The Myth of Normal (5/5): How to do laundry when you're depressed | KC Davis

0:00With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

0:32This episode is sponsored by WeShare Health, an affordable alternative to traditional health insurance. While health care costs keep climbing every year, WeShare is doing things differently. It's a nonprofit built to put people first. No annual price hikes, no surprises. In fact, their membership prices haven't budged in five years. Members can pay up to 60 % less than they would for traditional health insurance, saving up to$5 ,000 per year. Plus, members get real benefits. A nationwide PPO network with over 1 million physicians, unlimited telehealth, and access to more than 68 ,000 CVS Caremark pharmacies.

1:10WeShare goes beyond traditional health insurance, providing both extensive preventative and holistic care. Over 100 ,000 members have already made the switch. Call 1-888-WE-SHARE to get a free quote in minutes. That's 1-888-WE-SHARE. or visit WeShareHealth.org to learn more. Today's episode is sponsored by Kashi. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola, a straightforward, delicious way to fuel your gut made with prebiotics, fiber, and cultures. My favorite flavor, blueberry almond, has perfectly crispy clusters, delicious almonds, and bursts of whole blueberries. It's an easy fit for a daily routine, whether that's for breakfast or a snack.

1:52In a world of overwhelm, it's a straightforward, delicious choice. Try new Kashi Gut Health Granola.

2:02Hey, it's Shoshana, and welcome to my September playlist. Fall has a way of resetting our routines, new schedules, new rhythms, and with that reset comes a good chance to revisit our assumptions too. So I've been thinking about a question that comes up constantly in health and medicine, but we don't always stop to examine it. What do we mean when we call something normal? In science, we rely on norms all the time. Normal weight, normal vision, normal behavior, normal ways of coping, functioning, or moving through the world. Those categories can be incredibly useful, but they can also flatten a lot of human complexity.

2:41Because bodies and brains don't always fit neatly into the boxes that we've created for them. And sometimes what we think of as a personal failing, a limitation, or even a disorder looks very different once we understand the biology, the environment, or the assumptions underneath it. So I pulled five conversations from the TED Health Archive that make me rethink some of those assumptions. You'll hear from Mads Tan Christensen on why obesity is far more complicated than willpower. Kate Kale on why autism is so often missed in women and girls. Andrew Leland on why blindness is better understood as a spectrum than a binary.

3:21Amy Baxter on the surprising ways our brains shape the experience of pain. And Casey Davis on why something as ordinary as doing the laundry can become incredibly difficult, and why that has nothing to do with your worth. These episodes cover very different territory, but they all share a common idea. The more closely we look at what we call normal, the more complicated and often more interesting the picture becomes. And I think there's something freeing in that. It invites us to be a little less certain about the judgments we make and about other people and about ourselves. So this playlist is about rethinking normal, where our assumptions come from, who they leave out, and what we might see differently when we start questioning them.

4:07Hi listeners, it's Dr. Shoshana, the host of TED Health. How can you turn a mundane task into a therapeutic one, especially if it's a task you'd really rather not be doing? In her August 2022 TEDx Mile High talk, therapist Casey Davis shares her personal experience with depression and how she found comfort in the repetitive and mindful process of doing laundry. Hear how small changes in the way that we approach household chores can make a big impact on our mental health. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, stuck in a rut, or just need a little inspiration, keep listening to discover how even the smallest to-do item can offer some healing.

4:59Shortly after I published my book, I got an email. it said, your book was the only thing that saved me from suicide. You saved my life. Now for a book about how to clean, that's sort of odd, yeah? But what if a new approach to cleaning could teach us a better approach to treating mental health? I'm not an interior designer or a lifestyle influencer. I'm just a therapist with ADHD. And in February of 2020, I had my second baby. Because with the first one, I had some postpartum anxiety, and my husband had just taken a very demanding job that was going to keep him busy, I developed a meticulous postpartum plan for myself.

