The Best Advice I Ever Heard: From Motivation to Paper Plates, 10 Genius Hacks for Keeping Yourself and Your Home Organized

Let's listen in on a live, unscripted second grade Challenger School class.

They're studying Charlotte's Web.

What words did this author use to describe this barn?

Descriptive words.

Wonderful. Can you find some adjectives in there?

New is an adjective describing rope.

Webber is an adjective and it modifies boots.

Those students are seven.

Starting early and starting right makes a real difference. Learn more at challengerschool.com.
Three distinct all-electric Cadillacs. Some drive them for the performance.
Others drive them for the range. And some drive them because it's the only way to make an entrance.
Three different ways to turn every drive into an occasion. Whatever your reason, there's never been a better time to say, let's take the Cadillac.
The all-electric Cadillac family of vehicles. Escalade IQ, Optic, and Lyric.
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm so glad you're here.
We got something really exciting to talk about. In the last episode of the Mel Robbins Podcast, you and I were talking about laundry, dishes, taking care of yourself, and how to find the motivation to get the little things done without beating the shit out of yourself.
And we learned how to do that from our extraordinary expert, therapist, and bestselling author, KC Davis. Now, KC blew you and me away.
I mean, if I was wearing wind pants, they would have been blown right off my body, blown away. Honestly, I personally think it was worth more than a ticket to Taylor Swift's tour.
And if you have not heard that conversation, don't you worry. After this one, you can go back one episode and you can hear Casey teach you how to remove the shame, the guilt, the judgment that you and I put on ourselves about the little things that we need to get done.
But I want you to stay with me right now. Why? Because my mission with this part of the conversation with Casey is to prove to you that if you didn't get the dishes done or you didn't get the kids on the bus on time or if you got dirty dishes piled high in the sink, you're not broken.
You're doing just fine. In fact, you're doing better than fine.
And Casey and I will prove it to you. Her hacks are genius.
Her advice is a game changer. And today, we are picking up this life-changing conversation with questions from your fellow listeners.
And I am just so excited that you get to experience more of Kasey Davis. So you ready to jump in, Kasey? I'm ready.
So let's just start with that concept that when it comes to getting things done, momentum is way more important than motivation. Why is this so important to forget about motivation and focus on starting the task even though you don't think you can? So research shows us that momentum builds once we start going.
So in a lot of ways, we sit around waiting for motivation to do something when in reality, sometimes motivation precedes the action. Like you do something and then you feel that motivation.
And the problem with motivation is twofold. You know, we talked last time about how if you're looking at your laundry and going, I don't want to do that.
I don't understand why it's important. I don't care.
I don't deserve clean laundry. That's a motivation problem.
But if you're going, I wish I could get that laundry done, but I just feel frozen to my seat, that's a task initiation problem. And that's when you really want to focus on building momentum.
Well, what do you want us to do instead? Well, one of the things I like to say is that we can use 5% momentum to do 5% of the task instead of just waiting around for 100% momentum to do everything. And so thinking to yourself, you know, I don't have to do all the laundry, but I can fold one thing.
I don't have to do all the dishes, but I can do two dishes. I can set a timer for five minutes and clean for five minutes.
That makes perfect sense. But sometimes something that makes sense isn't so easily applied when you feel like shit.
And so I want to dig into our listener questions so you can unpack this further, Casey, because I keep getting DMs and forms submitted at melrobbins.com slash podcast where people are writing in feeling overwhelmed and they're making themselves wrong for not feeling motivated. They're looking for motivation.
For example, here are two questions from listeners who have recently written in. Here's the first one.
Mel, I'm having that moment where I'm so overwhelmed. I can't get to anything.
I've been laid off and it's been a couple of weeks, zero motivation. Or this one from another listener.
after a bad re-breakup with my high school sweetheart of several years i have lost all motivation to clean the house or take care of myself casey what do you hear in these questions i hear a couple of things there's a difference between motivation and task initiation.

So motivation is the awareness and the belief that a thing is worth doing and that you would like to do it or you would at least like the results of it.

So if you're looking at your laundry and you're going, what's the point?

I don't even deserve clean clothes.

That's motivation issues.

