I wonder if you would mind KC, taking me back to April of 2020 and telling me a little bit of your story.

So I actually gave birth to my second baby in February of 2020.

Wow.

And I had like a really great plan on how I was going to support myself. You know, I was going to get meals dropped off and I was going to get a housekeeper and my two year old was going to go to daycare. It was going to be airtight.

'That's KC Davis. She's a mom. She's also a licensed therapist. But sadly, these well-laid plans that she's describing, they didn't happen.

Unfortunately. Three weeks after I gave birth, I got a phone call from the daycare saying, "hey, like lockdown has started and we're not going to be having kids anymore." And that sort of domino effected quickly basically cutting off my access to all of that plan.

Like so many people, KC's life was upended by Covid.

'And I found myself at home with a newborn and a not-yet two-year-old. My husband had just started being a lawyer, so he was busy seven days a week. And I was just stuck in this house.

As the days and weeks went by, KC's mental health started to suffer.

The depression was subtle. We think of depression as being sad, but I didn't get sad. I just got really numb. And as I got numb, as I struggled really hard to take care of both baby's needs at once, all of a sudden the dishes start piling up, the laundry starts piling up. You know, I've always been a messy person, but it's always been functional. And for the first time in my life, like, it really wasn't functional.

'Life was starting to pile up for KC, quite literally. So she was stuck in the house with nothing else to do, and she decided, why don't I just post about my chaos on Tik-tok?

I'm having a friend over today. She's a good friend, but she's never been to my house. And I'm not cleaning. I'm not cleaning it. It's just, let's just stop. Just agree to stop. If we all stop together, we can end this nonsense.

Now, what happened next would ultimately change KC's life. She says, first of all, she had an overwhelming response to her video. There were tons of comments and messages from strangers saying they related to feeling stressed and overwhelmed by their daily chore list. So KC started posting more and more videos and also sharing tips for how to feel less overwhelmed.

Dishes are like the Mount Everest of care tasks. There actually are very real and valid reasons why some people cannot clean as they go home tonight. I really didn't want to do my closing duties, so I decided I was going to set a 15 minute timer and race the clock.

'What KC did was combine her real-life experience as a mom with her training as a therapist to come up with a new approach to tackling what she calls "critical care tasks." You know what they are. The never-ending list of chores we all have to complete in order to live. Take the garbage out, do the laundry, grocery shop, feed yourself or your kids. The simple things you need to do to stay organized, to stay sane, but can also feel impossible for your brain to complete. And these tasks can also start what feels like an endless cycle of falling behind on life. You just never feel like you can catch up. Now, as you listen to this, maybe it sounds familiar. And I think the question often is, does a disorganized life also imply a disorganized brain? KC says not necessarily. In fact, years after posting that first TikTok, KC wrote a book. It's called "How to Keep House While Drowning." So I decided on today's show, I wanted to sit down with KC for a conversation about the inner workings of the organized brain, what it really means and how we might all get there. Plus, the fascinating brain science behind simply tidying up your environment and how we can all do it better. So get ready to learn how to cut down the clutter in your home and in your mind. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. And this is Chasing Life.

KC says the responses to her first few posts on Tik Tok were mostly positive. Fellow moms commenting, saying her messy home, well that was relatable. College students thanking her for sharing helpful tips. But there was this one comment that KC says really stung.

Someone called me lazy. Which is just like something that's really common, which is like if somebody is struggling with anything related to like cleaning or getting their dishes done or even like hygiene, it's never like, "Oh, you must be struggling." It's always all there must be a moral problem.

And it's this instinct, KC says, to call her messiness, her disorganization, a moral failure, she believes that reflects outdated beliefs about neatness. And she believes when we internalize those beliefs, we're actually doing more damage than a growing stack of dishes ever could. Here's why: when we beat ourselves up or call ourselves lazy for not getting simple tasks done, it's not actually motivating. Instead, we're actually wasting our precious mental energy on feeling ashamed. And that takes a lot of energy. And in the end, that very shame makes it harder for our brains to complete the tasks. Now, on top of all that, there is data that shows living in a cluttered home can trigger anxiety, can trigger stress, cognitive overload. Your brain is struggling to prioritize which mess to clean up first. Think of it this way: your brain is sort of placed in a constant state of low grade fight or flight, which means heightened cortisol levels. And as you probably know by now, that can lead to real health effects, including a greater risk of type two diabetes and heart disease, even depression. All of that just from living in a messy environment. Now, I have to tell you this: perfectionists, they're not off the hook either. The need to have everything in order., That can lead to anxiety as well. Because nothing stays perfectly clean forever. So you can never relax. That also becomes a vicious cycle. Now, this might feel counterintuitive, but KC says after putting this all together, the first step to achieving a cleaner house is releasing the shame that comes with feeling messy. You get that? The first step to achieving a cleaner house is releasing the shame that comes with feeling messy. That way, your brain can actually focus on other things, like getting the chores done. Think of it as the very act of quieting your own inner critic. But that's not an easy task. And it can be a big shift for some people, especially if you grew up in a household where cleaning up was a chore you needed to finish, or else.

