132. Drowning in family chaos? Here's what actually helps.

If your home feels endlessly chaotic — toys everywhere, dishes piling up, laundry that never ends — and it leaves you feeling overstimulated, irritable, or ashamed, you’re not alone. In this episode, I break down why this experience has nothing to do with personal failure or not “handling it well enough,” and everything to do with how your nervous system responds to visual clutter, mental load, and chronic overstimulation. We’ll look at the neuroscience behind why mess feels so overwhelming (especially for moms), why your partner may genuinely experience the same space differently, and how your thoughts about the mess can either intensify shame or create relief. I’ll also walk you through practical, compassionate steps to protect your nervous system — without chasing perfection or tying your worth to clean countertops.

If you'd like to get the show notes for this episode, head to:

 https://leighgermann.com

Transcript

Why Mess Feels So Overwhelming

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If the constant mess in your house leaves you feeling overwhelmed, snappy, and like you're failing at something everyone else seems to handle just fine, this episode is for you. Today, we're talking about why household chaos is not a personal flaw and often very much a nervous system response to real cognitive overload. This is Leadership Parenting: How to Handle Family Chaos and Clutter. Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it's what we want for our kids, but it's also what we need for ourselves. My name is Lee German. I'm a therapist and I'm a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way. Hello, friends. Welcome back to Leadership Parenting. Today we are answering another question that I got from a listener. And actually, I get this question a lot, so I'm excited to read it. I feel like I'm drowning in the daily mess of our house. Toys are everywhere, dishes pile up, laundry's never ending. I know it's just stuff, but by the end of the day, I'm completely overwhelmed and snapping at everyone. My husband doesn't seem bothered by it all, which makes me feel like I'm the problem. Is there something wrong with me that I can't handle normal family chaos? Okay. Anybody recognize anything familiar to you in that question? Gosh, as I read that, I kind of thought, I've been there so many times. And even on the daily, I'll have moments where I might feel that way. So, first, let's just acknowledge there is nothing wrong with you. And I want to spend this episode explaining exactly why that's true. Because what you're experiencing is not a character flaw. There's not like it's the problems on your end, some failure on your part. I really think that's your nervous system responding to what we call chronic visual and cognitive overload. Now, is that kind of a scientific answer for this question? I want to be able to back that up with you because I think once you understand that your nervous system is actually responding to the things going on around you, that will help you get out of that feeling like something's wrong with you. And especially when we can start to understand that your nervous system is trying to protect you. So I want to break this down and figure out what's really happening and what you can do about it. In order to do that, we kind of have to look at what I call the science of overwhelm. It's not just what I call it, it's what the researchers call it. Because when you walk into a room full of, say, clutter, and I'm gonna use the word clutter because I think that's a great name for what we experience when we live in a family that has stuff. I mean, I have, I create my own clutter for just me. But when I had five kids at home, my mom lived with us for a while, my husband, me, and a dog, there was a lot of stuff. Even if we tried to cut down in the amount of things that each of us had, with that many people, we would each have even small piles of things that we were working with or dealing with, whether that's pieces of clothing, whether that's backpacks, purses, bags, um, all of the things that you need in your daily life that's coming to your home, in and out of your home that belongs there. And then we can add things like toys and then items that we need for like dinners, so dishes, um, papers, mail, all of the things that are part of a functioning household have to be in our homes. And I'm going to use the name clutter for all of that, but I want you to pay attention to the feeling you have when I say the word clutter. Do you kind of get a little bit of a judgmental feeling, like it's bad? That might be our first step in looking at this a little bit differently, because I'm going to submit to you that all of that stuff isn't bad. It's neither bad nor good. But especially I want you to recognize that it's not bad. It's part of life. If you lived in a home and you had no things yourself and you had no people that lived with you, you were alone in a perfectly clean house, maybe like walking into a model home with no personal items anywhere, it would be very easy to live free of clutter, free of things. But we don't want that kind of life. That's not realistic. That's not the life that we actually have. So there's the definition of clutter. And with things and clutter comes that feeling of overwhelm. And that's because your brain isn't just passively looking at stuff. Your brain processes every single item in your visual field as kind of a microdecision point. Now, there's some interesting research from the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute that found that physical clutter in your environment literally competes for your attention. And we know we have lots of competition for our attention. Second by second, our brain is making decisions where we're going to put our attention, not