How to Create Less Stress in the Kitchen

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When you walk into your kitchen every morning, how do you feel?  Does it ever bring you stress, anxiety, overwhelm? Are there things piled high in the sink or clutter covering every inch of your countertops?  

Kitchens are one of the easiest rooms in the home to get cluttered and messy.  We cook meals in there every day (well we should, right), we’re often dumping things on the countertops, and unless we constantly do the dishes, we can hardly ever see the bottom of our kitchen sink.  

I know most of us struggle with this every day. We know we have a messy kitchen but we don’t know how to overcome it. Well, I have listed 5 ways that kitchens cause us stress and how to solve those problems to bring you order and reduce the stress in your kitchen.

5 Causes of Stress in the Kitchen

Dishes

Dishes are probably the biggest source of stress in the kitchen.  If they aren’t cleaned the night before, they’re left for us the next morning just sitting in and around the sink.  Ugh.  Not what you want to look at when you walk into the kitchen, right?

Solution:

1. Each time you need to do the dishes, tell yourself you’re only going to do 5-10 minutes. Most times once we get started, we’ll finish. It’s getting into the mindset that we don’t have to do a lot of work if we don’t want to. Trick your mind if you need to. But, when this doesn’t work, at least you’ve tackled some of your dishes.
2. Play music while you’re washing dishes. Music puts most of us in a better mood. I always do this, otherwise, I think of all the other things I could be doing instead of washing dishes. When I play music, I sing (either in my head or out loud) and that passes the time quicker.
3. If you’ve really had a stressful day and you honestly don’t have any energy left to clean dishes, use paper plates. There’s no shame in that. You have to think about yourself and know your limits. Don’t push yourself to exhaustion, just use disposable plates, silverware, and cups. Clean-up will be super quick.
4. Can anyone help you? Do you have a family member that can wash the dishes if you’re completely spent? Have the kids do it once they’re old enough.
5. Get into a routine. The more you get the dishes clean every night, overtime, you’ll start buiding a routine and then you’ll be doing it without realizing it. It’ll become automatic. Make it a priority to get the dishes done every night after dinner (or before you go to bed) and enjoy it when it becomes a habit.

Related: How to Manage Dishes Effectively

Meal Planning

Hearing, “what’s for dinner”, is another big source of stress on us.  If nothing is planned, we’re left scrambling to figure something out or it will mean another night of take-out again.  So how’d do we overcome this: meal planning.

Solution:

1. Figure out what type of person you are, what works best with your personality. There are a few ways to meal plan.
2. Stick with it. Whichever way you decide to meal plan, keep with it. After some time, you’ll get used to it and it will become more like a habit.
3. Keep your recipes organized. I use Evernote to store all of my recipes so I can quickly see what I want to make for the week. I’m not searching all around for my recipes either on my phone somewhere or in a recipe binder. They’re all in one place and I love it!

Related: 7 Reasons Why You Need to Meal Plan

Dishwasher

If a dirty or clean dishwasher causes you stress, you need to figure out why.  A dishwasher shouldn’t take up much of your time whether loading it with dirty dishes or unloading the clean ones.

Solution:

1. Figure out a schedule that works for you. If you’d prefer to unload it first thing in the morning then all you need to do is run it at night. But if the ideal time to empty it is at dinner time, you need to restructure when you start your dishwasher.
2. On the contrary, if the dirty dishwasher bothers you, figure out why that is and change it.
3. Time yourself. It doesn’t take long to load or unload the dishwasher. Once you know how long it takes you, it shouldn’t be as big of a struggle to get it done since you know it won’t take up much of your time.

Cluttered Countertops

Cluttered countertops are a big source of stress in the kitchen.  There’s no room to cook food and a cluttered kitchen affects our happiness.

Solution:

1. The action is taking time every day to go through the clutter in your kitchen. Remember, kitchen countertops are there so we can cook food, they’re not there for our clutter.
2. Have a touch once mentality. This means, once you touch it, you have to decide what to do with it. Does it belong in another room…take it there. Is it a bill…put it with other bills to get paid on payday.
3. Keep this in mind while clearing out the clutter, your kitchen didn’t get messy in one day so don’t expect to clear the clutter in one day either. Start small, work in sections, and know that this could take days or weeks to go through everything. That’s okay, reward yourself with any progress you make (no matter how small) as you get rid of the clutter.
   

Related: Clutter is Killing Your Happiness and it Doesn’t Have to

Space

Some of us have to deal with tiny kitchens where we have either a small amount of counter space or minimal cupboards and drawers.  Or maybe you’re dealing with both.  Most times, this is very stressful when we need to cook and there’s hardly any space to do it.

Solution:

1. Remove anything from your countertops that you don’t use daily.  You have minimal counter space, don’t clutter it up with small appliances that you use once a week or a month.
2. Can you add a cart, a baker’s rack, or some other type of standing structure that has space underneath?  Preferably it has wheels so you can move it around when needed.  Check yard sales or Facebook Marketplace for something affordable.
3. Remove everything that doesn’t belong in the kitchen.  And if you have appliances that you only use every couple of months or longer, move them to somewhere else in your home.  Space is limited, only keep what you use on a daily and weekly basis in your kitchen.
4. Look at your dishes, do you really need all that you have?  You honestly only need two dish sets per person in your home.  While one is getting cleaned, you have a backup if needed. And worst case, if they’re both dirty, wash it and use it.  Keep extra dishes somewhere else in your home and use them when you have guests over.

Final Thoughts

We all deal with stress in our kitchens from time to time.  But it’s in the actions we take every day to combat those stresses, that we can start to have the kitchen of our dreams.   We can see the bottom of our kitchen sink every morning, meals are getting cooked every day, we’ve worked out a schedule with the dishwasher, our countertops are open for us to cook that marvelous food on, and we’ve minimized what we keep in our kitchen to have more room. 

What causes you the most stress in your kitchen?

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