I often get panicky and stressed at the thought of the never-ending nature of simple tasks. Laundry and dishes will always pile up; food and other stocks will always need to be resupplied; bills, insurance, taxes, and other paperwork will always need to be redone; I will always need to work to get money; etc. All of these things seem to stress me out significantly more than they do other people, and the fact that I'll never truly be rid of them is almost terrifying - and has been since I realized it in my teens.

When I've had difficulties with similar things in the past, I've been able to adapt by changing my perspective on the issue using "rationality" theories. For example, I used the theory of hyperbolic discounting and picoeconomics to change how I dealt with cravings and impulsive thoughts.

Sometimes, rationality-based techniques can also help. Goal factoring (and aversion factoring) helped me to change my habits for the better.

The problem is that I can't find anything similar to help with this issue - my difficulties with mundane responsibilities. I've heard of a few arguments/solutions that would help, but they seem insufficient:

Everyone has these chores, so everyone has the tools to deal with it - I've heard this in a few forms, and it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Just because an experience is common doesn't mean that everyone can do it. For an obvious example, walking is pretty common, but many disabled people are unable to do it. People with debilitating psychological issues may be unable to function without medicine - or at all. There's always a possibility that something about my brain makes my experience unusual, unpleasant, and - possibly - unfixable.

Just trick yourself, fake it 'til you make it - A couple people have recommended that I just try to power through these chores, turning off my brain for a while. They suggest that if I do this enough times, I'll get desensitized to the stress and everything will be fine. Aside from the obvious silliness of "don't think about it," this hasn't worked so far. If I ignore the stressors, then I just end up getting stressed without noticing until I almost throw up.

You're pushing yourself too hard, take time to relax - This makes a lot of sense, but doesn't seem to be the issue. I'm a full-time student with a lenient courseload. I have tons of free time, but the problems seem to persist. A logical counter-point is that it's not the quantity of free time that's the problem, but the quality. After several attempts at tweaking my recreation, there hasn't been any improvement. The problem seems to be with the stressors, not the relief.

Change your thoughts, and everything will be alright - This one is an interesting one, because changing my thoughts is what I think will work. The problem is that the new thoughts people suggest aren't helpful. Changing "this is stressful" to "this isn't stressful" doesn't change the emotional response for me; I have to come up with a specific reason behind it. Hence my search for new paradigms.

 

I'm eager to hear if anyone here has any thoughts - or better places I should ask. Thank you for your time.

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moridinamael

Jul 22, 2023

3011

I suspect that if somebody had given me this advice when I was a student I would have disregarded it, but, well, this is why wisdom is notoriously impossible to communicate. Wisdom always either sounds glib, banal or irrelevant. Oh well:

Anxiety, aversion and stress diminish with exposure and repetition. 

This is something that, the older I get, the more I wish I had had this tattooed onto my body as a teenager. This is true of not only doing the dishes and laundry, but also vigorous exercise, talking to strangers, changing baby diapers, public speaking in front of crowds, having difficult conversations, and tackling unfamiliar subject matters. All of these are things that always suck, for everyone, the first time, or the first several times. I used to distinctly hate doing all of these things, and to experience a strong aversion to doing them, and to avoid doing them until circumstances forced me. Now they are all things I don't mind doing at all.

There may be "tricks" for metabolizing the anxiety of something like public speaking, but you ultimately don't need tricks. You just need to keep doing the thing until you get used to it. One day you wake up and realize that it's no longer a big deal.

What you really wanted from this answer was something that you could do today to help with your anxiety. The answer, then, is that if you really believe the (true) claim that simply doing the reps will make the anxiety go away, then the meta-anxiety you're feeling now (which is in some sense anxiety about future anxiety) will go away.

doing the dishes and laundry, but also vigorous exercise, talking to strangers, changing baby diapers, public speaking in front of crowds, having difficult conversations, and tackling unfamiliar subject matters

Mmm. I'm with you on all the social ones (strangers, crowds, conversations etc.). I wasn't remotely stressed the first time I changed a nappy- it wasn't difficult at all. I don't remember the first time I did dishes or laundry, but I imagine I was a small child and rather charmed by it all- certainly not stressed (nor have these things ever bothered me). I don't know that I've ever engaged in vigorous exercise. 

shminux

Jul 22, 2023

2117

My personal approach is to do something you like but have no time for otherwise that can be done at the same time as the chores. I listen to podcasts or audiobooks while doing dishes, for example. My framing is "without chores, I'd never have time for this fun stuff".

