Cluttered Home, Anxious Mom: Why It Makes Perfect Sense to Live in a Clean Environment

Are you a person who feels overwhelmed and finds it hard to function when things around you are far from being in order? Well, welcome to the club! There are many of us, and we feel exactly the same. Moreover, there is a scientific proof of why people find it hard to think, work and live in clutter.

Rush of everyday life makes us all to look desperately for some space, being it personal space in order to spend some time away from your close ones or literal space to move around our own houses. Unfortunately, quite often it becomes way too far from what we would like to get, and one day we find ourselves stuck in clutter that drags away out energy, ability to create and even fulfill our regular tasks.

Fortunately, psychologists have managed to find scientific explanation of clutter being such a big, if not a major one, obstacle in performing our daily duties and enjoying our lives.

According to Sherrie Bourg Carter, the trick clutter plays with us is that it significantly slows down our speed of doing things as well as general well-being, with us not even realizing this. We are much more likely to attribute sudden drop in daily performance to whatever else rather then to our home space being stuffed with things we’ve long forgotten of but can’t find enough resources to clean the mess up. What are other benefits of living it clean?

Maintaining physical health

A study conducted by researchers from Indiana University has tracked physical health of 998 African Americans aged 45 to 65 years old, which is a category exposed to higher risk of cardiovascular issues. People who’ve devoted some time and, inevitably, physical effort to cleaning their houses have shown to be fitter and more active in general in their lives than those who made peace with mess.

Better sleeping

This may sound funny, but how you leave your bed in the morning does matter. National Sleep Foundation, having conducted a respective survey, has concluded that those who make their beds are 19 percent more likely to estimate their night’s sleep as good and resource-restoring. The survey participants have also noted the use of clean sheets in better sleeping, due to the feeling of comfort and self-care this gives to them.

Better ability to concentrate on things

As Princeton researchers have found, cluttered space may have its big part in our capacity to focus. Specifically, they have studied reaction of our visual cortex to various stimuli in different circumstances and concluded that environment stuffed with objects that have no purpose for the task at hand hampers our concentration and ability to successfully complete things-to-do.

Maintaining mental health

Our perception of the space we live in does result our mood and general mental capacity. The linguistic analysis study of 60 couples who guided researchers through their homes and described the space has shown that women who felt and told their homes were ‘cluttered’ were more likely to have or get depression or chronic fatigue, what may be due to their higher cortisol levels. However, women who considered their homes to be ‘restful’ and ‘restorative’, have it much easier in life and mental stability. It is also important to note that it is women who are more likely to develop feelings of significant discomfort in a cluttered home, as they are still perceived and are working as primary housekeepers, making them feel responsible for poor organization of home space, even despite the fact that all family members participate in making the place messy and quite often don’t take part in cleaning up.

So, if you’ve read this and it really echoed, get down to business! And keep in mind that it is all the people of the household who are responsible and should clean the mess of their place, not just mom. Feeling better and happier is definitely worth it, isn’t it?