Or if you're looking at your laundry and going, I don't care. I don't care about it.
Like, it literally doesn't bother me to wear dirty clothes. That's a motivation issue.
And maybe you could just wear, I mean, like, who cares? I'm not your judge, right? If you're going, I am so, so frozen. I can't, I can't do it.
I'm looking at my laundry going, I should do that. I've got to do that.
I wish that was done. That's not motivation.
What I hear is these people thinking to themselves, I'm not doing anything anymore. And what I'm hearing is they are doing something.
They are processing emotionally a significant crisis in their life. And that takes emotional resources.
And that takes cognitive resources. And you are not going to have enough resources sometimes to deal with that crisis and do your laundry.
Like that is normal and human. It would be weird.
You don't have an unlimited amount of cognitive resources every day. And if you are using a good portion of those processing pain, caring for a child, processing a breakup, being in emotional pain, re-experiencing trauma, being terrified about how you're going to pay your bills.
You are going to use up a lot of your cognitive emotional resources and those executive functioning tools, and you are going to struggle to do these other things. One of the things that I love saying to anybody and to myself when that happens in life and you feel paralyzed or profoundly overwhelmed or you're in a breakdown is the pile of laundry and the breakdown and the paralysis is a sign that you're mentally well.
Yeah, like that's how you're supposed to do it. Because your body is processing it.
Of course you are breaking down. Of course after a major breakup or getting laid off or losing somebody that you love.
Of course you're going to go through a period of time where you just don't have the energy. I think the problem becomes when that's your everyday life.
Where it's chronic. When it's not functional.
Yes, when it's not functional, because you realize you would like to get to this stuff, but you can't even get to the beginning of the task. You're that depleted.
Yeah. And when that happens, what do you recommend people do? So that's when we want to look first.
We want to go into self-compassion immediately because we know from studies, shame is arresting. Self-compassion is motivating.
We see greater psychological functioning with people that can exercise self-compassion. So we get in that place where we're feeling frozen.
We can't get things done. We want to first address, how am I speaking to myself about this? Am I saying I'm not doing anything? Well, is that true? It's not.
I am doing something right now. I'm doing something very important.
I'm listening to my body. I'm processing pain.
I am being tender with myself. I am giving myself reasonable expectations.
And you still deserve clean clothes. So that's when we want to look at some of these little life hacks.
That's when we want to look at good enough is perfect. Because the options aren't lay in bed all day or get up and do all of your laundry.
What if the option was lay in bed for 10 hours today and then get up and launder one outfit? I love what you just said. So I want to take my little yellow highlighter and make sure that you listening heard exactly what Casey just said, because this is an important distinction.
Shame causes paralysis. When you start to make yourself wrong and you feel paralyzed, you are likely in shame.
Self-compassion, I'm allowed to be human. I'm doing exactly what I need to, which is processing all this emotion.
A little bit later, maybe I can wash one outfit or I can throw some water on my face. But right now, I'm just gonna give myself the rest that I need because I deserve to process this.
That is a life-changing distinction. And you now know kind of the emotional feel of both.
One is paralysis, that's shame, and that's the beat down. And we want you to get out of that cycle and to use this mantra.
You talk about it a lot. I'm allowed to be human.
I'm allowed to be human. I'm allowed to be human.
And we talk a lot about like nobody has to be perfect. But in our head, we still have categories of acceptable imperfection and unacceptable imperfection.
What are some of the big categories that you see in your work that people say are unacceptable categories? Like being mean to somebody. What do you mean? Like if you were rude or you were mean to someone, or if you blew a huge deadline, if you didn't show up to something that was really important and now you look absolutely ridiculous in front of your whole profession.
Like things where you've upset someone or someone's angry with you or you've let someone down. And we're not saying that that that was, you know, let's repeat it because it's not functional.
We're not saying that people don't get to have their feelings about whatever you did or said or however you showed up. It's just that like, I can make like a genuine bona fide mistake.
And it can be very wrong of me to have done. And I still get to be human.
Humans do very wrong things sometimes. And I want to respond to it by going, okay, I don't like that.
I don't want to do that again. How can I grow and heal so that I can move away from that? And I think that that's kind of what it comes down to.
And if you're someone who finds yourself in this state chronically, that's when we want to start thinking about accessibility. How can I make my home more accessible? How can I make these tasks more accessible? Because there's a difference between, you know, I'm nine months pregnant for only three months and it's hard for me to bend over.
