Let's talk about housework anxiety

Does parenting make our anxiety about household tasks grow stronger?

Like so many topics that we discuss on here, I want to address something that comes up all the time in my clinical work, and also affects me personally.

It is the sense of anxiety, urgency, preoccupation, and dread that comes up for so many parents I meet around household tasks or chores.

When we explore anxiety from the point of view of thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, I have heard hundreds of descriptions of how housework anxiety shows up.

It is the nagging, pulling feeling that distracts you away from playing with your children, because there is something that needs to be done.

It is the loud, stern internal voice that insists that you get X, Y, and Z done before you sit down in the evening after bedtime.

It is the pit of discomfort in your stomach when you are away on holidays without access to a washing machine for five days and you think about how long it’s going to take to catch up on it all

(And if that last one sounds oddly specific, it is because it is my most recent personal experience of housework anxiety!)

Of course not every parent experiences this, and of course it is also possible to experience task-based anxiety without being a parent.

But in my clinical work with many many parents - primarily mothers - this has been a consistent theme.

And as psychologists, it is an area that we need to approach with balance. Engaging in household chores and tasks can be positive for and even protective of mental health. It can give us a sense of achievement and mastery, and can allow us to feel more in control of our environment. When working with people with low mood one of the interventions we often utilise is ‘behavioural activation’, where we encourage people to consider very small active tasks that they might feel able with to begin re-engaging in with support, and these often centre around household tasks (along with other activities). And also, it is a reality for most parents that there are certain tasks and jobs that do simply need to be done.

Yet there feels to be a distinct difference in the way that many of the parents I work with - and indeed the way I myself - relate to household tasks. Where the idea of things not being done feels psychologically intolerable.

The question that I will often explore is this: “what is the core fear underlying this?”

In other words, if you were not able to complete the household tasks in the way that you would like or in the timeframe that you have set for yourself, what might that mean for you or about you?

If I apply that exploration to my own example about not being able to wash clothes while on holidays, immediately I can recognise a fear coming up about losing control of my environment. And if I were to delve that little bit deeper, I might recognise that the scariest thing about losing control is that long-standing fears about my ability to ‘keep up’ with the tasks of motherhood would start to ring more true. Perhaps that one of the functions of keeping on top of household chores is that it allows me to feel connected to these ‘standards’ of motherhood that I have set for myself. And that without meeting those standards, my identity within motherhood would feel fragile and insecure.

From this place of reflection, a number of possibilities emerge. The first is that I can recognise and acknowledge that my ideas about the ‘tasks of motherhood’ are actually not based in my own experience, but in old, outdated socialised beliefs I hold about what a ‘good’ mother should be able to do. This brings with me the opportunity to explore my experience of motherhood more holistically, and look at all of the valuable, connection-based experiences that I was able to share with my family during that holiday - largely because I was separated from household tasks.

Secondly, I can offer myself some self-compassion, recognising that it is so hard feeling out of control. And that parenthood already takes away so much of our environmental control (our ability to schedule our time, to keep things a certain way and so on and on). So naturally I would be working hard to find that control wherever I can, and would struggle with the sense of not having that. I can be easy and gentle with myself in noticing this, and also feel a sense of comradery and connection with other mothers, all around the world, who might feel similarly.

This brings me somewhere new and different from the original space of tension and anxiety - not that those feelings have gone away but now there are lots of other experiences going on too. My relationship to those feelings has broadened, and that makes the anxiety far more tolerable.

Sometimes I will work with clients to experiment with their relationship with housework, noticing the discomfort that this can bring and practicing skills like present moment focus and self-compassion in the face of this.

Essentially this is all to say that if you notice yourself struggling with this specific aspect of your parenting experience, you are not alone. It’s not silly, and it’s likely part of a much bigger story about our own and the world’s expectations of us as parents and mothers and the way that this story shows up in our day to day realities.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash