May 10th marked National ‘Clean Your Room Day’, a lighthearted but important reminder of how our environment affects our mental health. The idea is simple: asking us to refresh our living space, going beyond surface-level tidying. Cleaning is often taught to us as a monotonous chore to check off rather than a chance to reset our environment and benefit our physical and mental well-being.
One way to help reframe how we view cleaning is to change our perspective from it being an obligatory task on a checklist to a form of self-care. For example, instead of saying “I need to clean” or “I’m so lazy”, reframe those thoughts to something more caring – “I deserve to have a clean space”, “I deserve to feel calm in my home”.
Along with reframing how we view cleaning as a whole, building executive function skills can help assist us when it’s hard to start bigger, more overwhelming tasks such as cleaning a messy room. Here are some tips:
- Use Timers – Creating a false sense of urgency can help us focus without feeling the pressure to complete the entire project all in one sitting (10 minutes on, 5 minute break).
- Tiny Steps – Break projects down into tiny steps. The smaller the better! It’s easier for me to start picking up all the trash in the room than to think about cleaning the entire space in one sitting. Goblin Tools is a great resource to help identify more realistic steps.
- Momentum Building – It can be easier to begin tasks when we’re already engaging our mind and body. Try going for a walk, doing something fun, or running an errand before beginning to clean.
- Reward Yourself – Plan fun activities or structure to your day to motivate yourself to complete tasks.
- Accountability – Loop in a friend or family member to help increase your sense of responsibility. You can even pair goals together to motivate one another.
- Habit Stack – Turn on a comfort show or upbeat music (or another thing you already regularly do) while you clean to help the process go by more smoothly.
- Shift Your Focus – The Zeigarnik effect is a psychological phenomenon that helps us remember incomplete or interrupted tasks more so than completed ones. We can capitalize on this by shifting our focus between two tasks (either prompted by timers or boredom) – such as switching between picking up trash to folding clothes, keeping the momentum going if we feel like we’re slowing down.
Cleaning is not innate, it is often taught to us as an obligatory task, or even punishment, rather than a form of caring for ourselves. Tracking our habits by using an app (‘Finch’ is one of my favorites) can help us tackle small tasks each day to avoid ‘doom piles’ of laundry or big cleaning projects building up in the future.
Overall, this boils down to grace. We cannot start a sustainable habit through shame or self-hatred. Much like how ‘panic cleaning’ before guests arrive doesn’t help us maintain cleaning habits in the future.
Therapist KC Davis beautifully describes how we can take the shame away from the concept of clutter and cleaning. Be kind to yourself, and know that it’s a process.
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