Clean the Kitchen, Clear the Mind

There’s something strangely profound about doing the dishes.

I used to think that healing would come from big revelations — new mindsets, life changes, deep talks. And those helped, sometimes. But during the hardest periods of my life — years of anxiety, spirals of depression — it wasn’t the big moments that saved me. It was the small ones. The ones that didn’t look like much from the outside.

Like cleaning the kitchen.

There’s a law in life — not written in any psychology book, but it might as well be — that everything tends toward disorder. Thermodynamics calls it entropy. I felt it deeply on the bad days: the mess piling up, the thoughts spiraling, the stillness turning heavy.

But I noticed something: whenever I did something — anything — I felt better. Not good, necessarily. But better. Less stuck. Less lost in thought. A bit more like myself.

Over time, I started to live by a kind of quiet rule:

Do one small thing, even if you don’t want to. Do it well. Maybe even do a little more than you need to.

This wasn’t about being productive. It was about staying afloat. About turning rumination into movement. About giving form to what felt formless inside.

And I remember one of the first times this idea really clicked for me.

I had a friend in school who always struggled — bad grades, chaotic energy, often unprepared. But something changed in him during our later years. One day, he showed me this scrappy little to-do list he carried around. Nothing fancy. Just things he wanted to get done that day. And he actually did them. Day after day.

It was like he had found this strange superpower.

By organizing his life on paper, he started organizing his head. His grades improved. He became more grounded. And most of all, he seemed less overwhelmed.

Until that point, I hadn’t thought much of being organized. I saw it as boring — something for people who didn’t know how to wing it. But seeing the way it helped him find stability planted a seed in me.

Years later, I’d remember that to-do list on the days when my own mind felt like a storm. I’d scribble down small tasks, cross them out one by one. And somehow, it helped. Every task a quiet resistance against the inner chaos.

That’s when I started practicing what I now call Fractal Discipline — the idea that small actions done with care ripple out into bigger patterns of clarity, strength, and healing.

And over time, I layered in another habit:

The “one more rep” mindset. The idea that whenever you think you’re done — whether it’s cleaning, writing, working out, or just making it through the day — you do just a little more. Not to punish yourself, but to stretch your capacity gently.

I practice this every time I’m in the sauna and feel like I’ve hit my limit.

I start counting backwards from 120.

Not because I have to, but because it builds something in me. A kind of quiet confidence. A sense that I can stay a little longer. That I won’t break.

It’s my ritual of increasing frustration tolerance — one hot, unbearable second at a time.

It’s not heroic. It’s barely visible. But it changes things.

You begin to realize that the discomfort won’t kill you. That you don’t have to escape every hard feeling. That sometimes, the strength you’re looking for doesn’t come before the action — it comes from it.

It’s a simple philosophy, really.

Clean the kitchen. Clear the mind.

Stay a little longer. Do a little more.

Not to be perfect — but to become a little more whole.

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My mission is to empower people to discover their true selves by freeing them from the mental and social constraints that hold them back, and to assist them in becoming their best selves.

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