just to the things around us, but also the ideas and thoughts that we have in our heads. And all of that competition results in decreased performance and often a feeling of increased stress. Because that stress is coming from a load, a cognitive load that's falling on your brain. So think about it. When you walk into a cluttered room, remember what cluttered means? A room where people live, your brain is simultaneously doing all of these things. Okay. First, it's scanning for threats. Certainly the first sorting job that it does is safety or dangerous, right? But it's also looking at things as far as categories, toys, dishes, papers, clothing, shoes. It's running this background calculation, things that you might need to deal with. And on top of all of that, it's trying to focus on what you actually stepped in the room to do for the first place. So no wonder we're exhausted by the end of the day. Our brain is doing a ton of things. Now, why might our partners or children or whoever else lives with us, why might they not notice these things? They may not be bothered by the mess. And I think this is important because I know it can feel so invalidating when you're drowning, you're feeling overwhelmed, and your partner or your kids are like, they're just fine. It's like they don't even see what you see. And it's not about who cares more about the family. This is kind of a tricky trap we fall into, right? It's really more about something that we call cognitive labor. There are studies on mental load that show that the person who holds the most primary responsibility for the management of the household, and let's be honest, that's usually the mom, they develop this invisible work, this invisible role of noticing, planning, and managing household tasks. Your brain has actually been trained to scan and categorize for these things because that's your identified role. And your partner's brain probably hasn't developed that same scanning pattern. And we know your kids probably haven't developed that. They walk through the house and their brain just doesn't register the mess the same way yours does. Here's some research that validates what you and I experience when this happens. Found that women who describe their homes as cluttered or full of unfinished projects, they had higher levels of cortisol. That's that adrenaline hormone, right? Your stress hormone. Those levels got higher throughout the day compared to women who describe their homes as restful and calm. And so this is biological. This is not weakness. This is your body responding to real life environmental stressors. Your nervous system is responding. So what's actually triggering you? Because for most moms, it's not really the mess itself. It's what the mess represents. The mess becomes proof of something. Maybe that we're failing. Maybe it triggers fear of judgment, even our own judgment, right? It can represent a loss of control. It can be just this physical representation of the emotional mental overwhelm that we feel inside. So it's not going to be the same for every person. And I would add that we each come with kind of a preset, depending upon what kind of situation you grew up in. Take a little self-check and look at where your feelings might be coming from. And then I want you to ask yourself when you look at the mess, what's the story that you hear in your mind? Are you hearing that you're a bad mom, that you can't keep up, that everyone else has it together except for you? And that's what we call a story. And we're going to talk about changing that story in a minute. When we're looking at feeling overwhelmed and disorganized because of things going on in our life, the chaos in our life, the first way that you deal with this is by loving yourself unconditionally. We call that self-compassion. And that's another way that we act on that job one of parenting. We do it for ourselves. Unconditional love and acceptance of you that you extend to yourself. The mess around you is not a moral failing. You are not broken. You're a human being living in a home with other human beings who create entropy. Do you know what that means? It's the idea that everything's going to come back to kind of chaos, even though we try really hard to organize it. It's like digging a hole in the sand at the beach. It's going to fill up. Is it going to fill up with water or sand or both, no matter what you do? I feel like our life as mothers is full of entropy, because that's literally what living things do. They create disorder. And there's research on self-compassion from Dr. Kristen Neff that shows people who practice self-compassion, they have lower levels of anxiety and depression. And because of their self-compassion, they're way more motivated to make positive changes. Not because they recognize they're inadequate and they give up, but because they care about their own well-being. They take off the self-criticism off the plate of all the things they're carrying. And before we get into any systems or things that are going to help you reduce the clutter, we have to do one big piece of work first. And that's the thought work. Because this is really the part that makes changes. The thought-feeling connection that happens in your life is where you have the most power. Because the mess doesn't create your feelings. It's your thoughts about the mess that creates your feelings. Now I know that sounds like I might be making light of what you're experiencing, but this is actually the most empowering piece of information that I can teach you. Because the truth is you can't always control the mess. And I probably should say that differently. You can never control the mess because you can never control all the other people that you live with. But you can learn to manage your thoughts about it. So when you walk into your messy kitchen, your brain doesn't just see dishes. It