered from my gemlog, I am struggling a lot with mental health at the moment. Specifically being burnt out by traumatic events, emotional as well as physical. So it is no surprise that keeping my household in shape is a real struggle. It's a struggle that I kept loosing for the last 5 months but slowly, I begin to work my way out of it.

A friend of mine who struggles with similar issues has borrowed me a small book - "How to keep House while drowning" - since it has helped them a lot.

I have to be honest I didn't finish reading it yet but even the first few takeaways are things that are already helping.

Everything worth doing is worth doing partially and the 15 minutes of labor

This was a sentence I needed to hear. When your house falls into neglect and chaos, it quickly becomes too much to even start - too overwhelming to even think about it.

Allowing myself to not finish what I start means I start things I otherwise wouldn't. And in housekeeping, a half tidy kitchen is better than an unusable messy one. So I stopped setting myself goals. The only goal is to do 15 minutes of housekeeping labor. After 15 minutes I am allowed to stop whatever I'm doing.

So either I get into the rhythm of doing housework, forget about the 15 minutes and just continue until it's done. Or I feel like this is too much rn but I can force myself to do 15 minutes. Sometimes it's just 10, sometimes even just 5. But even 5 minutes are 5 minutes more than nothing.

Conditioning the brain

When you suffer from such severe executive dysfunction, every bit of labor can be hell. Not the work itself but getting started. Dopamine is what controls our executive function and the dopamine system is what gets fucked during depression. We need a reward that triggers dopamine so our brain makes us do the thing again that gave us the reward.

Many people get a reward by feeling good about a clean house. Or by checking off tasks on a todo list. A depressive brain does not. Once that association is gone, doing chors creates an aversive reaction, making us wanting to do it even less. So let's get the dopamine from something else and use the timely correlation to form a positive reward reaction, at some point overwriting the aversive one.

I do this by blasting dance music on my headphones and doing a few dance moves here and there when I do my chors. Movement, especially dancing, and activating music give me a little dopamine hit. Not enough to make an instant change but those connections need time to build.

Setting myself up to fail

I am unemployed and disabled, so keeping some structure throughout my day is a real challenge. I am unable to just pick up a job to fill that role but then I just end up unable to take care of myself, and ultimately fall into permanent sickleave again. Wage labor just doesn't comply with ME/CFS.

So in the evening I plan tasks for the next day. I plan my day until the early afternoon, knowing that I will probably fail in the execution of my plan. But that's okay. A day where I get half of my tasks done before I need to rest is a day I get more done than nothing. And planning everything early in the day means I at least start early-ish.

The earlier I get out of bed (for me 10:00 is early atm) the earlier in the day I am exhausted. Usually I'm out of energy around 14:00. One of those tasks has to be an outside task, otherwise I have trouble getting myself to leave the house. Ideally it's the first task on my list.

Recap

Really, it is about being nice to yourself. Allowing yourself to just do a little bit here and there. If you're in a state like me, that little bit is likely more than what you'd usually do. And bit by bit, day by day, the house becomes a little bit cleaner than the day before. And sometimes it gets worse again. But that is okay, you made progress before so you might not fall back as far as you started at. And you made progress before so you probably got a little better at making progress.

Baby steps are okay, just keep on going them. Even when they feel like nothing, actually doing nothing just means falling behind more and more.

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