And so things just kind of pile up and I just let it because I have the right priorities and it'll get, but if you're someone with chronic back pain, that's not really something you can just go, well, it'll just pile up and I'll get to it when I feel better, right? Right. That's when we need to think a little long-term, which is like, well, maybe you need a grabber.
What's a grabber? Maybe like a grabber. I don't know what a grabber is.
What is a grabber? If you've ever had like surgeries and you can't like reach up or reach down, you like pull the handle and it's a long stick and there's like a little tongs at the end that pick things up for you. Wow.
What I'm getting from you, Casey, is that when you get caught in this loop where everything's a moral obligation and everything that you're not doing is evidence that you're a loser and that you can't get yourself together, you get so stuck in making it a problem that you don't see the obvious solutions that are right in front of your face if you were to simply just give yourself a freaking break. Yes, because if what's wrong with you is that you're failing, the only solution is try harder.
But if the issue isn't some moral failure, then you trying harder on the same kind of broken wheels isn't going to produce anything else. But if you go, this is a morally neutral problem, but I deserve to function.
How can I get creative? How can I fix this? All of a sudden, the world opens up and there's all of these creative possibilities. Can I stop folding my clothes? Can I use paper plates for a bit? Can I get a wheelie stool? Can I get a grabber? Can I, you know, can I do a toy library for my kids where two thirds of their toys stay in this closet and they only have some of their toys out and they can check them in and out as much as they want.
But then they, right, like all of a sudden you have so many ideas. What if I had a 32 gallon trash can on wheels in my kitchen instead of these tiny little trash cans? Because I seem to fill up trash cans twice a day, and I don't seem to take out trash enough to keep up with it.
And so most of us think, well, the answer is make yourself take the trash out, make yourself more motivated. But what if we focus less on that, and there was just a simple upgrade the trash can to be bigger.
It's so great. I was recently thinking about how much we aim criticism at who you are.
I got to be more motivated. I had something wrong with me.
Instead of looking at, well, what are you doing? And what could I change about what I'm doing? Like putting a bigger trash can on wheels in the space instead of making 55 trips every day. And where things are.
Like, what is it about the environment? What is it about the way that you're thinking about things? I want to give you a couple of our listeners' sort of challenges and role play a little bit with you about what hacks or mindset flips or what you would want them to do as a first step. One listener writes, in the midst of my son's autism diagnosis, every single task felt like it would kill me.
I had to talk myself through everything step by step to avoid the anxiety for months. When somebody's in that kind of a state, I said this about 18 months ago out loud.
I can't handle one more thing. If one more thing breaks down in my life, if one more bad thing happens, you're gonna have to check me in to an inpatient facility.
I can't handle one more thing. She was talking herself through coaching step by step by step.
What's another strategy somebody could use? We often picture a highway as life and these sort of like side roads as like not life. And we're off on the side road with a broken car kind of going, well, I'm pushing the car, I'm pushing the car, and I just want to get back to life.
This isn't how it's supposed to, I can't. And I think it's more helpful to envision that like, there's not this like mystical place of life where everybody's firing on all cylinders.
Like life is in fact getting an autism diagnosis for your child and needing to process through that and just figuring out how we move forward. There's nothing that this person is doing wrong.
They are using so much cognitive emotional energy to process this diagnosis. I would also just say from a personal perspective that your son's going to be okay.
Your autistic child can have a very happy full life, and so can you. And so you're going to be okay.
You're not doing anything wrong. You are not supposed to be able to do more than what you're capable of doing now.
And you're right. What can we do to keep things survival level, functional while you get through this? And that's when I would say, if this person, first off, I want this person to start using paper plates immediately.
I want paper plates. I want paper napkins.
I want you to be able to throw everything away right after a meal. I want you to, as much as your budget allows, outsource anything you can, whether that's cleaning or laundry or grocery delivery.
I want you to pick one tiny corner of your house that you can make beautiful and you can get it beautiful in under five minutes. And that's where you get to go and sit when you just can't look at anything else.
I want you to make a hygiene kit for yourself with baby wipes and dry shampoo and something that smells nice. And I want you to go on Amazon.
I want you to buy those toothbrushes that are single use toothbrushes that are pre-pasted in individual packages. And I want you to put little hygiene kits all around your house because you're just going to be in the middle of it