has a story or statements that start to roll in our mind. This is too much. This is proof I'm failing. Everyone else has it together except me. My kids don't care. I can't live like this. Okay. If we were to take those thoughts straight up and believe they were a hundred percent true, doesn't it make sense why they trigger such feelings of shame, of defeat, of hopelessness, of even abandonment when we have those thoughts that other people don't care about the place that we live in? Here's what's wild. Two people can walk into the exact same, what we think might be messy house or kitchen, and they have completely different experiences, all based upon their thoughts. One person might think this is evidence that I'm a failure, and feel shame or guilt or hopelessness. And another person might think, this is evidence that we had a full day of life today, that we were really busy. And they are going to feel at least neutral or maybe grateful. In other words, that hopelessness and that shame, and maybe even that overwhelm itself just isn't present. Same mess, different thoughts, different feelings. That's the important part here. I think we have these very common thought patterns. I call them common because I think all of us know what it feels like to have these thoughts. And when you know that there are categories of thoughts that you might be experiencing and that each of these thoughts has a way to reframe, then you're going to be able to catch them better and reframe them better. So here's number one: all or nothing thinking. It sounds like my house is always a disaster. I never have a clean home. Everything is out of control. You hear those words, always, never, everything. They're those continuum, all or nothing. These absolutes are not true. They almost can't be true because always and never are very difficult categories to fit all the time. But they can feel true when you're overwhelmed, when you're saying them in your head. Remember, we rarely put our thoughts to the test. We think them and we go with them. And your brain knows how to catastrophize. So before you lift a finger to reduce clutter or have a system in place that feels better to you, you must work with your thinking. Because when your brain is catastrophizing, everything gets worse. And remember, the solution isn't going to be found outside of us where we can control everything perfectly. The solution is always, always going to be found first in our perspective, getting our feet under us in a grounded, foundational way so that we're standing in truth and in power. And then we make decisions about what we're going to do about it. It cuts everything in half as far as time and stress and worry when you're standing on solid ground, when you know I do have to move forward and have a plan for my family, because seriously, we things feel out of control. But I want you to get grounded first before you say that. Because when you say things are out of control, haven't we already lost if they're already out of control? And isn't the pressure so high that we have to hurry and get it in control? And if you have children that are anything like mine, you just don't have control over them. We want to lead them. That's why we like the word leadership, not controlling, because it's not possible and it's not useful and it's not good for them or for us. So we've got to check our brain, check our thoughts, and become empowered in how we think of it. We could say, right now, my house is messier than I would like. This is temporary and solvable. Do you see how this is still honest? You're not saying my house is perfect. I love it just like it is. You're also not saying this is the worst thing ever and it's always this way, and I never can make it better. We're getting in the middle, we're getting more neutral, we're noticing that it's temporary and that it's solvable. Next thinking challenge trap that we walk into personalization. This sounds like this mess means that I'm dot dot dot, a bad mom, a bad housekeeper, horrible at organizing, whatever your label might be. And you'll know, because you'll hear it in your head, you might have ones that come back to you over and over again. That's a great clue that you're caught in personalization. The truth is you are whole, valuable, and wise. Your value does not depend upon what your house looks like or how organized you are or how much your kids will help you, or your spouse will help you keep things out of chaos. If you're having a label that you're slapping in your thoughts on yourself or your family, you're into personalization. It's a trap we all fall into once in a while, but you gotta catch it. Okay, all of these speak about your worth and your value. And my reality check here is that a mess or chaos or clutter or disorganization, whatever that is, it's only about systems. It's about how you're managing the stuff around you. Some of it's in your control, some of it isn't, but it's not about who you are. We need to rise above that and get more empowered. Here's a reframe. This mess means that we live here. My worth is not tied to my countertops, no matter how many people I have living in my home. I'm doing my best with the resources I have right now. Here's another one: the dreaded should statements. They sound like I should be better at this. The house should be clean by now, I shouldn't need help with this, or I should want to keep things organized. Here's the reality check. Every time you should on yourself, you're measuring your reality against an arbitrary standard that may not even be realistic for you. Any should you have, you can take and turn it into a desire. And even sometimes when I have a should, I should be doing this differently. When I catch myself and I hold myself accountable and I say, I desire to do this differently, totally changes the feel of that sentence. So we're looking for