5:41My family would rotate in in shifts for the first 60 days, the cleaning crew would come once a month, the new mom's group would drop off dinners, and my toddler would go to preschool. I was so proud of this plan, and it ended before it even began. Because 2020 is when the COVID lockdowns happened, and all of that support disappeared overnight. In a blur, my days turned into breastfeeding difficulties, toddler meltdowns, and depression. The dishes stayed in the sink for days. The laundry pile reached impressive heights, and there was often not a path to walk from room to room. And when I should have been catching up on sleep, I would lay in bed at night and think to myself, I'm failing.

6:28Maybe I'm not capable of being a good mom to two kids. I decided to post a joke video on TikTok one day about my house turned disaster. some funny shots of my clutter and my dishes and my enchilada pan to a nice beat sort of a laugh to keep from cry situation surely and i got a comment

7:00lazy yeah that stung but i must be a glutton for punishment because i kept posting videos about my messy house. Video after video of all of the weird tips and tricks that I was using to try and get it back in order while managing my feelings of being overwhelmed. And I braced myself for more criticism. But what happened was entirely different. In the comment sections of my videos, hundreds of stories came rolling in. Stories like Amanda, who after losing her baby in the second trimester was standing frozen at her sink because she forgot how to wash dishes. Stories like Lula whose chronic health problems and depression made it difficult for her to brush her teeth.

7:46Story after story of people with depression, ADHD, autism, burnout, bereavement all struggling with these daily tasks. And it might seem odd to some of you that someone could struggle with tasks that are so simple. But are they simple? Let's think about what really goes into something like laundry. Everyone picture your laundry pile right now, okay? How many clean clothes do you have left right now? Can you wash tomorrow or must it be today? Do you need to prioritize, pre-sort, pre-treat anything? Did you grow up with anybody that taught you how to do that? You're out of laundry detergent. If you work three jobs, when are you going to get to the store next?

8:25And if you get there, can you afford it? And if you can afford it, which one you choose? And you get it all home, get it in there. Now pick a setting. Which one? I don't know. Google it. By the way, you have memory problems. So you'll remember that wash in about three days when it's mildewed into the washer. It's okay. It's okay. Just rewash it. Okay. And get it into the dryer. You'll forget that too. And it'll wrinkle. Now dry it again. Now, all you have to do is get it out and fold it. But also you have three small children and those three small children haven't given you a moment alone in quite some time.

8:53But when you finally get that moment, you have to decide, are you going to finish the laundry? Are you going to eat a sandwich? Are you going to take a nap? Time's up. You didn't do any of it. you stared at the wall. You have decision fatigue because the burden of carrying a home all by yourself has burnt you out. You see, for some of you, all of the steps and the skills that go into care tasks run on autopilot. But for millions of people, the autopilot is broken. And what's worse, what if you had to do all of that when your mom just died, or your job just fired you or you're using every ounce of strength that you have to just not kill yourself today.

9:35If you have access to therapy, it's unlikely your therapist will ever ask you about your laundry. I've worked in mental health for about a decade. I've been in therapy even longer. And the only time I ever had a provider talk to me about things like cooking and cleaning and brushing my teeth was when I was in a psych hospital as a teenager. Yet here were hundreds of thousands of people in my comment sections telling me that these daily care tasks were a major pain point in their life. And so I started to wonder, what if we started here? What if we started with these care tasks? Could making daily tasks easier improve mental health quicker?

10:23In the two years that I've been posting and writing about the intersection of mental health and care tasks, I've come up with a philosophy that does just this. And it all starts with one simple idea. Cooking, cleaning, laundry. It doesn't make you a good person or a bad person. Listen to me. Care tasks are morally neutral.

10:53Now, I know that if you've been watching Martha Stewart for decades and scrolling the perfect Pinterest aesthetic every day, that it can feel like struggling with these tasks is a moral failure. Like it's because we're lazy or we're irresponsible or we're immature. But having an organized closet doesn't make you a success. And living out of a pile of laundry on the floor doesn't make you a failure. You know where the shirt you want to wear is. it just... It might take you a bit of sifting to find it. The truth is, it's not about morality. It's about functionality. Does your home work for you? Not some hypothetical house guest that is coming to inspect your closet.