and smell yourself and go, oh gosh.

And then you'll never be more than a few steps away

from ability to take care of yourself

when you can't leave your child alone in the room.

I want you to put a laundry basket

and a trash can in every room of your house

so that anytime you create laundry or trash,

you're only a few steps away

from being able to be done with it

in one step, not three, four, five steps.

And I want you to rest. I feel like that's what your best friend would do for you.
What you just did was beautiful. And I think it's also an extraordinarily tactical example of your space should serve you.
And so is the visual of the highway. You know, I'm thinking about one of our daughters who is, you know, just processing a breakup and she sounded so good today.
This is like 24 hours. And she's like, yeah, but I'll be crying probably in an hour because that's my process.
So I'm going to take myself on a walk and I'm not going to force myself to do anything today. And as I was listening to her, I'm like, wow, that's exactly right.
You don't have to motor through it. You don't have to get on a revenge diet.
You don't have to gossip about it all day. You can just take a step back and allow yourself to be human.
I have another listener question that writes in, Mel, personal care. I get completely overwhelmed by taking care of myself.
I hate how I look and I hate how I feel because nothing ever changes. And judging by the look on Casey's face, as I was reading that, I can see that Casey has got a lot to say to this person.
And here's what I want to do. How about we hit the pause button? We hear a word from our sponsors.
They allow us to bring all this to you at zero cost. When we come back, KC, I want you to help this person.
I want some more of that KC wisdom, dropping the knowledge that is going to help this person because I know you got it. All right, everybody.
Stay with us. What are some of your favorite brands? Mother, Barley, Z Supply, ours too.
We're EverEve, the women's fashion retailer that loves all the brands you do. So they're always here, which you love.
You'll also love 10% off at evereve.com slash podcast. Do we know you or what? Let's listen in on a live, unscripted second grade challenger school class.
They're studying Charlotte's Web. What words did this author use to describe this barn? Descriptive words.
Wonderful. Can you find some adjectives in there? New is an adjective describing rope.
Webber is an adjective and it modifies boots. Those students are seven.
Starting early and starting right makes a real difference. Learn more at ChallengerSchool.com Three distinct all-electric Cadillacs.
Some drive them for the performance. Others drive them for the range.
And some drive them because it's the only way to make an entrance. Three different ways to turn every drive into an occasion.
Whatever your reason, there's never been a better time to say, let's take the Cadillac. The all-electric Cadillac family of vehicles.
Escalate IQ, Optic, and Lyric. Welcome back.
I'm Mel Robbins. And right before the break, I read a listener's comment about taking care of themselves.
They hate how they look. They don't take care of themselves.
And so I've turned to Casey Davis, who's a therapist and bestselling author of How to Keep House While Drowning. And Casey was about to give this person some advice, and I want to read the comment again, so we're all on the same page.
Mel, I get completely overwhelmed by taking care of myself. I hate how I look, and I hate how I feel because nothing ever changes.
Casey, what do you want to say to this person? So I'm going to assume that this person maybe is talking about, I hate how I look physically. So I have a lot of body consciousness, things like that.
So the first thing I would say there is that if that is somehow related to difficulty in showering and doing things like that, because that happens. I don't want to see myself naked in the shower.
We're just going to cover the mirrors. You don't need to look in the mirror to shower.
I want you to get a smaller pocket mirror so that when you want to put your makeup on, when you want to check a zit, when you want to look at your hair, you can do that in pieces as you need to, but you don't have to look at yourself all day long. And I'm not saying, oh, that's going to cure the way you feel about yourself, But I am saying that's going to give you some relief today.
You should be able to have a place in your life where you get to exist without constantly pondering how you look. Where you can have a first person experience of life, not a third person experience where you're always sort of going, what do I look like when I do this? What do I look like when I do that? Then, depending on what this is, but this is a good one.

One thing, and again, I'd have to know more about this person, but this is just sort of

a tangential thing, is that go into your closet and get rid of the things that you bought

because you don't think that your body deserves clean, cute clothes.

The things you bought just because it covers you, the matronly shit that you bought because you don't think that you deserve to wear XYZ now. Get rid of the things that are three sizes too small that you'll never fit into again, but you're going, oh, one day.
Let's address your closet because what I found is a lot of times when I was disliking my body, it was not information I was getting from my body.

It was information that I was getting from my clothes.

It didn't look right on me.

It didn't fit right on me.

It didn't.

Well, they're clothes.

Your body is not made to fit clothes.

Clothes are made to fit your body.

Hallelujah.

Casey Davis dropping the knowledge again.

Say it again.

Your body is not meant to fit into clothes. Clothes are meant to fit your body.
You know, I can even, I'm going through menopause and I know a lot of you see me and you are like, you're really skinny. But my body has freaking changed.
And the things that fit me two years ago don't fit. I was wearing a pair of jeans yesterday that I absolutely love.
They got cute little like cargo things on the side legs. The waist is so damn tight.
And I thought to myself, why am I holding on to these? Because I'm waiting for my menopause middle to go down. And yet I'm sitting here in basically a tourniquet around my waist and it's reminding me all day long that I'm changing and I'm aging and that makes me feel like something's wrong.
And I would say half of my closet has clothes in it that I actually cannot fit into. And it does, when I walk in, remind me of where I'm not.
And I love the analogy that you gave about the fact that life is not like all these little side roads and some days you're gonna get back to the highway. I'm on the leg of the journey at mile 54 and there's a lot of clothes in this closet that need to be taken out of the trunk of the car that I'm driving and left on the side of the road or in a donation bin because they're not a part of this stretch of the road trip called life.
And I would also tell that person that you don't have to care about yourself in order to begin caring for yourself. Say that again.
You do not have to care about yourself in order to begin how to learn to tenderly care for yourself. So many times we feel as though we don't deserve to be clean or we don't deserve cute clothes.
We don't deserve that shower. we don't deserve to get up and do these things.
And I think that when we look at that belief system of I have to wait to like myself before I start treating myself a certain way, it actually happens backwards. We begin with self-compassion and tenderness to care for ourselves, and slowly but surely it helps us to begin to care about ourselves.
And I kind of liken this to, you know, if you go to the pound right now and pick up a dog, like you could pick up the rattiest dog there. There is no dog that's like, oh, this dog deserves X, Y, Z.
No, you can go pick up the most behavior prone, yappy, dirty, fleaa infested dog and you bring it home and why do you care for that dog because you just decided to you literally just decided that you're going to care for that dog you just decided it was worthy the dog didn't have to do anything can we break this into just a simple series of actions?