Celarix

Jul 22, 2023

163

I do have this feeling from time to time. Some stuff that's helped me:

  • Simplify, simplify, simplify. Do your chores with as little effort as possible, per https://mindingourway.com/half-assing-it-with-everything-youve-got/. Buy stuff that does your work for you. Your goal is to complete your chores, not to do work; work is in service to the goal, not the goal itself.
  • Success by default. Make the easiest, lowest-energy, laziest way to do the thing also the right way. Have exactly one clothes hamper for dirty clothes. Buy clothes that don't need ironing. Put decorative items on unused surfaces so you don't put random junk on them.
  • Suggested to me by ACX commenters: random rewards. Pick something you like (chocolates, kisses from your wife, etc.) and set up a timer that goes off at a randomly selected interval which entitles you to that reward. The randomness might help your brain to associate chores with better feelings.
  • Make it satisfying: Power-washers for big jobs, steam cleaners, compressed air, powered dish brushes. There's a lot of cleaning content on /r/oddlysatisfying for a reason.

This next one's a lot more speculative, feel free to completely disregard. Seriously, I'm suggesting the following because it works for me, but my anxiety response might be way less than yours is and my method might be totally useless for that.

Anyway, it sounds like you have a strong anxiety response when either doing chores or thinking about them. I had a similar issue, and my strategy was flooding, exposure therapy turned up to eleven. Do not recommend.

My real suggestion is, when you feel these racing thoughts and fast breathing, is to stop the chore for a moment and stand there. Don't try to distract yourself, because the focus is, for a moment, now on the anxiety response itself.

For me, anxiety is a series of waves of intense physical symptoms like fast heartbeat and breathlessness. There's definitely a sense of "here it comes!" before each next wave. One thing that helped me was realizing that, while the anxiety response can be quite long-lived, each wave was only 10-15 seconds long. Noticing this gave me strength; if I make it through this wave, I'll have a few minutes to work with the anxiety before the next. This may not be true for you, though.

You say that the endless nature of these chores terrifies you. In this moment of standing still, your goal is to dig a bit deeper, to try to ask "why does the fact that these chores are endless scare me so much?"

Possible answers could be:

  • Endless chores scare me because they'll take up a huge chunk of my finite life.
  • Endless chores scare me because every time I finish them, I have to do them again soon; all my previous work has amounted to nothing.
  • Endless chores scare me because my thoughts race and my breathing speeds up.

Or something else entirely! It might take awhile to get a good answer, and you might have to think through many of them until one seems to fit.

All this might sound very familiar; you say you're taking anxiety medication, but you may also have heard all this through therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) or meditation. Again, my advice works for me but may not work for you! Please don't feel bad if this doesn't apply!

Groudon466

Jul 22, 2023

161

Regarding a drug-based solution, I recommend Silexan. Scott Alexander wrote about this not that long ago on ACX, and anecdotally, it's been shockingly effective for anxiety issues that arose for me a year ago.

Regarding an entirely psychological, but still clinical solution? Consider starting online therapy with a psychologist/psychiatrist. This has helped me as well- not to the same extent as the Silexan, I think, but it still helped just because it was a dedicated hour per week of thinking about it and voicing those thoughts to someone. Almost every breakthrough came from me just rationally talking it out, but that was 10 times easier in therapy than on my own because I had nothing else to get distracted by or be doing during that period. That, and talking about one's problems to another party has been proven to improve problem-solving effectiveness as compared to thinking them through internally, even if the other party is doing nothing but listening (or even if they're a literal inanimate object like a rubber ducky).

Finally, for my own anecdotal "folk" solution that I completely made up, but which helped me at one point and might be helpful to you as well: try to imagine two selves inside of you in a dialogue, one of them completely calm and rational, and the other embodying whatever your emotions and impulsive thoughts are (so during a panic attack, this would mean picturing one of you who's having the panic attack and another who's calmly thinking about what to do next to resolve the situation). Then, in the dialogue, picture the rational one consoling the emotional one (which is a perfectly rational thing to do for someone who's stressed or anxious).

