Doing the Dishes: Bad for Relationships, Good for Writing
One of the paradoxes of the creative mind is that it often functions best when it’s trying the least. Witness the fact that we get some of our finest ideas performing the most mundane of activities, like showering, exercising, and washing the dishes.
But before you rush to the kitchen sink to work up some suds in the hope of stirring your creative juices, consider this: an upcoming report suggest that doing the dishes can be harmful to social relationships.
At least, under certain circumstances: first, that the dishes in question are being washed in a household headed by two persons, and second, that the responsibility for completing this chore falls predominantly to one individual.
According to the study, the downsides can be particularly egregious should the designated dishwasher happen to be female. So sayeth Daniel Carlson, lead author of the report, who writes: “Women who found themselves doing the lion’s share of dishwashing reported significantly more relationship discord, lower relationship satisfaction, and less sexual satisfaction than women who split the dishes with their partner.”
Interestingly, the percent of partners reporting relationship dissatisfaction is highest in households with lopsided dishwashing duty than in any other category of common domestic chore. The author speculates that the statistic stems from the fact that sharing responsibility for the task is now more widely expected in our culture than other types of housework. The greater the expectation, the thinking goes, the more likely resentment will flow when someone in the relationship fails to meet it.
Dishwashing and Cognition
While I’m all for gender equality and an equitable shouldering of responsibilities around the home, I would caution any fellow creatives who currently assume the mantle of dishwasher from relinquishing their time at the sink in the name of these laudable goals.
The reason is this: performing mindless chores is actually a highly effective method for generating valuable ideas and creative insights.
It‘s all because of how our brain works.
In simple terms, we think in two different ways: focused and unfocused. Focused thinking is just what it sounds like — a form of mental processing that demands conscious attention. Balancing your checkbook, memorizing the Gettysburg Address, and proofreading a manuscript are examples of focused, “heads down” work.
Unfocused thinking is the opposite. Every time you indulge yourself in a daydream about your future success as a writer, or find your mind has wandered into subject areas that have nothing to do with the paragraph you’ve been laboring to compose for the last half hour, you’re engaged in undirected cognition.
Now, think about your mental bandwidth as a finite resource. You could devote nearly the entirety of that bandwidth to concentrated thinking, such as when a deer suddenly darts out in front of your car while speeding down a country road. Alternatively, you could allocate the bulk of your cognitive capacity to randomized thought, such as naturally occurs when you’re in a state of extreme grogginess just before or after sleep.
Or, your could divide that bandwidth between the two by doing something like washing the dishes.
The Power of Hybrid Thinking
What is it about doing the dishes that allows for both focused and unfocused thinking to occur simultaneously, and how does that promote creativity? Just this: the act of washing dishes is so habitual and requires such little manual dexterity that you don’t have to invest a great deal of conscious attention to do it. That frees up the greater part of your mental bandwith to indulge in unfocused, back-of-mind thinking. Since many of our formative creative ideas emanate from this part of our consciousness — especially when they’ve been incubating behind the scenes for a while — we have a greater likelihood of having them rise to the fore when we’re engaged in low-skill household chores.
Incidentally, the metaphor of back of mind is no accident. Neurologists tracking brain activity in subjects engaged in various types of creative activities have found lower activity in the frontal part of our brains that are known to regulate executive functions, which involve conscious decision making, among other tasks. This suggests that other areas of the brain, such as might physically reside behind our frontal lobes, constitute the locus of de-focused attention and generative idea formation.
Managing the Dilemma
This is all well and good, but it leaves an important question unanswered: how do you optimize the creatively catalyzing effect of dishwashing without taking on the whole burden yourself, thereby potentially damaging your relationship with your partner, spouse, or roommate?
Easy — agree to split the task, while searching out other domestic and personal activities that enable hybrid thinking. There are plenty of them, including the aforementioned showering and exercising, as well as cleaning and dusting, vacuuming, tending to plants and gardens, doing the laundry, taking out the garbage, buying and putting away the groceries, and caring for pets. With newfound sources of inspiration and insight at your disposal, you may never be bereft of good ideas again.
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