I want people to know that care tasks, whether it's cooking, cleaning dishes, feeding yourself, getting into the shower, they are morally neutral. Meaning, if you find them hard to do, that's not a reflection on whether you are good or bad, right or wrong, success or failure. It is. It's almost never this issue of not trying hard enough. It's always an issue of a legitimate barrier, a struggle to get the right coping skills. A struggle to get the right guidance and really the struggle to stop hating ourselves long enough to figure out a way through.

You know that that adage, a cluttered desk is reflective of a genius mind? But I guess the question is, what is going on in the brain during the performance of care tasks?

Doing tasks like laundry or dishes or picking up toys or whatever it is, it takes a lot of what's called executive functioning. And executive functioning skills happen in your prefrontal cortex. So it's not the seat of your brain doing fight or flight. It's not the seat of your brain, you know, doing those big emotions. It's not the seat of your brain dealing with your senses or or your breathing. It's the part of your brain that does time management, that does task initiation, that looks at something and breaks it down into steps. And if those things are all firing on all cylinders for you, it feels automatic. You just decide to do the dishes and you do them. It's automatic. If there's some disruption to your executive functions, you look at the dishes and go, "I got to do the dishes." And you can't. You can't. What happens next? You feel frozen or you feel overwhelmed or you go, "okay, I'm going to go do something over here first and that I'll get to the dishes." And you get distracted because focus is a big part of those executive functions. There are so, so many steps involved in any of these tasks, and we just don't appreciate it. Because when your brain's running on autopilot it doesn't feel like so many steps. And there are some people that have disorders that disrupt those executive functions. So if you are depressed, anxious, if you've got ADHD, and then but even if you don't have a diagnosis, there are lots of things that can compromise your executive functioning: sleep deprivation, chronic stress, being burnt out. And we also know that you only have so much, let's say, gas in the tank for those functions. And if you think about like the last time you had a really stressful day, have you ever had one of those days where whether it was emotional or work or whatever, you hit like 2:00 and your brain just won't work anymore?

Yeah. What time is it right now?

Yeah, like your brain revolts and there's like the brain fog and you can't think. You know, you're overwhelmed by a simple task, or you're kind of like staring at something that normally would be easier for you. All of those things, that's you hitting kind of your capacity of working with your executive functioning that day.

'No doubt, any of us can feel tapped out when it comes to our executive function. But here is where I think my brain probably works a little differently from cases. For me, tidying up can be self-soothing. I feel like it can lower my anxiety instead of causing it. And it's not just me. There is plenty of research out there showing that a simple act of making your bed every day can improve your mental health. It is a sense of accomplishment and it helps reduce clutter in your life as well. For KC, however, that same feeling is near opposite. And to be fair, for a lot of people, just the idea of thinking about cleaning up the idea of thinking about organizing your environment, that can cause instant anxiety. So what then?

I need to be able to learn how to organize as a messy person. I need to be able to clean as a messy person. I need skills that work with my brain instead of against my brain.

'Coming up in just a moment, we're going to hear how KC did that - organized her brain and her life. And if you're a parent, she also had some tips on helping your kids learn those same skills. We'll be right back.

As I talked to KC, I couldn't help but wonder how her personal approach to cleaning up had changed since she opened up about her messiness and her chaos a couple of years ago.