That last one, I used for a week or two with moderate effectiveness, and then I transitioned from that to standard self-compassion. I'd heard about self-compassion before, but I didn't really get how to actually do it until I'd gotten some practice with that toy model of the rational and emotional selves.

Nisan

Jul 21, 2023

110

Consider seeing a doctor about the panicky and stressed feelings. They may test you for hormone imbalances or prescribe you antianxiety medication.

You bring up a point that I definitely should've mentioned in the post: I am diagnosed with an anxiety disorder (OCD) and am currently taking medicine for it. It doesn't solve everything (such as the issues mentioned here), but the diagnosis does help to explain why I might be having these problems in the first place.

1GdL7529mo
Are you in any sort of psychotherapy for it specifically? That seems like exactly something that could be worked on with empirically supported OCD specific methods.

maia

Jul 24, 2023

70

I got a lot of value out of How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: https://www.aslobcomesclean.com/book/

The high level takeaway is that these tasks become much more manageable when you establish a consistent set of habits and routines around them. There's a lot of very specific step by step advice for creating those habits. It's still the same amount of work, but feels less overwhelming once you have a grasp on how much work it actually is and experience with each task.

Lord Dreadwar

Jul 24, 2023

72

I have a similar problem. What worked best for me was simply removing chores from my life.

I realised I was mentally comparing myself to an unrealistic standard of chore-completing perfection (brushing and flossing three times a day, showering/bathing daily, cleaning my apartment every night, doing the dishes after every meal) and feeling perpetually guilty for being a poor adult when I failed to meet my own demands. I realised that leaving an apartment somewhat untidy until I was expecting company was completely fine, that bathing every other day was quite enough hygiene-wise, started using paper plates and plastic cutlery so I wouldn't have to do the dishes ever again (this alone was the greatest relief), etc. So, my suggestion would be to go through your chore list, and see which are being imposed on you by social convention and eliminate as many as possible. Be rationally lazy. Make life work for you. Half-ass it with everything you've got.

Ann

Jul 21, 2023

73

The tasks you are talking about are known in caretaking and occupational therapy as Instrumental Activities of Daily Living. Many people do find them difficult to manage independently.

Seeking out occupational therapy may be helpful. Interventions you might pursue with or without their help include skills training (practicing the task to gain confidence with it, or learning easier ways to do the task), modifying your living environment and making use of tools that help you carry them out with less friction, and looking further into training cognitive skills that help with the task. You might also consider screening for any psychiatric conditions that may make this an additional challenge and look into any useful treatments or management associated with anything you find.

This is very interesting; thank you for this. Are you an occupational therapist?

1Ann9mo
I am not, but have had some.
1Benjamin Hendricks9mo
Good to know. I was asking because my cursory research suggests that it may be oriented towards older people, or others who may be in more need than me. If it's not too much to ask, what were the circumstances around your using OT?
3Ann9mo
Around middle and highschool, exploring various interventions, treatments and skill training for relative impairments from ADHD, anxiety, autism, dysgraphia and less specified struggles with physical coordination and speech difficulties. It's important to note that I would test as 'good enough' on skills I was actually rather impaired on because I was "good at intelligence tests" in general, and was able to cover for weak points fairly effectively with effortful application of other skills. The learning difficulties were best discerned by strong peak/valley effects in my score pattern. I consequently might have appeared to be "less in need" of the interventions from a naive perspective of the testing, but this was an illusion, and I benefited a good deal from trying things out to improve those skills. Occupational therapy is a broad field, but it comes up pretty reliably with aging due to the rather ubiquitous necessity of adapting to physical and cognitive changes.

cwillu

Jul 22, 2023

61

Not a complete answer, but something that helps me, that hasn't been mentioned often, is letting yourself do the task incompletely.

I don't have to fold all the laundry, I can just fold one or three things.  I don't have to wash all the dishes, I can just wash one more than I actually need to eat right now.  I don't have to pick up all the trash laying around, just gather a couple things into an empty bag of chips.