little shifts to be able to empower us and get us out of that spiral that's so depressing and so hopeless. These are just a few of our thought traps that we get into when it comes to chaos. Did any of them seem familiar or resonate with you? Just the exercise that you're thinking about it, that you're looking at what you're thinking and how you're thinking about it is going to give you a sense of power because you're breaking a cycle. And remember the first part of parenting that we're applying to ourselves? It's loving yourself. It's accepting yourself. It's saying, you're having a hard time with this. I love you anyway. And the truth is, when you're a mom, you're dealing with a lot of chaos. So sometimes it helped me to say, I'm right where I'm supposed to be. This shouldn't be that shocking. Here's what I want you to do next. When you feel that wave of overwhelm hit, when you look at a mess, step one, pause and just name it. Say out loud to yourself, I'm feeling overwhelmed. And then see if you can find the kind of thought that just went through your head. It might be just, I feel overwhelmed, but it also might be one of those thought traps that we just talked about. It's really helpful, step two, to write it down. At least say it out loud. Get the thought out of your head and into the light. Usually it's something like, I'm failing or I can't do this, this is too much, whatever that is. It's really helpful to say it out loud, write it down. Step three, ask yourself, is this thought helpful? Okay, notice I didn't say, is the thought true? No, is it helpful? Because sometimes unhelpful thoughts are partially true, right? This house is a mess and I feel overwhelmed. Yes, all of that's true. But if you walk around having that thought over and over and over again, is it helpful? Is the thought moving you toward feeling empowered or defeated? And that takes you to step four. Pretty basic. Choose a different thought, not toxic positivity, not everything's fine because our brain calls BS on that, right? Because it's not. You feel overwhelmed in that moment, that's okay. But we want a different, more empowering thought. So instead of I'm a terrible mother because my house is a mess, I want you to try, I'm prioritizing the kids. We've had a busy day. I've been exhausted from the holidays. This chaos kind of makes sense. This is a valid choice, you guys. Instead of I'll never get ahead of this, I want you to try right now. This is overwhelming. I just need to take one small step. All of this is from our self-talk pillar and our resiliency system. It does your heavy lifting. The way you speak to yourself about the mess really matters more than the mess itself. And when you catch yourself in that spiral of I'm failing, I'm failing, I'm failing, I want you to interrupt it, say, stop, I'm not failing. I'm just a mom managing a household, and it's just me and a lot of them. It's not a moral issue, it's a logistics issue. I can solve logistical problems. That's a shift from shame-based thinking to problem solving thinking. That's everything. Because shame paralyzes you and problem solving empowers you. I know some of you listening to this think, well, I really am failing, and that mess is proof of that. And here's what I want you to consider what if mess is just a mess? What if it's morally neutral? What if it's not proof of anything except that humans live in your house and that humans create disorder? The story you're telling yourself about the mess. What I want to say is it's optional. When you change that story, you're changing. How you feel. And when you change how you feel, then you change what you do, what actions you can take. And you can't really clean your house and organize your house from a place of shame. It feels like you're like you're giving in to the prison guard. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think our kids feel this somewhat sometimes when we get really harsh with them. They don't want to do it because they have to do it, because they've already lost. They've already lost our respect. They've already lost our attention, our kindness. So what do they get to win? They're in trouble. They feel shameful. It's not motivating. We do this to ourselves. Shame makes you want to hide and avoid and give up. But we can organize or try something new from a place of self-compassion where you say, I want a space that feels calm. I'm going to take 10 minutes to kind of tidy up the kitchen so I can feel better. Do you see the difference? Do you feel the difference? I'm really tempted to just stop the episode here because I think when we get into systems and action steps, it could be really unique. And the last thing I want to do is to have you feel like there's a right way to do this. There's going to be a way for you to feel like you could put a system in place. So we'll talk about that. But first, let's just pause here and look at what we've accomplished. We've decided that all moms know what it feels like to feel overwhelmed and to have things get chaotic around them. Number two, we've decided that this has nothing to do with our value and worth. Number three, we've decided that the real fight, the war that we're waging is happening here in our mind. And that it's important to catch the story or the statements that you're telling yourself and then reframe them. Choose a better story. Now, I think even before we get to any suggestions, we have to kind of reset the nervous system because we've talked about our thoughts, we've talked about our feelings, but guess where all of that ends up? In our bodies. We start to feel the tension. We start to feel the breathing shift. You start to feel the tightness in our stomach or that sick feeling. So a deep breath goes a long way with you attending to your body. Now, it's not an episode on how you help your body through a nervous system. I've