'In the span of two years. I've gone from somebody with a cat and a husband to two kids, bigger house, husband working all the time. You know, what do I do? I'd never had systems. I always just sort of did whatever. Now I need systems for my home, but I need them to work for me. No one has ever berated themselves into better mental health. And you deserve practical solutions that work with the level of ability you have to day. So if you have so many dishes in your sink that you don't have clean dishes to eat off of, you can't access the clean water. You know, the solution to that can't be "okay from now on, every time you eat, put that dish straight into the dishwasher." Okay, well, how do you think they got to this place to begin with? Because they were struggling to just put it in the dishwasher. So we need to prescribe a solution or offer some advice that actually is something that they can do with the current level of skill. Right? So it could be, hey, hey, buddy. Let's move to some paper plates for a while. You've got a lot going on. You've got bigger fish to fry in terms of, you know, figuring out what you're struggling with. And in the meantime, you deserve to eat, like you really do. You deserve to eat off of paper plates while you figure this depression out. Are you bored? Let's get you a podcast that you really love and you only listen to it when you do dishes. It really depends on the different types of barriers that people are experiencing. Maybe you have ADHD and you're never going to be a person that slows down to put every dish into the dishwasher as you do them, because of course, in the middle of the day you open it up and there's still clean dishes in there. Well, what have you got a dish rack and you put it by your sink and it was for dirty dishes. That's it. You come by and you put that dirty dish straight into the dish rack. Well, what happens at the end of the day? You still have a clean sink, so you have access to your clean sink all day long. You can still make food. You can still get the fresh water. And at the end of the day, you're looking at your dish rack. And let me tell you a dish rack that has plate next to plate, next to plat, next to plate, standing up, equal wits apart, and then three bowls stacked on each other and then all of your silverware. That that is much less intimidating than looking down at a jumbled sink of dishes with the dirty water at the bottom with the food crust that you don't want to stick your hand into. And so just the mental barrier of, when I go at the end of the day and I see the dirty dish rack and it's organized, I don't feel that frozen-ness. I don't feel that I don't want to do this or this is going to take so long. There are so many things we can do, but they all start with legitimizing whatever that barrier is and realizing that the barriers morally neutral.

That's really interesting, KC, you know, I got I got to admit, I hadn't thought about it with that degree of granularity before. And, you know, as you as you say, coming up as some having a real conversation about what is the inhibitory force here, you know, maybe it's just standing the boredom, whatever it might be. You also write that people could clean less. And that might feel counterintuitive. But actually, starting in more digestible sort of steps could give you the spike of dopamine and maybe the ultimate, I guess, energy to complete a bigger task.

'Yeah, I think whether it's, you know, your daily things that you do or just in general. You know, I know when I went out and got the Marie Kondo book, I there was no part of me that was like, "maybe I'll implement one of these ideas." It was like, "my life changes tomorrow," right? Everything is changing. And we tend to do this. We get into a place where we're struggling or we don't like the way something's functioning and we go to some sort of self-help and then we just decide like, "I'm turning over a new leaf." All right, new, new me. And we implement all these things. And then, of course, it only lasts a few days or a few weeks or a few months. And then as those all fall off, then we feel shame. We've messed up. We failed again. And I think if we slow down and go, okay, is there one thing we can do today? Or if you see a huge mess. Well, what if you just set a timer for five minutes and did five minutes of it? Like, you may find that after going for five minutes, you kind of got the ball rolling. And that motivation and that momentum has built on itself. Or, you may find at the end of five minutes, no, this really does suck. And I really am tired and I really, you know, don't feel good, want to lay down or whatever and not. Okay, go do that. You still got five minutes done.

'Studies show our brains do tend to prioritize small, but urgent tasks, like answering an email or going to the store over larger and more consequential projects that don't have a deadline. And we give preference to immediate satisfaction over long-term rewards. Think of it this way: we crave that rush of dopamine from a quick and easy job well done. So to capitalize on our natural tendencies, we tend to break up our chores into small chunks, as KC suggested, so that they are more likely to get done. It's part of the way our brain works. In hearing all this, I couldn't help but wonder about my own family's habits.

If you have someone who who is in your household, someone you love. And let's say in my case, I have three teenage kids, my wife. And I think that I am very different than some of the ways that you're describing from all of them, at least from a few of them. If my kid's room is very messy, for example, but she's functioning and she's happy and she doesn't seem to be burdened by it, should I be intervening? Should I not?

'I don't think so. But I want to caveat it to say, it doesn't mean we stop parenting. But maybe, maybe the messy room isn't an issue. And I think the better approach is to say, "hey, you know, how do you how do you feel in the mornings?" If you're observing, for example, that one of your teenagers is really stressed in the morning or, you know, always forgetting things in the morning or whatever it is, asking them about what matters to them. So instead of us sort of imposing, you know, your room needs to be neat and tidy all the time. Okay, well, if you're feeling stressed in the morning, you know, what are those things that are stressing you out? "Oh, I can't find my papers. You know, I don't know what to wear. I, you know, my phone's not charged." And if you're going to help them put together, like, rituals and routines, the most important thing is to find out what they care about. Even if you think you know, I see you every morning, you know, looking for clean socks and you never have your clean socks because over here and that needs to be on your list. But if you ask what do you really care about? And your kid goes, I don't really care about the socks. I care that my phone's not charged. Right. We got to get something they're already motivated about, because if she can learn the skill, she or he can learn the skill of plugging their phone in at night, because they're thinking forward to the morning and they have this attitude of this is a kindness to morning me. I'm taking care of myself by doing this. That's a muscle. And the more that they flex that muscle with the phone, the more they will be able to transfer those skills and those thinking and that self-compassion and that thinking forward to other things when it matters. So, you know, she or he might get to be 18, 19, 20. I mean, they may never care about the socks. Or they might turn 30 and decide they really care about their socks, but they know what to do about it now.