It doesn't mean anything, I'm not committing to anything, I'm just doing one meaningless thing.  And I find that helps.

Vanessa Kosoy

Jul 23, 2023

50

Some things that help me:

  • Having a proper task tracking system with due dates (I use rememberthemilk but it's not necessarily the best one, just what I'm used to.) Once you know that all your tasks are accounted for, you don't need to stress about forgetting something. You should be "stateless", your brain occupied by whatever you are doing at the moment, and not by fretting about all the other stuff you need to do. (stolen from getting things done.)
  • Have a dedicated "chores day" once a week when you do all the chores that (i) don't need to be done more frequently and (ii) don't have any other specific time they need to be done. You implement it by assigning every new chore to the next chores day in your task tracker. If, during chores day, you don't finish all of the chores, then move those that suffer delay to next week and the urgent ones to tomorrow. This system makes all non-chore-days both more relaxed and more productive.

simple_name

Jul 23, 2023

50

The perspective in this post has been quite helpful to me for dealing with this and might work as a new thought paradigm if viewing these things as obligations is part of what is causing your stress. If the never-ending nature of the tasks itself is an issue, then perhaps this post can help with that. 

Seconding the recommendation of the rest in motion post, it has helped me with a maybe-similar feeling.

Nathaniel Monson

Jul 22, 2023

51

Something I've found helpful for similar issues is to change my mindset from "I need to x" or (worse) "I should do x" to "I want to do x", even if the reason is because the consequences of not doing it seem very bad. Trying hard to reframe things as a desire of mine, rather than an obligation has been very good for me (when I can do it, which is not always).

avturchin

Jul 22, 2023

40

If there are too many such tasks, maybe its time to find a way of life which removes most of them:

  • Hire a cleaner
  • Order food from restaurants or eat outside. 

Matt Goldenberg

Jul 21, 2023

41

There's a cluster of things around non-coercion, parts work, and coherence that might be helpful here.

It could be good to start with something like focusing, which can help you find the meaning behind the stress, and may give you more information about how to address it moving forward.

These sound promising. How would I go about looking for information about these? The terms are generic enough that I'm not sure a Google search would turn up what you have in mind.

1metachirality9mo
I think it is referring to Gendlin's focusing.
1Celarix9mo
Not a full answer, but Kaj Sotala's Multiagent Models of Mind (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip) is a great sequence that introduces some of these concepts.

Jonas Hallgren

Jul 22, 2023

32

Maybe a shit answer but becoming great at meditation allows you to be with emotions without trouble. Chores then become an oppurtunity to deepen your awareness and practice (more long term but you cut the root of the tree)

Richard_Kennaway

Jul 23, 2023

20

Something I find useful for chores is making rules, not individual decisions. (I daresay there’s a connection with TDT, although I learned this before TDT was ever invented.) For example, “all dishes will be washed before I leave the house or go to bed at night”.

GdL752

Jul 24, 2023

10

Cognitive behavioral therapy for what appears to be fairly severe underlying anxiety?

Rebt in particular might apply as you seem to overwhelm yourself with the thought of the thing more than the thing.

Undiagnosed ADD comes to mind as "existential crisis doing chores" comes up a lot to describe it when I talk to adults.

Unified mindfulness would also be a suggestion, you can use the opportunity of the hated chores to wire up a more peaceful sensory experience and relationship to your body and mind.

Waldvogel

Jul 23, 2023

10

Once you reach a certain age, you may find that these little tasks and chores become therapeutic. They offer a chance to step away from your desk and do something with your body. This isn't really a big deal in your teens and 20s, when your body can take all sorts of punishment and keep going, but once you pass the 30 mark, you may find that a little light exercise and movement feels really good if you've been sitting at a desk or staring at a screen all day.

Also, studies have shown that exercise actually improves mental acuity. I don't remember the exact details, but I recall one study that split students into two groups: one that studied for about 1 hour, and one that studied for about 45 minutes and exercised for 15. The second group (the one that studied less and exercised more) actually performed better on academic and memory tests.

So my advice is: don't think of chores as wasted time, but as opportunities to recharge your mind and body and actually accelerate your mental acuity. You might not think of folding laundry as exercise, but compared to sitting at a desk, it is.