got lots of those in our library of podcast episodes. And we will talk more and more and more about that. But just give yourself a little bit of a note, mental note, that it's okay to take a breath and calm your body down. When we're talking about dealing with uh clutter or stress or chaos in our environment, our research that we talked about really focuses on visual highest kind of touch clutter. Rarely do I walk into a room and think about the messy drawers that I can't see and have them bother me a lot. It's visually what's in our plane of vision. This is usually like having your kitchen counters clear or a couch surface clear where you can sit down, or a path through a main room that's just walkable. So what if you just started with those three things? Kitchen counter cleared, a space on the couch to sit, and a path through your main room's walkable area. That's it. Just those three things. Think about how this would reduce your visual overwhelm, requiring minimal energy for maximum result. You probably have seen those Instagram or TikTok videos of moms going around and decluttering spaces just like this, those three spaces and putting things in baskets. Now it can kind of feel like you're just taking one thing and shifting it to another place. But what you're really doing is giving yourself a visual plane that feels calm and uncluttered. Okay, action step number two: one touch rule for high traffic items. This is what we call a system that you want to put in place for the things that tend to be continually dropping in your home. Think shoes, coats, backpacks that multiply and happen on a daily basis in your home. So creating a designated landing zone near the entrance of your house or garage, wherever it is you come in, maybe a basket, a hook, a spot. When items come in, they go there. Not even putting them away properly, just contained. Here's why this matters. Research on decision fatigue shows that we make poor decisions as the day progresses and our cognitive resources deplete. So when you eliminate those micro decisions about where things go, you preserve mental energy for decisions that matter more later, like how you respond to your kids when they walk through the door. Now, does this take some time? Absolutely. How long do you have to practice training your kids to drop their shoes, backpack, coats in the landing place that you've identified? One hour, two hours, a week, two weeks. It could be weeks, it could be months where you're training your kids to do this. That's okay. That's your job as a parent is to help them learn a few systems that work, not only for you, but for them. Okay, action step number three. Let's bring a few more people online here and have a family meeting. Also part of your second job in parenting, right? Where you teach the kids something, not nagging them, but sitting down when everyone's calm and saying, look, our home needs to work for all of us. And it's getting really cluttered. What's one area each of you can be responsible for? And maybe you start small. If your kids are really little, maybe it's just simple. Like you have everybody start to clear their own dishes and wash their own dishes and load the dishwasher. Did you know that we kind of miss this window where our kids are too little to do that? And then all of a sudden they're old enough to do it, but we still kind of keep doing things for them. I love it when we hand off tasks that make moms' lives easier and help kids grow in their competency. Remember, you're not asking them to help you. You're teaching shared responsibility for shared spaces. Action step number four. Let's have permission to lower the standard. Ah, I don't even know if I can say that without cringing a little bit. We don't like to lower standards. I know that. But the truth is, your house doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't even need to be company ready. You know what I mean? Like when people come over, you kind of do that mad dash to clean everything up. Your house needs to be livable for you, where you can be organized enough that you don't feel stressed. Some things can stay messy. Give yourself permission to let it be good enough. Standards that match your actual energy and your actual time. So let me come back to the original question. Is there something wrong with you that you can't handle normal family chaos? The answer is no. This is a normal physiological response to chronic overstimulation. Your nervous system is trying to protect you by sending out loud alarm signals. That's not failure, that's your body just doing a job. And the path forward is not about becoming some superhuman who can handle endless chaos. It's about building small systems that honor your actual capacity and what's actually going on with your family. Hopefully getting your family to share the load, releasing yourself from the story that you should be able to do it all without feeling overwhelmed. We're always going to go back to those original thoughts. How you think about it is going to create how you feel about it. So maybe when you start to hear those thoughts, you ask yourself, what would I tell someone that I loved? What would I answer them if they said these things to me? You'd give them compassion, you'd give them encouragement. Let's do the same for ourselves. Start with one action step this week, just one. Not because you're inadequate, but because you're worth protecting. Thank you for that question. We're all dealing with our own little corners of chaos and overwhelm. And it's so important to know that we're not doing it alone. Thank you for being here with me, and I will see you all next week. Take care. You can always find me on Instagram at LeeGurman or on my website at leegurman.com. The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It's also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.