It's interesting that the child that I'm talking about is 18 and just started college. And what has been so interesting is that her room has always been a mess. She's been consistent in this for sure, but she's not bothered by it. She's ready on time in the morning. She's not a doesn't have a lot of stress, generally knows what she's going to wear. My child, who is super clean and neat, is often the one who does not have the clothes. You know, she changes her mind about clothes, can't find, you know, a charger, whatever it might be. It's really interesting because I would have thought it would have been the opposite. But somehow, you know, the quote unquote, messier child makes it work.

'Yeah. I mean, it really goes to show that our our preconceived ideas about what functions and what's best aren't always right. And I think that if you look out there, if you are someone who's messy or you can't find your charger or whatever, there's this idea that if you look at the self-help, you know, offerings in the world of organization, they seem to be almost exclusively offered by people who are already neat. You know, so this is, let's tri-fold our underwear and color-code our bookshelves and all these kind of things. And I, I love to watch and consume that type of media because it's interesting and soothing. But what I had to realize was, I'm a messy person. I have ADHD, I have two kids, I have a dog, a cat, right? Like I have all these things. I can't create or I can't pick solutions for my life that depend on me waking up a completely different person tomorrow with like a completely different personality and skill set and life and energy and time needs. Like, I need to be able to learn how to organize as a messy person. I need to be able to clean as a messy person. I need skills that work with my brain instead of against my brain.

You do make the case in your book that. I guess there are some universally applicable tips. One of them you say is the "five things method." And that really seems to have caught on. People really seem to have resonated with this idea of the five things method. Can you share what the thinking is and what the idea is?

Yeah. So I came up with this method when I was in my 20s because I was always feeling overwhelmed by, you know, kind of being messy. And I've had so many people share with me that it's been the first tip that's ever really worked for them. And what it is, is, you know, when I look in a messy room, I tell myself there's really only five things. In every room, even if it looks like there's a thousand, there's only five. There's trash, dishes, laundry, things that have a place that are not in their place, and then things that don't have a place, meaning like they don't have a place to go. And what I found before I'd use the five Things method is that I look at a big space and you're like, okay, you don't know where to start. And when you do start, you just, I guess, pick something random up and then you have to look at it go, okay, what is this? Where does it go? Maybe it goes in the other room. You wander off to the other room, you get distracted. Maybe you don't know where it goes. And now you're having to sit there and think about where it goes. Well, I guess I could reorganize this pantry. You'd put it there. You know, there's just a lot of mental load and decision fatigue that goes with that. And, you know, that's when you find yourself doing something for two hours looking up and it makes you made no progress, and now you're discouraged. Right. So when we use the five things method, what we do is we get a trash bag and we go, you know, all I'm doing is picking up trash. Just trash. I can ignore everything else. Now we've kind of put ourselves on a one track mind, right? We're looking for one specific thing we see. The one specific thing. We throw the thing away. We're looking for one specific thing. We see the ones. We see how repetitive that is. So it doesn't require a lot of executive functioning to do that repetitive thing over and over and over. And once that's done, I move on to the dishes and I'm just putting them into the sink, not doing them. I'm just. Because that's easy. Look for a dish. Find a dish. Put it in the sink. Look for a dish. Find a dish. Put it in the sink. Then I do the same thing with my laundry in the baskets. And then, you know, I might pick a space in the room and go clockwise or counterclockwise and put everything away that I know already has a space. So if I pick up my hairbrush, I know my hairbrush goes in the top drawer of my vanity, I can put it back. If I pick up, you know, my dog's leash and I go, wow, I don't there's not like really a space that I always put this. Well, I can just put it in a pile. You know, we're not going to get slowed down with those things. And I do that until everything that has a space is up. And then I have my pile of things that don't have a place. Now, that's really the hard stuff. And now maybe I can put on a Netflix show or, you know, listen to a podcast, or I can sit down and go, Okay, are there some things in here? Where can I put them? How can I organize them? Or the best part, if I'm really rushed, I can go. I'm just going to put them in a basket for today. And your space is much more livable, much quicker. And you have these like multiple finish lines that feel really good and keep you motivated to keep going because you have that sense of accomplishment.