Because so many people around the world look in the mirror and see a person that they do not like. In fact, you know, in the research that we did for the high five habit, 50% of men and women don't even look at themselves in the mirror.
And for somebody that feels such a low level of self-worth, that they're unworthy, intellectually, they can get that you can start caring for yourself in a kind and loving way before you feel like you care about yourself. But what are one or two actions for someone listening that gets that intellectually but doesn't know how to put that into physical practice? Sure.
So I think one of the things to remember is that self-esteem is really overrated and it's actually not connected to like better outcomes and how you feel um that it's self-compassion that is connected to better outcomes in your life and that's great because self-compassion doesn't require that you like yourself because we can show compassion to people we don't like i do it all the time i would also say that if you were looking for an action to do, some of the things that we've talked about, I think would work like the hygiene kits and just like making things easier for yourself is in itself an act of compassion. It's saying I deserve to access this task.
But I also want that person to pick one thing, one little like weird bugaboo about their morning. And I want it to be inconsequential.
I don't want it to be big. I want it to be something like, I don't like the way that my feet are cold when I walk from my bed to my bathroom.
Or I don't like when I wake up and I have to be chilly when I take the dog out first thing in the morning. I don't like something really simple.
And I want you to pick that one thing, and I want you to start doing it for yourself at night. Meaning what? So give me an example.
So I want you to go before you go to bed. I want you to move a pair of slippers in front of your bed.
Or I want you to move a robe by the back door. Or I want you to set your coffee to automatically make coffee.
And I don't want it to be dishes. I don't want it to be cleaning.
I don't want it to be laundry. I want it to be something specifically that has no reflection on, oh, you're doing good, right? So, oh, I cleaned my kitchen because I deserve it.
No, no, no. Something that literally you experience an immediate, oh, that does feel good.
Just that one thing. I love that.
I absolutely love that. Let's talk a little bit about thinking about rest, because we're in this cultural moment where women are feeling all this pressure to be everything.
What got modeled for us in our households growing up was mom did everything. And at the same time, there's also this incredible grind and hustle culture at work and hybrid work has made it worse.
I have never experienced in the 10 years that I've been

coaching people the amount of burnout, the amount of people who can never catch a break from work or family or chores, the pace that kids are being pushed on travel teams and like everybody's just running this race to nowhere.

And we've forgotten how important rest is.

How should we think about rest so that we don't feel guilty?

We should think of rest as a right and not a reward.

Oh.

Can you unpack that for us? A right, not a reward. Oh.
Can you unpack that for us? A right, not a reward.

We often get the message from childhood that rest and recreation is a reward for productivity.

Right? You do well, you get something extra. So you have to do your chores, then you can go play.
Do your homework, then you can go play video games. You know, if you don't work hard in class, can't go to recess.
And there's nothing wrong with that necessarily. Like, you know, people want to teach children responsibility and priorities and all that.
But sometimes the unintended message is, I can't go do the fun thing. I can't go do the rest thing until the productive thing is done.

And that's fine when you're a kid and your list of things that must be done is finite.

Right?

If you're 12...

Unpack your backpack.

Yeah, unpack your backpack.

You know, take out the trash and do the dishes and great, then go run off and do whatever.

