The Dishes in the Sink

The Difference Between Preference and Compulsion

I remember the first time I left dishes in the sink overnight. I rinsed them, sprayed a bit of soap so nothing gets gross, and then I walked away. I watched TV, went to bed, and told the part of my brain that was already calculating the cleanup plan to please, for the love of everything, take one night off.

Nothing happened.

I mean, obviously nothing happened. They weren’t going to walk away in protest. They were going to be there in the morning, still dishes, still just as easy to load into the dishwasher as they would have been at 7pm. But for someone who had spent years in a fairly active, ongoing argument with her own anxiety, walking away from an undone thing without a spiral was genuinely not nothing. It took specific, deliberate, and hard work to get there.

The problem was that my standards (which are real and valid and not going anywhere) were running me instead of the other way around. And those are two very different things.

Thank you, Mel Robbins.

I did specific work on this, thanks to Mel Robbins’ books, workshops, and audio books (before her podcast was launched). I consumed every word and moment of her content to help manage my anxiety and many other things in my life. The dishes were an experiment.

The first night I soaped them and left them in the sink. I watched Golden Girls, went to bed, and noticed the discomfort sitting there. I did not act on it, as much as I desperately wanted to.

The second night, the same dishes were still sitting there. Now many of you are probably gasping right now, but I assure there was a point to this exercise, which was to let my nervous system prove to itself that nothing catastrophic was going to happen just because something wasn’t done and felt wrong.

The third morning, I put them away. I was totally relieved but more importantly, I was fine.

I did this a few times, not exactly a clinical trial but enough to teach my brain and body the difference between a preference (I don’t like dishes in the sink) and a compulsion (I simply cannot tolerate dishes in the sink and will not be able to rest until they’re dealt with). Those two things had been living as one thing in my head for a long time, and they needed to be separated.

This matters in a real, daily-life way when you share space with another person. Tony is not a neat person. He’s worked hard at it and we’ve found a balance that works for us, but stuff is out when he’s here. That’s just what happens. I don’t want to spend our time together managing inventory of where his things are everywhere, and I also don’t want to be quietly tense every time a bunch of charging cables are on the counter. So I did the work to get myself to a place where I could genuinely be okay with “things are out right now” without it running in the background all day like an app I forgot to close.

The preference is still there. I still don’t love dishes in the sink. But I put them away promptly, because I want to, without the spiral. And on the days I don’t have time or feel like it, it doesn’t bother me anymore. The internal frenzy when something isn’t exactly where I want it is gone. And that’s a completely different way to live in your home, even if the home looks more or less the same from the outside.

What This Has to Do With You

If your home is a source of ongoing anxiety, I suggest that the answer might not be a better organizational system, new throw pillows, or a more disciplined cleaning routine. It might be worth sitting with whether your standards (which are real and 100% worth keeping) have tipped from preference into compulsion, or whether you’re holding your home to a standard that would be genuinely lovely to achieve, and punishing yourself every time real life interrupts it.

You can have high standards without being owned by them. It takes work to get there, but that work is quieter and more interesting than you’d expect. And it starts with letting the dishes sit, just once, and seeing what happens.