How to Keep House While Drowning

A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing

By: KC Davis LPC LPC

Narrated by: KC Davis LPC LPC, Dr. Raquel Martin

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.

Critic reviews

"With compassion, hard-earned insights, and touches of humor, therapist KC Davis offers relief to the overwhelmed. Her voice is warm and understanding; whether listeners are struggling with the pandemic’s aftermath or depression, Davis offers supportive ways to care for the home — and the self. With exhausted listeners in mind, Davis keeps chapters short and maintains a pace that can be readily absorbed. As she provides shortcuts and helpful recaps of main points, Davis throws a lifeline to listeners who are drowning in piles of dishes or laundry. Having been there herself while experiencing postpartum depression with a toddler, she offers advice that rings with the conviction of lived experience and is packed with creative work-arounds that will help listeners to challenge negative self-talk."

Pleasantly surprised

I have read/listenef to what feels like a gazillion self-help books. There are very few that hit home with me but this one does. I first got the audiobook and enjoyed it so much, I am getting the book version as well. I have already implemented some of her ideas into my daily life and I am so much happier than I was before I started listening to it. My house however still messy, is much more manageable and I can actually find things now faster when I want them. She also took away most of that negative, ‘I am just broken’, belief. I’m sure my family has heard it before, “this book is good and I feel like it’s going to help me change”. So I told them again but it was different for me this time. I feel like I’m making changes and it’s not as hard so I’m hoping they will stick.
Now time to listen to it again!

really insightful

I found this very insightful. It really helped me view my mess as something I needed to work on to feel better and less of a personal failure. My mom died right at the beginning of covid just before I started a two year nursing school journey. I just graduated with honors but I found that both my grief and stress had caused both my self care activities and my living environment to spiral out of control. I had two years worth of clutter and poor health habits to fix and intense guilt at how I had failed myself and my family. The narrator/author had a very soothing voice as well as some great insights into organization and motivation for a person who may suffer from depression, adhd, post traumatic stress or some other difficulty.

Fit right in with my deconstruction journey

I read the reviews before listening and saw that many 1 starers didn't like one specific part and formed their entire opinion around that. I didn't relate to everything in the book, but no one is going to match everything the author needed to function, and I wish they were able to see that and draw inspiration from the parts relatable to them.
I was raised in fundamental extremism where all of my worth rested on my wifely duties. thankfully I married a feminist. Usually I do the dishes each night in my "closing" for the day. sometimes I don't and I always tell my husband "I'm purposely leaving those and will do them in the morning". He always asks who I'm trying to get permission from to leave them. He doesn't care. (He is willing to do them but I'm a bit... picky about how things get done) He has been great about reminding me that my worth as a wife doesn't come from how clean the house is, and I LOVE that this book continues to break that thinking error.
Thank you, K.C. for writing this and giving me the inspiration to fold only the laundry I enjoy first, and then just riding the motivation.

Amazing!

If you’re nuerodivergent and hate cleaning, or have childhood trauma from cleaning, this book is for you! I didn’t know how badly I needed to emotionally reframe my habits and be kinder to myself. Highly recommend

Pragmatic AND self loving? Sign me up!

I binged this as an audiobook over the course of a work day and I will 100000% be revisiting this masterpiece. I struggle with what I believe to be undiagnosed ADHD and depression and, being a woman, I have received a lot of the messaging about how success as an adult includes having your house clean and basically all the gazillion tasks of living organized and accomplished on the regular and I just can't do it, at least not the way I was taught. Being naturally rebellious, my current take has been to do very little cleaning as an eff u to the system, but unfortunately the system doesn't live in my house or trip over crap I left on the floor - I do. I was looking for a different approach that is both kind to myself while making it easier for me to live in a cleaner more functional space, and this book really does that.

A lot of it is about reframing chores, cleaning, hygiene etc away from a moral obligation and into a morally neutral care task. It's a task that accomplishes a function and while there are consequences to not doing it (eg no clean dishes when you want to cook), it isn't a moral failure to have dirty dishes. Obviously, there's more to it than that but this reframing of the tasks and my role in their undertaking feels like a tremendous relief already. I am very excited to try some of her tips and suggestions, too. If you struggle to get your daily stuff done with ease and/or if your constant effort to keep up feels like you're flailing in quick sand, this is the book for you. Cannot recommend enough.