And then you become a 35-year-old woman and you're like, wait, but the things that have to be done is like unpack the backpacks, then do the dishes, then take the trash out, then feed the cats, then vacuum the floors and scrub the baseboards and then call the doctor and then do. And it's like, we think we have to get the whole list done before we can rest and relax.
And that, so we never relax. And when we finally burn out or we get overwhelmed and we collapse and we're frozen and we think to ourselves, I'm resting now, but you're not because people who rest in shame work in shame.
People who work in shame rest in shame. When you think that all of those tasks are moral obligations and you're not going to be good enough if you can't stay on top of it, then if you do go and sit down, all you're thinking about are the things you should be doing and you don't actually rest.
And so you get up, now you're behind and you're tired and you think, I can't do this. And then for a lot of people, they get so overwhelmed and burnt out that they kind of go frozen and can't do anything.
And then they go, well, I must be lazy. I must try harder.
I got to do more when it's like, whoa, maybe you need to do less. How do you put that into action? Because as you were talking, I'm like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, that's me, mm-hmm.
Because I don't know anybody, at least no women, that are able to truly take a break, rest, and not feel guilty about it. Yeah.
So I think that there's been a lot of talk about taking breaks and how important that is. And I want to go in a slightly different direction.
One, because a lot of people can't. They physically can't.
Things will fall apart. Things will not be functional.
And I think that if you are someone privileged enough to have the time, money, energy to be able to take breaks, then you've heard that advice. You can just go do that, right? So instead of thinking about, well, how am I going to get a break? How am I going to get a break? How am I going to break? And yes, we need breaks.
However, let's think instead about how we can get rest by just making things easier for ourselves. So the example that I use a lot is, let's say you have a mom and she's overwhelmed.
Maybe she's a single mom, she's overwhelmed. And so the traditional sense of a break would be like, well, can you get someone to babysit the kids so that you can take a few hours a week? Right.
Great. That's fine.
That's nice. But what if they can't do that? That doesn't happen because then you think, it's going to take me time to find somebody and then I'm going to have to coordinate it and then I'm going to owe them the two hours.
And so that's a wonderful thing for researchers to recommend. But in a normal person's life, it doesn't fucking happen.
Yeah. So instead, let's go, how can we make something easier? So what if Friday nights at this woman's house are rest nights? And instead of cooking, she orders a pizza.
Or instead of cooking, she makes a giant grazing plate for her kids. And she puts it out and goes, eat what you want.
Or if they're older, what if she goes, it's make your own dinner night. And I don't care what you make.
Get the ice cream out of the freezer. I don't care, right? So you find a way to give yourself a big break on how you're feeding.
And then you say, Friday nights are also movie nights. And that means we all make a pallet in the floor.
We turn on the TV. And I don't care what time you go to bed.
And in those few hours, maybe she doesn't get to go anywhere. Maybe she's not, maybe she can step away and do a fun project.
But at the least, she gets to sit there and do nothing. And things are just easier.
There are no dishes to clean up. She uses paper plates.
She doesn't have to do the bedtime rigmarole of who, you know, I don't want to sleep and read me another story. No, we're just going to sit here and watch TV.
Or that's the night we all in mom's bed or that's the night, right? Like let's find a way to make Fridays or Sunday afternoons or Saturday mornings easier for a period of time where you just kind of go hands off, needs are met. Your kids are going to think it's fun.
You're going to give yourself a break. Amazing.
I think that's why. I think that's why too.
And just hearing you say it, my shoulders just dropped. And now it's going to be movie night and fend for yourself night at the Robbins household on Friday nights.
All right. And one thing that I also love that I read is you got this amazing saying about paper plates for those of us who feel guilty when we're using paper plates.
And I want you to share that saying right after the break, because it's awesome. Stay with us.
If you're like most of us, you start shopping for a dress at T minus the thing you need the dress for. And if that's a fail, stand back, sis.
It's not pretty. Gratefully, there's EverEve.
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They're studying Charlotte's Web. What words did this author use to describe this barn? Descriptive words.
Wonderful. Can you find some adjectives in there? New is an adjective describing rope.
Webber is an adjective and it modifies boots. Those students are seven.
Starting early and starting right makes a real difference. Learn more at challengerschool.com.
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Escalade IQ, Optic, and Lyric. Welcome back.
I'm Mel Robbins, and we're talking about laundry, dirty dishes, messy houses, taking care of yourself, and how to not feel bad or guilty when you don't get everything done on your to-do list. And Casey Davis is here to save us from the judgment that we are hurling at ourselves.
And one of the things that I read that I love is this great line that she has about paper plates. Casey, tell us about paper plates.
Yeah, so my mantra about paper plates is you can't save the rainforest if you're depressed. And this came about because I was making a video trying to help somebody in a deep depression about how do they do their dishes.
And I brought out like everyone's going to have that Tupperware molding in the back of the refrigerator. And that's what's keeping you from doing anything around your kitchen.
And what I want to say to you is just throw the Tupperware away. Just throw it away.
You can't save the rainforest if you're depressed. Better that we take some shortcuts now to get you back to being a functional human being where you can actually have the energy and the capacity to contribute to environmental causes in a way that matters, right? We know that there's a way to contribute that makes a big impact, and that is, you know, through your politics, through perhaps your donations, perhaps your volunteering.
But we're not going to save the earth just by convincing depressed people to hang on to their moldy Tupperware and their cardboard boxes. You're fucking awesome.
I just, I wish you lived next door to me. And by the way, I've never seen an environmentalist shame a diabetic for using single-use plastic syringes.
And yet I have seen so many people in the name of environmentalism shame a new mother or a person in grief or a person with really bad ADHD or autism for using a single-use toothbrush or a paper plate. You have a concept called fair rest.
And for those of you that are living with family or a roommate, and you feel like you're the one that does everything, what is the concept of fair rest? And how can you use it so that the kind of division of labor, so to speak, which almost never really works in people's households and in the apartments that you share with roommates, how do you use this concept of fair rest? So this is a different way of looking at division of labor because the traditional way of looking at it is equal labor. So the work should be equal.
But when you talk about the work should be equal, let's just say we're talking about a marriage. What that sets you up for is comparison, competition, and like every man for himself.
Because then it's me having to prove the labor that I'm doing and how worthy it is. And then my husband has to prove how valuable his labor is and who's doing more.
And unless you have the exact same job, and even that, it's like, who's going to compare a corporate attorney to an author or a stay-at-home mom? Like you can't, you know, a coal miner to a teacher, to a psychotherapist, to a, you know, a doctor like there you can't.