You know something, I couldn't have probably had this conversation with KC without acknowledging something pretty crucial in a lot of households" completing quote unquote "care tasks" is a job that often falls to women. In fact, there was a Pew study released just this year which found that women spend about 2.5 hours more time per week on housework. As compared to men. And that was even while making similar earnings. KC talks about this in her book and has tips for hacking what she calls "fair rest." Now, listen closely here, I've already started applying this in our own house. It's a different way of thinking. It's not fair work, but it's fair rest. How do you make rest fair?

So when you talk about division of labor, particularly in relationships between men and women, it can be really complex. And you have lots of arguments around, well, you know, who should be doing dishes and who does this. And I do more. I know you do more. Well, I work harder. Well you work longer? And when we come to this conversation from the perspective of who's working harder, we automatically put ourselves in competition with each other. We put ourselves in the defense. I have to prove how hard I'm working, whether it's at work or at home or whatever it is, and we're comparing. And so this idea that, well, we'll see who's working harder and then, you know, divvy up all the domestic care on top of that according to who's working harder, who's working not as hard, there's always a loser, Right? Instead, I want us to look at, you know, the work doesn't have to be equal, but the rest needs to be fair. This is particularly important for relationships where you have children. Because you often have someone that kind of falls into that default parenting role and, you know, you have someone that's usually the one who is getting the kids after school or the one that's always up in the middle of the night or the one that maybe is even staying home full time with children. And you just can't compare who's working harder to who should have to do what. The truth is, regardless, even if you could compare them, even if one of you, quote unquote, isn't working as hard as the other. They still deserve rest. It doesn't mean that they should have to work 24/7. And when you have children, when you have pets, when you have a home, like a lot of that work is 24/7. Doing the dishes after every meal, making every meal, thinking of every meal, grocery shopping for every meal, picking things up after people, making sure there's laundry. All those tasks are cycles that never end and they go 24/7, 365. There are no weekends. There's no clocking out. There are no holidays. And so you have to divide your domestic labor in such a way that both partners are looking out to make sure the other one is getting rest, relaxation and time autonomy. And so now you're on the same team, right? It doesn't matter if I do 80% of the housework and my husband does 20%. If that's what allows us to have equal rest. And so we decide that, hey, it's 7:30 after the kids go to bed, both of us are off the clock. We're hanging out. We're spending time. We're watching TV. Nobody is going to continue to work, work, work, work, work. And so that means that what needs to get done before then and who has the time to do it. It means that, if you have a hobby that you like to go do on the weekends, what we're going to avoid here is that one partner gets to come and go as they please, make their schedule however they want and sit down and relax when they want because they have a little finite list and it gets done. And the other partner, like, basically has to file paperwork with their spouse to to go out and see a friend, right? Or to to go shopping or to go do a hobby or whatever the case may be. Right? We need to find a way. I always sort of laugh about it with my friends is like, you know, my husband doesn't do any domestic labor on Saturdays. It's his one day off. And I do. And so if you just looked into our home on a Saturday and you saw the husband was laying on the couch watching football and the wife cleaning, I mean, you might be like, "oh, this is so unfair." But what you don't see is like, I take a nap Monday through Friday while my kids are in school. I work part of the day, and then I purposely save hours of my day to do what I want to relax, to do. And I clock out at 730. Don't do anything after that. And so I can look, we can look at that as a couple and go, well, you know, if he's working six days a week and he works from the time he gets up and he gets home late and then we're taking that time to hang out together. Like, this is fair rest. It doesn't have to be necessarily equal in the way who's doing dishes, but it has to be split up in a way that both of us, you know, neither one of us feel burdened or trapped or taken advantage of.

'As I said, some of these tips have already been super helpful for me, both as a husband and a dad. Fair rest. Well, that's a new way of approaching self-care that I think my family, and any family, could use going forward. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, your biggest takeaway from this episode. Or if there's something you do to help your brain tackle the mess or the clutter in your life. Leave me a voicemail at (470) 396-0832. Your message might be featured on a future episode of the podcast. And speaking of future episodes, next week we're going to finish up the season with an episode that almost all of us can use at some point.

I think everybody is just as capable of forgiveness as they are for being fair to others. But we all forgive with different levels of enthusiasm.

Your brain on forgiveness. That's next time on Chasing Life. Thanks for listening. Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Eryn Mathewson, Madeleine Thompson, David Rind and Grace Walker. Our senior producer and showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Andrea Kane is our medical writer and Tommy Bazaria is our engineer. Dan Dzula is our technical director and the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. With support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manesseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora and Nora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andret, Nicole Pesaro and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Sealy and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health. And, Katie Hinman.