Cleaning not as a chore but for greater mental health

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Cleaning is not just a chore but a chance to clear your mind. As time has gone on, I have found that tidying and cleaning the house has become a valuable escape from anxious thoughts and stress. After spending an entire day, draining my brain of energy and wanting to just lay back, cleaning has served as a way to both get active and forget all that’s happened. It recently came to me why do many of us view cleaning and tidying so negative? Of course, in our busy lives, cleaning and tidying the house is an extension. However, we are too quickly overlooking the importance and benefits of cleaning to our mental health. Rarely is there an activity that forces you to switch off and find fluid productivity in seeing the immediate practical improvements to one’s environment. Time out each day to clean and tidy can also be our means to practice self-compassion by taking care of ourselves and those in our households. Cleaning should be an activity to calm the mind and build companion and comfort within our humble abode.

1) Extraction in an overstimulated, anxious world:

With all the technology and entertainment around us, there is so much we do and can do each day that leaves our brain overstimulated and anxious. You may already notice it in the struggles to stay focused. While you focus on one task, a random thought or distraction in our environment carries us away, pulling us in several directions from the things that matter. We see this at a deeper level in our anxious escape in social media consumption. The constant stream of new content and entertainment has absolutely brought sparks of joy. But equally, it has transformed into an insidious machine for dopamine and disconnection from tackling the real-world.

Cleaning is a primitive behaviour that removes us from the phenomenal reach of our interconnected world and grounds us to the present moment. Whilst we hoover the room, clean the windows, wipe the desks, wash the dishes and more, we are disconnecting ourselves from the wild, wide web. It is a valuable time to connect with yourself and your environment. Play some music for yourself whilst you clean, or get talking, whatever it is enjoy the break from our overstimulated world. Cleaning is your opportunity to free yourself from the frantic world and remember only you control your thoughts and actions and remain clean and healthy. Thus, view cleaning as a pivotal means to escape from wild anxious thoughts. Engagement in our actions and only our immediate environment is already a proven means in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to appreciate our own existence.

“Engagement is the ability to be presented instead of caught up in our thoughts. It is about being fully in the moment; being open to, curious about, and actively involved in our here and now experience.”

Dr Matt Lewis, Overcoming Anxiety: A Self-Help Toolkit for Anxiety Relief and Panic Attacks, p.93

2) Get productive with cleaning:

Let’s admit, for better or worse in our capitalist economies we live in a hustle culture where competition and status is still a thing. The diversity of roles and jobs out there leave us perplexed, or hungry to take on more activities, roles, responsibilities, and titles to display on our social media pages. In actuality, this hustle grind mindset has seriously underscored mental health and led many of us to feel a lack of value and purpose in the fast-moving, hyperactive modern world. Cleaning helps us to slow downtime. As we focus on curating our own homes there is an essence to basic human life we all experience, realising across all these titles, we are still simply human with a finite time to enjoy and appreciate the world around us, i.e., taking out the bins, cleaning the dishes etc. Seeing the room expand in size as we put stuff away, or the kitchen counter-top sparkle or the windows becoming complete transparent provides us with a visual aide of being productive and improving our self. There is a genuine, personal satisfaction of seeing the work you have done and getting the final moment to relax and relish it. Cleaning is universal and reflects a chance to work for our self and achieve greater care.

3) Physical exercise:

Engaging with the present through cleaning as a means to overcome stress and anxiety is also reinforced by its physical nature. It is true cleaning is a burden when there are lots to do, especially for stressed-out parents and carers. Growing up, I always felt for my mum who would be the one left with the dirty dishes to clean, doing laundry, tidying rooms; her physical efforts in the house seem to ago miss yet she rarely complained and sometimes embraced it. But taming the untidy beast in everyone’s house does not need to be a one-person job. We all need to recognise the ways cleaning and tidying help us all appreciate each other’s presence and keep us active. For those trapped with the responsibility, the value of compassion only strengthens.

Cleaning with compassion will drain the listlessness out of us and find a break from the couch-potato mode. There is nothing wrong with binging on TV series and movies after a day of work. It often forms as a necessary escape from many people’s daily stresses. The last thing you want to do after a long stressful day or week at week is to use your last remaining brainpower on cleaning. Hence, the easiest and quickest form of entertainment becomes on-demand video streaming. However, we can see that too much time behind the screen makes the idea of exercise an increasingly distant activity. Cleaning forces us to get off our seats and get moving across the house. The diverse choices involved means there is no excuse not too and provides a firm ground for everyone in the house to get involved. They may not share the same enthusiasm but getting yourself and others to appreciate their help and exercise will make cleaning truly meaningful.

4) Appreciating your house:

While many of us are not fortunate to own our own homes, cleaning can still be a way to appreciate the shelter and comfort our own unique homes provide, regardless of size. Keeping the house tidy and tending to its cleanliness helps us find a sense of love for the space we live in. We choose to not forget about our presence, not trash it by discontent or jealousy of living elsewhere. This is the very space I live in; I enjoy having a house, a bed and a place to cook and eat. These are enough to make this space my own by keeping it clean and tidy so I and those around me are free to use. Cleaning is the expression of care and connection with our surroundings. Like birds collecting the right material for their nests, cleaning and tidying our rented or purchased place is our way to showing respect for the space we want to live. Thus, cleaning and tidying can help us accept aspects to our surroundings we are fortunate for and sustain a tenderness to finding a more homely house.

In all, cleaning and tidying do not need to be a ‘chore’ when we think about the potential health benefits to our mental and physical health. The primitiveness to tending to our own spaces provides a means to disconnect with the chaos and drama of the outside world. Leaving cleaning as a separate activity and not as a ‘chore’ means an opportunity for the entire house to service each other; we discover new fondness to the spaces that are more liveable, respected and cared for through the simple yet thoughtfulness of cleaning and tidying. Slow down and think again when you next go to clean and tidy your house, your role is appreciated.