There's all sorts of different ways why people's jobs are difficult or any of those things. So it makes, I have to look out for me.
I have to prove the value of my labor and then fight for, you know, only getting what's going to be fair. No, no, no.
Back it up. It doesn't actually matter whether the work is equal.
It matters whether the rest is fair and to make the rest fair it might be that one person's going to be working more or harder than the other and different seasons an easy example let's say let's take that corporate attorney and that stay-at-home mom and he's going i work so many hours and she's going, I work nonstop too.

And we look at how can we work together to make sure each of us is getting fair rest.

And you can look and go, okay, well, what if that corporate attorney,

you know, even though he works all the time, he's still off the clock sometimes.

And he still gets that lunch break. He still has what we call time autonomy to decide what and when to do things.
And you have this stay-at-home parent who, you know, has a more flexible schedule. Maybe she does get to have that rest in the middle of the day or something.
But she's also doing care tasks which are cyclical in nature. They never stop.
They never stop. She's always on call.
She's always on call.

And so it might be that they need to have a conversation about,

on Saturdays, you be the default parent. You be the one that changes the diapers and makes the

dinners and listens for the fights and does those things. And on Sundays, I'll be the default parent.
And on, you know, when you're not the default parent, you get to just exist in your home. You get to go read a book.
You get to do this. You get to do that.
Now, that's not a prescription. That's not going to work for everybody.
But if you have a dentist and a teacher, let's talk about fair rest. Let's talk about both of us deserve at certain point at night to clock out.
I love that. We both deserve a functional house, but everyone deserves to clock out of home labor and out of house labor.
It shouldn't be the case that one person spends most of their time facilitating the life of the other?

Whoa.

and what I liked best about what you said because you once again flipped the paradigm

is that for most of us

that are struggling with division of labor

in our relationships and households,

we're in a deadlock and a fight

about the importance of the work that you're doing, justifying that you need time off. And when I started my career, this part of my career and my speaking business really took off, it was at a moment in time where Chris had left the restaurant business, and he was what we started calling the first call parent, which meant he was the first person on the list at school that got called when there was something going on.
And he was a stay-at-home dad. And what I noticed was very interesting.
As I took on the role of primary and solo breadwinner, I also took on the gender stereotype of feeling like my work was more important. And here I had been the first call parent for over a decade.
And yet now that I'm making the money and I'm doing all the things and I'm out and I'm traveling and I'm working and I'm bringing home the bank and I'm doing all this stuff, I, as a woman, valued my contribution as much more than what my husband was doing by taking care of the kids. And we would have all of these battles about, you know, I need time, but you've been out and I haven't had a break.

But we were in the non-stereotypical gender roles in our marriage. And I found it extremely enlightening how work out of the house or the type of work that you do makes you think you deserve more.
Yeah. and by making the conversation about rest

because we all believe that and can see that we deserve rest. And in talking about the fact that when you're the first call parents, you're in a never-ending cycle.
There is no lunch break. There is no time off while somebody's taking a nap because you're probably trying to fold laundry.
You'd need rest. And so by talking about it in this way, it actually brings compassion

instead of competition into it. I love that.
I love that. I love that.

There's been a lot of talk on my TikTok channel about division of labor and especially this idea

of, well, if I bring home the bills, you know, that they should be taking care of everything else.

I think that's a big difference between a couple saying, hey, this is how much I work. And here are the things that need to get done.
And how can we divide these so that you and I have the maximum amount of free time it's not about what do I deserve what I like I shouldn't have to take out the trash because I did xyz it's if I take out the trash right now while he's doing bedtime then we'll both get to hang out afterwards it's not a a tit for tat. It's yeah, it's not.
It's okay. We decided that, you know, I'm going to stay home and you're going to do this.
And because of the amount you work, I'll do most of this stuff. Not because, oh, I have to pull my weight or you don't have to do this, but because it just makes the most sense because then we can both have time.
But the other half of that is having an explicit conversation about what is sort of the minimum standard of functionality because everybody deserves to function and letting go of perfectionism. Like one of the reasons why I think we miss this conversation is that it's not just about who's taking out the trash.
It's also about when one of you comes home and the trash isn't taken out, how do we respond to that? Do we go right to accusatory? Do we go right to you should have done it? Or do we go to grace? Do we go, wow, I wonder if they had a hard day today? I am guilty of all of this. Chris and I have had all of these issues in our marriage.
The one thing that's very triggering for Chris is when I stack the cardboard boxes by the garage door, and I don't flatten them. And when he sees the tower of cardboard boxes, he says, look, I feel like you think I'm the maid here.
And so we've had that conversation. I got a lot out of this concept of fair rest and maximizing the amount of free time.
And I'm going to bring that into my conversations with Chris, because we haven't talked about it that way. What flipped it for me, Casey, is that I started to see how gross it was that I was adopting this very masculine, traditional value work.
Even though I didn't feel that way at all, it's almost as if society itself had me absorb those messages because it's so insidious the way it can impact you. I started to realize I can't do what I do and have the family life that I want without him here full time.
Oh, yeah. There's not another person I can pay.
Like even that, well, what would I pay somebody to clean the house? It's not the same because that's their dad. And so it's priceless.
And so when I finally absorbed that and I believed it and felt it, we became equal in terms of the contribution. But I've never had the conversation about what rest you need.
How do we maximize our time together? How can we be in better partnership? And I think that's a game changer, complete game changer. Especially a game changer when you have that first call parent, because unless the person who's not that default parent, they have to be proactive about inserting themselves into situations in order for that first call parent to rest, even if they're still at the house, right? You'll often have a dynamic where, okay, partner A is the default most of the time.
And so when someone cries, do I wait to see if they're going to do it? And if they don't, okay, I'll do it. If they're busy, I'll do it.
I help. I do.
Okay. But it's not just if they're busy, you do it.
It's sometimes you have to get up and do it. So they don't have to, they don't have to be busy.
That's not the only justification for being able to just sit on your couch for more than five minutes at a time. It's a right to rest, not a reward.
I remember when I was struggling profoundly with postpartum, and I know you had a very significant struggle too. I was so sick and so weak and so depressed that I was in bed severely medicated for 12 weeks.
And it was a really awful moment in my life. And it was severe enough that they didn't want me to be alone with the baby, with Sawyer.
And I remember during that time that our cousins, Lisa and Steve, paid to have their cleaning person come to our house once a week. And it was one of the greatest gifts somebody could have ever given me.
And I also had my parents who could stay,