9 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 9:01 AM

There's an analogy with the notion of "toil" which is popular in the Site Reliability Engineering subfield of software engineering. Toil in this context is work which is necessary to keep the lights on, but which doesn't actually improve anything. In some sense, the job of an SRE is to reduce toil; they must certainly be psychologically able to deal with it, because it's the stuff with which they work! I'll just talk a bit about it here in a fairly undirected way, in case any of it gives you ideas. The SRE Handbook is well worth reading if you're a software engineer, by the way.

The SRE's (imperfectly-aligned-to-your-problem) answer to the problem "we're being buried in toil" is to track the proportion of time spent on toil versus "productive" work. If the toil becomes greater than some proportion, the response is to divert resources from feature work towards reducing the toil (e.g. by automating it, or addressing the root causes of the issues that you're spending time fighting). An extremely simple example of such automation is setting up direct debits to pay bills, or repeat online orders for groceries. An SRE performing any particular piece of toil would at least spend a moment to think about whether it could be automated instead.

Runbooks (lists of triggers and responses to guide you through operations) are a standard SRE-style tool for making the toil less error-prone and stressful. To know when you should be performing some piece of toil, it's standard to identify and set up alerts, so that you have a specific trigger. ("I just got a Slack alert saying that the database has reached 70% capacity; the alert pointed me to this wiki page telling me step-by-step how to bring the database offline safely and perform a vacuum to release space", or "my washing basket is 3/4 full; that means this evening I will be putting on a load of laundry".)

It's also standard to batch up the toil. A team of people will usually have a rota, so that any given person's time is mostly spent doing productive work, and the toil is the responsibility of the people on duty. That way, you only get a small amount of relative hell before you rotate onto better work. The toil necessary to maintain a human life is generally not that urgent and is hence very amenable to batching, except for the most basic biological things like using the toilet or putting food into your mouth (note: preparing food is not an urgent biological need unless your planning procedures have failed!). You can batch up a lot of it: e.g. you spend half of Saturday preparing meals for the week, or otherwise arranging so that the daily time spent preparing and putting food into your mouth is as low as possible, and you can declare that one Sunday every two months is paperwork.

I love hearing about the overlap between personal life stuff and concepts from technical fields. So thanks a lot for this comment! Another instance of this topic is the advice from the book Algorithms to Live By.

Also, I'd love to hear more about this stuff. Furthermore, I think the general theme of "general-purpose advice based on what I learned in my work" is very fruitful for blog posts, including LW posts.

It is true that everyone is different. There are lots of ways different people deal with it. Some more effectively than others. I pushed myself hard to keep up daily life tasks for years as I fell into a depression, and it's taken me years to get out of it and the resulting burnout. Some thoughts:

