First week of May marks the Canadian Mental Health week, an important event that helps to bring more awareness and support discussion around Mental Health. Some of the common mental health challenges include Stress, depression, anxiety and ADHD etc. There are a lot of implications of these conditions including affecting activities of daily living. The extent to which these activities are affected can differ however it is very common to slip into a stage where the laundry and dishes keep piling up, garbage is not thrown away, plants are not watered, teeth not being brushed and the guilt about not performing these daily activities keeps rising and social media and self help guides keep going on and on about productivity. While it is important to address the mental health issue by seeking professional help, it is more important to realize that you should not feel guilty and the discourse around daily chores and productivity should strongly factor in mental health.
Stop feeling Guilty
Therapist KC Davis provides a new perspective in her book ”How to maintain a full house while drowning ” . She details how individuals feel guilty at not being able to perform these activities of daily living or as she likes to call them “care tasks” and think of themselves as lazy. The usual discourse in society fails to take mental health into account. But also as an individual it becomes easy to think that it is the laziness that is stopping you from doing the tasks. It is time to look at it from the perspective that mental health might limit functioning just like physical barriers do and it is normal for the laundry or dishes to accumulate. While we are constantly rating our performances in schools and at work, daily activities should be spared from the same.
Personalize
Disassociate the guilt and personalize your daily activities. KC Davis discusses compassion, involving sensory pleasures and treating your daily activities as functional tasks. The understanding that I gained from it and which makes it practical to follow when facing mental health, is that you set your own parameters for your living space and hygiene and other daily activities. Not everyone needs to follow a single template of productivity. Start with recognising the limitations you have in performing certain activities. Set your expectations regarding them based on those limitations. Work around them and lastly, the most important, do not feel guilty.
For example, I had a small closet full of cluttered random stuff and paper documents . I felt guilty and thought it made my living space unclean but I did not get to clean it for months simply because I was so overwhelmed. Getting rid of the guilt and setting my own expectations helped me resolve the situation. I stopped thinking of it as unclean and rather thought of it as becoming dysfunctional for me. It was hard for me to find stuff and I was not using some of the things because they were all cluttered and out of sight. So, I knew I decided to declutter it to make it more functional for myself. I made the task more pleasing by sorting everything in organizational boxes and folders. This way I enjoyed finishing the task that I had been delaying for months.
It is important to normalize the struggle of not being able to perform daily tasks or activities due to mental health limitations. Society should not dictate productivity parameters for every individual. Realize your limitations, set your parameters for daily tasks and identify ways you will enjoy performing them.
Sources:
https://www.ted.com/podcasts/how-to-be-a-better-human/how-to-keep-house-while-dro wning-w-kc-davis-transcript
https://www.strugglecare.com/resources/#self