11:44I mentioned Amanda, who had lost her baby and forgot how to wash dishes. She told me that when her husband would go to work, she would lay on the floor next to the empty crib and say to herself, what can I bring to my family if I can't even wash dishes? But that changed when she began to see care tasks as morally neutral. All of a sudden, the dishes in the sink weren't representations of her failure as a wife. but instead she would look at the pile and think to herself, what do I need to function tomorrow morning? And then pull two coffee cups out of the pile to wash. She had her coffee the next morning and it was a little bit easier to get up off the floor.

12:29When we liberate ourselves from the idea that we are a good person or a bad person with care tasks, we can stop thinking about the right way to do things, about the way that things should be done and instead start thinking about what we can do with our current barriers to improve our quality of life today. And this is the fun part, because you get to customize a life that works for you. When Lula realized that her problems with brushing her teeth were not moral failings, she gained the confidence to speak to her dental hygienist. And together, they came up with solutions that work around her barriers.

13:07She now relies on pre-pasted disposable toothbrushes that she keeps in her desk, floss she keeps in the living room, and a no-rinse prescription toothpaste. Because by breaking down the component parts of a dental hygiene routine and ensuring that each step was accessible to her mental and physical needs, for the first time in a year, she's done every step in that routine for two weeks straight. She says that now that her teeth are clean, she's a little less stressed about tomorrow's problems. And this approach can work with any care task that you struggle with. Simply ask yourself, what am I trying to achieve and how can I achieve it in my way?

13:50In a rare moment of folding clothes, I looked down at the baby onesie that I was folding. and I thought to myself, why am I folding this?

14:07Baby onesies don't really wrinkle. And even if they did, nobody cares if a baby's in a wrinkly onesie. Furthermore, I was probably going to change her four times before lunch. This doesn't need to be folded. it. I said it out loud and literally braced myself for the laundry police. I don't know. There are rules to laundry. But for the first time, I stopped thinking about the way that laundry should be done and instead started thinking about how I could make laundry functional for me. And I looked down at the fleece pajamas and the underwear and the athletic shorts and the tank tops and realized almost none of my clothes actually needed to be folded.

14:55And I haven't folded any of it since.

15:05I moved all of my family's clothes into one closet off the laundry room, and now I just toss things into organized bins unfolded.

15:20My new motto is good enough is perfect.

15:27And everything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.

15:36You have to give yourself permission to do a little. To do it with shortcuts. To do it while breaking all of the rules. And replace that inner voice that says, I'm failing, with one that says I'm having a hard time right now. And people who are having a hard time deserve compassion. If it's too hard to shower today, grab the baby wipes. It may not be the normal way to do it, but you deserve to be clean. If it's too hard to cook dinner, get paper plates, heat up something frozen you'll go back to cooking and washing another day but the day is not today and in the meantime you deserve to eat if you're too depressed to do your dishes get a two gallon ziplock bag and keep it in your bedroom because if you put a dirty plate into a two gallon ziplock bag and seal it it will keep the bugs away

16:40and it'll be there for you when you're ready to go back to the kitchen because you deserve a sanitary environment, even if you can't get out of bed. I could share with you hundreds of other genius solutions that people have come up with once they embrace the idea that care tasks are morally neutral. In my experience, people will exhibit mind-blowing creativity when they are only taught how to speak compassionately to themselves. so what if mental health treatment started here by shifting the idea of care tasks as these external measurements of your worthiness to just being morally neutral tasks that you can customize to care for yourself because if it's true that regardless of what you struggle with you are worthy of a functional space.

17:41What else might you be worthy of? Thank you.

17:54That's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Grace Rubenstein, Farrah Degrunge, Jimmy Gutierrez, Anna Phelan, Michelle Quint, and Colin Helms. I'm Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. I'll talk to you again next week.

18:20Today's episode is sponsored by Kashi. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola, a straightforward, delicious way to fuel your gut, made with prebiotics, fiber, and cultures. My favorite flavor, blueberry almond, has perfectly crispy clusters, delicious almonds, and bursts of whole blueberries. It's an easy fit for a daily routine, whether that's for breakfast or a snack. In a world of overwhelm, it's a straightforward, delicious choice. Try new Kashi Gut Health Granola.

18:52With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds.

19:29It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish. Cases closed. Requests handled. No extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.