  1. Lower your standards. Or at least, lower the expectation you have of living up to what you perceive as other people's standards. You can wear clothes multiple times and cut down on laundry several fold. You can clean some things less often. Think about how much more difficult many of our tasks used to be, and notice that as modern technology made them easier, society decided (in part) to do them more often instead of realizing the gains from saved time. You don't have to follow that if you don't want to. You don't need to Jevons Paradox yourself into being overstretched.
  2. We also have a lot more choices in general, in many cases, where our parents and grandparents only had a few options. If you find yourself spending a lot of time on making choices about something you don't value doing, notice that you don't have to optimize, you can pick a good-enough default and then just not worry about it, or maybe revisit it once a year or whatever cadence to see if it's serving you well.
  3. Automate or outsource what you can, when you can afford it. Compare hours saved vs. time spent from getting a dishwasher (and/or letting things air dry), hiring a cleaning service once in a while, using a laundry wash-and-fold service, getting groceries delivered, automating online bill pay, and cooking/portioning/freezing larger batches of food less often.
  4. Change how you live. What do you want your life to look like, and how can you move in that direction? My wife and I love to travel, but hated how taking trips meant coming back to even more stuff piled up. We had remote jobs anyway, so we sold our house, moved into an RV, and travel full time. It's a tradeoff, obviously not for everyone. There's new tasks and stressors, but with only 250 sq ft of space there's a lot less physical and mental stuff to keep track of. I don't have a yard to maintain. I do laundry once every 1-2 weeks at a laundromat, all the loads in parallel for much less total time, and I bring my laptop + hotspot or run errands while everything is going. I drive a lot less, because I'm in new places every few weeks and just explore what's right nearby. And there's a huge difference between taking a week-long trip somewhere, vs. being able to pick a random afternoon once or twice a week and just be in a new place. For other people this might mean downsizing, moving somewhere rural or more urban, or changing careers. These can be stressful in themselves, and certainly aren't quick, but it can sometimes be helpful just to remember that the options exist
  5. IDK what you do for work, but be aware that even within a field, companies and departments and bosses vary wildly in all sorts of ways, and finding an environment that's healthy for you is incredibly valuable (and has little or nothing to do with what society considers prestigious or high status). I switched companies last year, extremely similar job, at another company based in the same city, and in the process got a 50+% raise, 20%+ reduction in hours worked each week, more freedom and autonomy, more supportive upper management, clearer company mission, and happier coworkers. I could plausibly be making twice as much again at a higher status, larger company, but it would not be a good environment for me. (EDIT: NVM, seems like you're a student, but I'll leave this here in case it's useful for anyone else).
  6. Surround yourself with people you can talk to about what's bothering you. Not to get advice, not to get help, not to fix the problem, but just people who will listen. Could be a friend, a significant other, a family member, a therapist, a support group. All are valid options.
  7. Can you make any of the mundane tasks a shared or social endeavor? Do laundry and food shopping and cleaning with a friend or significant other, for example. Or if you live with anyone, you can divide up tasks according to who minds them the least. When my wife and I start to feel overwhelmed by a long todo lists, we sometimes play a game of "tasks from a hat." Write up all the tasks on post-its, plus a few fun things, fold them up, and pick at random, then repeat. Mary Poppins was right.

This is how I deal with these problems:

Laundry and dishes will always pile up;

The more I do it, the more automatic it gets. While doing dishes, I can think or talk about things, so the time is not completely wasted. Actually, I usually do dishes while cooking, it's a way to fill the time intervals while I am e.g. waiting for the water to boil. (Cooking, which you did not mention, also gets more automatic. The key is to cook a few meals repeatedly, rather than trying hundreds of different recipes.)

Currently my wife does the laundry (division of labor), but when I was single I simply used the same 40C temperature for everything, so I just needed to put the things in the washing machine, separate white from color, and press the button.

food and other stocks will always need to be resupplied;

Food in cans can survive for years, so you could e.g. make a list of things you want to have at home, and resupply once in a month. Buying fresh vegetables is annoying; I often do it on my way back from job.

If you are single, try Soylent or something like that.

bills, insurance, taxes, and other paperwork will always need to be redone;

Luckily, taxes are only done once in a year. (And if I had a company, I would pay someone to do this.) Most of my bills are paid automatically via direct debit.

I will always need to work to get money;

Sadly, I do not have a good solution for this.

[-]jmh9mo20

Not sure if this would be possible or helpful for you. I'm wondering if the source of the anxiety is volume of day to day demands or just the existence of the various demands. Nor do I know about your social or living arrangement.

That said, if it's about volume, and you are living with others or have a close group of friends near by, you might be able to find a way to distribute some of the obligations. For instance, if you're living with others maybe you take care of one of the bills for everyone (ideals such that any side payments needed for equity accrue to you so you're not just complicating obligations).

The idea might be viewed as moving from a form of autarkic living (you take on all your obligations) into some form of division of labor economy where a type of joint production is applied.

[-]dkl99mo21

When you actually do these never-ending simple tasks, do you dislike/suffer-from the process itself? Or is this just the stress of having to do them sometime, when you're not doing them?
(Sorry if you already explained this, but it's not very clear from the question)

Good question. Often, it's both. I will be stressed during a task (e.g. racing thoughts and fast breathing while shopping, or planning to shop) and if I think about it while doing something else (e.g. watching a movie with my wife and something reminds me that I need to fold laundry).

While not really answering your question, reading the description for the problem you're having brought this exploration / taxonomy of okay-ness to mind.

[+][comment deleted]9mo20