Rhythm, Ritual & Routine: How Doing the Dishes can Heal Your Nervous System

A Big Life doesn't start with a grand sweeping epiphany. It doesn't start with the perfect productivity system or a five-step plan to get everything together by Friday. It starts with how you inhabit right now. like how I am sitting in my bed next to my cat with my little timer set and drinking my tea thinking about you while I write this. Did you know that doing the Dishes can Heal your Nervous System.

How I’m learning to do this, is with containers. I want to share them with you.

I make no secret of the fact that I have ADHD and CPTSD—hell, it would be the worst kept secret of all if I even tried. That means the usual advice — to-do lists, habit trackers, "just be more consistent" — works for maybe three days before it runs out of dopamine and lands on the metaphorical ash-heap of well-intentioned this-is-going-to-change-my-life programs. That’s why I needed something different, and since nothing like that existed that I know of I built a system myself. I stumbled onto it while tending my little porch container garden.

My little zen garden on the top tier of my container garden

The Garden That Started It All

I have a five-tiered rack garden on my porch. Right now it holds a mini Zen garden, peas, strawberries, mint, and more peas — because honestly, who doesn't want more peas? One day while I was tending to it, something clicked. To have a balanced garden, I have to tend to each container individually. I can keep the squirrels out of the strawberries, keep the mint from taking over, let one pea container grow to maturity while harvesting the other as microgreens and rake and tend to the Zen garden to keep it a magical little spot of my home. Each container needs different attention, but I can show up for each one daily. And when I do, the whole garden stays healthy. I realized my life could work the same way.

And then I realized something else: the mindset matters just as much as the method. If I'm tending my garden with resentment or punishing discipline, or only tending when the plants wilt and I’m fixing plant emergencies, what's the point of even having a garden? That’s pressure and stress and I have enough on my plate as it is. If I change my mindset, though to where I tend it as an act of devotion — noticing the colors, the textures, watching tiny things grow — it stops being a chore and becomes nervous system medicine. I thought: what if I approached the details of my life that way too? What if doing the dishes could actually be an act of devotion? What if it could help heal my relationship with my own life and therefore my nervous system? Chores as medicine? As attachment healing? That's when I started building the container system.

What Containers Actually Are

On the surface, it's simple: divide what needs tending in your life into named containers, and show up for each one every day. Every morning, I open my big beautiful sketchbook — the one I found for $5 at Five Below — write the day and date, then write down the name of each container. Under each one, I write what I want to do in it today and how long I want to spend. That's my map for the day.

I call my group of containers the Great Eight. The individual containers are: Ritual, Quill, Happy Money, Body, Kindred, Wellness, Hearth, and Pleasure. Each one holds a different part of my life. I'll go deep on each of them in future posts — but what I want you to understand right now is that what makes this system work isn't the structure. It's the devotion.

Here one of the sketch books I used for my container to-do. I got it with a lucky cat and some cookies and tea I got at the Asian market.

Why This Works When Nothing Else Does: Oxytocin

Here's what I've come to understand about why most productivity systems fail so many of us, especially those with trauma histories or neurodivergent nervous systems.

Most organizing systems are built on dopamine — the reward hit of checking things off, finishing tasks, novelty, excitement. Those systems work well for some people. But for many, women in particular and those of us carrying trauma or nervous system dysregulation, the ignition hormone isn't dopamine. It's oxytocin — the hormone of safety, love, and comfort. We don't get moving because something is exciting. We get moving when we feel safe.

When I go to my favorite Korean spa here in Houston, something shifts. I'm lying on a warm mat in a little jade cave, or sitting in jetted pools, and for those hours I'm just there. No harsh inner critic. No scrambling to keep up and be afraid I’m dropping this ball or that. Just safety, comfort, rest. My nervous system resets completely. Just writing this, I wish I was there right now. Haha.

Containers, done with devotion, can create that same environment in ordinary daily life. When each part of your day is tended with care, love and safety — when Body isn't a punishment and Hearth isn't a shame spiral and Pleasure isn't something you have to earn — your nervous system starts to learn that showing up for yourself is safe. And from that safety, real change becomes possible, and strangely enough, your to-do list starts acting as medicine to heal your relationship with your life.

I keep my container system in my planner specially designed for it. I open it everyday to this intention.

What Devotion Actually Looks Like in Practice

For me, devotion means working with my ADHD rather than against it. I have a hard time initiating tasks, but once I'm in, I also have a hard time stopping. So, I give myself a few minutes to ease into each container, then I go for it. When the timer goes off, I stop — even if I want to keep going. Then I take about fifteen minutes between containers to drink water, move around, decompress. Then the next one. It creates a gentle rhythm to my day where each part of my life is touched in its time and with devotion, rather than running around putting out fires or under or over focusing on this part or that.

What I've discovered is that this rhythm feels like medicine. When the day ends, I feel proud of what I got done — but I also feel something close to the way I feel after a spa day. Because I inhabited each container fully when it was time. I didn't deep dive one thing and ignore everything else. I didn't have to shame myself into action. I did each thing with love and care, and there was very little room for the inner critic to get a word in. It starts to feel like there is pleasure in the rhythms and safety and peace. If I find myself getting rattly or too-to-do-ish, I regroup and reinhabit. I also don’t shame myself because this isn’t about perfection or magical transcendence or hearty discipline. This is about love. People who don’t have a trauma past or are neuro-typical might do the things on their own and be more intrinsically motivated in many ways, but there is no shame in needing containers to assist the healing process. When I started my healing journey back in 2013 it was Reiki and other energy healing methods that changed everything. Now as I’m on the other side of some of that, I find that it is my rhythms, rituals and routines that seem to pack the same kind of healing punch, and I love it, so now I combine both.

I will be writing more about containers, how to identify your own and build your own systems for safety and to heal your relationship with yourself and your life, using your daily to-do list as medicine, but this is where we start. What do you think your Great Eight would be? Do you think there would be eight? More? Less? What beautiful things can you create with the garden containers of your life?

click the button below to book a session with me and we can work together to create a container system specifically designed for you. Heal your nervous system by tackling your to-do's. You deserve it.

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