Doing Dishes Relieves Stress- If You Do It Right

Household chores are generally seen as a boring, sometimes inconvenient part of life, but researchers at Florida State University found doing the dishes can be used as an informal contemplative practice that eases the mind. Before they started, half of the students read a short mindfulness dishwashing passage and the other half read a short descriptive dishwashing passage. They were told to really smell the soap and sense the water temperature. This means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. “At first glance, that might seem a little silly”. The fact that I am standing there and washing is a wondrous reality.

Hanh’s passage instructed the reader to explore mindfulness through a mundane everyday activity, ultimately transforming it into a calming stress reliever.

Caveat: It isn’t clear if washing dirty dishes would produce the same results, researchers said. Not only that, but the participants who didn’t practice mindfulness didn’t reap any benefits. Mindfulness-based stress reduction was adapted as a treatment routine in 1979 and has been implemented in over 250 hospitals across the United States.

They expected to find that people “receiving mindful dishwashing instruction would evidence greater state of mindfulness, attention awareness and positive affect, as well as reduce negative affect and lead to over-estimations of time spent dish washing”. You may feel tempted to leave the dished behind, piling in sink until next morning but the scientists believe that its helps you release stress and it is actually healthy to do house chores, as reported by Daily Mail. The subjects gave their interpretations of the readings verbally and in writing, and then each washed 18 clean dishes. Since the activity promotes mindfulness, it offers increased mental stimulation as compared to control group experiments.