but just for, you know, they stayed for a couple of weeks and then Chris's parents came. And then I had a very dear friend, Joni, sit with me while Chris could go off to work because I couldn't take a shower.
I couldn't brush my teeth. I couldn't get out of bed and I needed to be recovering and I I'll never forget that.
And I wondered what thoughts you had about what the person listening can do to help someone that they love through a really tough time, like postpartum or depression or the loss of a loved one or just those moments where something happens or you find yourself in a stretch of the highway called life where laundry's overwhelming. Brushing your teeth is like scaling Mount Everest.
What can someone do to help? So, you know, taking into consideration that, you know, you have to kind of look at who that person is to you, right? The way you would show up at someone's front door of your best friend, maybe wouldn't want to show up at the front door of someone who, you know, you work with. But that being said, one of the things that I have found that almost works for everyone, and I know that sounds like I'm just like the paper plate queen, but like if you take someone in a hard time, a giant stack of paper plates, like all the paper stuff, it's magical because here's what happens.
It's already there. They may not ever go out to do that because, you know, they care about the environment, but if you already put it there, they're not making any environmental impact by just using it that's true that's my favorite like gift because i don't need to know their dietary restrictions i don't need to go into their house if they're not comfortable with that i don't know like everyone can get a break from doing dishes and you take all the guilt away by just being like i'm leaving it it on your front porch.
Oh, I love that. Casey Davis, you are a treasure.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for having me.
Thank you. Oh my God.
I told you you would love her. I feel like that conversation was such a gift.
And do me a favor. If you got anything out of this conversation, pass it on.
Pass it on to everybody that you know, because everyone is struggling with this topic and we're not talking about it. The fact is, at some point in your life or in your best friend's life or in the life of one of your family members, you're gonna go through a hard time.
And what's so amazing is you now know how to help yourself and you know how to help someone else through it. I say it all the time that these low moments and the high moments are temporary, but together we can help one another through them.
We can get rid of the shame and the judgment and be a little bit kinder to ourselves and one another. And one more thing, I don't give a shit what your house looks like or how high the laundry pile is or how many dirty dishes you have or whether or not the milk in the fridge is sour or fresh or plant-based.
I love you. And I believe in you and And I believe in your ability to stop folding laundry, to stop making yourself wrong, and to start being kinder and more compassionate because you'll immediately create a better life.
Alrighty. I'll talk to you in a few days.
Hey, it's Mel.

Okay, you ready?

You are in for an absolute... Okay.

Jesus.

Do I have chocolate in my teeth, Jessie?

No.

Okay.

Oh, shit.

Okay.

You corrected that properly, yeah. I did, but I didn't.
Okay, I don't know what that... Okay.
I should shit. Okay.
You corrected that properly, yeah.

I did, but I didn't. Okay, I don't know what that...
Okay.

I should probably start over.

So I clear my throat.

Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper.
This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you.
This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend.
I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.
Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.
Stitcher. What are some of your favorite brands? Mother, Farley, Z Supply, ours too.
We're EverEve, the women's fashion retailer that loves all the brands you do. So they're always here, which you love.
You'll also love 10% off at EverEve.com slash podcast. Do we know you or what? Let's listen in on a live, unscripted second grade challenger school class.
They're studying Charlotte's Web. What words did this author use to describe this barn?

Descriptive words.

Wonderful.

Can you find some adjectives in there?

New is an adjective describing rope.

Webber is an adjective and it modifies boots.

Those students are seven.

Starting early and starting right makes a real difference.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.