Many use cleaning as a coping mechanism for stress, anxiety, and emotional regulation, finding it helps manage feelings and provides a sense of
Cleaning involves smooth, repetitive, predictable movements such as pushing a mop back and forth across the floor, wiping a duster across the shelves, or circling a sponge across the countertop. As your mind focuses on these simple, task-driven movements, it can more easily block out the negative thoughts at the root of your anxiety. In other words, the repetitive act of cleaning can have a similar positive effect on the brain as more traditional types of meditation. [...] It sounds counterintuitive; after all, routine chores and never-ending housework can sometimes feel like just one more thing on an endless “to do” list. Yet it seems that for many people, housecleaning can actually provide a simple, easy way to help ease anxiety! In fact, cleaning offers a number of benefits when it comes to offering relief from worry and anxiety. In some cases, the act of itself cleaning may be the solution; cleaning requires a soothing, repetitive rhythm that can distract [...] Next time you feel worried, stressed, or anxious and just can’t seem to relax, see if a little cleaning might restore your calm and ease your anxiety. Experts note that it’s important to start small and manageable. Don’t try to clean the entire house at once, but set a small, achievable goal—mopping the kitchen floor, for instance, or organizing a bookshelf—and find out if this coping method works for you! ### Contact Ketamine Clinics of Los Angeles
When you feel anxious or struggling with anxiety, it can be a good practice to start cleaning or organizing. One study finds that repetitive and predictable actions– in this instance, cleaning– can help you cope with temporary anxiety. Moreover, the order in a house or environment makes people feel safe. Source: Pexels.com ### It gives you a sense of control Life is full of uncertainty, and there will be many situations where you feel like you’ve lost control and are living in chaos. [...] When dealing with a mental health condition like depression or anxiety, things are worse. Aside from helping you cope, cleaning can give you a sense of control. It makes you feel like you are in charge and a master of your environment. ## Benefits of Cleaning As Therapy ### It saves you time and money [...] There is a direct connection between mental health and cleanliness. Living in a messy and cluttered home is not suitable for mental health. The lack of organization can stress you out and lead to more severe issues besides compromising your physical health. A study found that women who lived in cluttered spaces or were full of unfinished projects were more likely to be depressed and fatigued. ### It’s a coping strategy against anxiety
If you are unsure whether or not your cleaning habits are constructive or bordering on a compulsion, you may want to talk to your doctor or a mental health professional for advice. A therapist can help you determine which behaviors are healthy and which might need to be altered. They can also provide other coping mechanisms for depression, anxiety, or stress. [...] Additionally, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America indicates that the physical activity of cleaning coupled with the end result of a cleaner home helps reduce stress, feelings of anxiety, and depressive symptoms. Cleaning can also reduce fatigue and improve concentration. ### Cleanliness and Focus [...] Clutter and mess can create more stress and anxiety, but by cleaning, organizing, and reducing the clutter, people are able to take control of their environment and create a more relaxing environment that helps them focus better on the more pressing issues in their lives. ## Benefits of Cleanliness and Decluttering
For them, cleaning is not a temporary stress reliever or self-soothing mechanism. Rather, it is a compulsion that the person feels driven to complete and can't
Cleaning becomes an easy way to restore some sense of order when everything feels like a tornado of emotions. It's a coping mechanism, plain and simple.
others; Tesser, 2000). Paralleling such mental mechanisms, we observe that cleaning can attenuate the effects of psychological threats to one’s self—as moral (West & Zhong, 2015), as rational (Lee & Schwarz, 2010), as competent (Kaspar, 2012), and as socially accepted (the present findings). This opens up a broad and exciting avenue for future research: Daily cleaning behavior, mundane as it seems, may serve supplementary coping functions that not only attenuate stress but also sustain positive [...] Either way, the potential utility of cleaning for coping with stressors such as physical risks and psychological threats bears theoretical and practical importance. Hygienic care is a human universal (Brown, 1991) and a part of our everyday life, for good reasons. Cleaning behavior confers significant personal and public health benefits (Boyce & Pittet, 2002) and is one of the most recommended daily routines by the World Health Organization for reducing pathogen risks (Pittet et al., 2009). [...] As part of the behavioral immune system (Schaller, 2015), cleaning behavior serves adaptive biological functions by separating physical threats (e.g., infectious pathogens) from the body. It reduces threat-related anxiety, especially when the threat is highly salient, as in times of a global pandemic (e.g., COVID-19; Trougakos et al., 2020). Beyond biological functions, however, an emerging perspective suggests that cleaning behavior involves physical acts of separation that serve higher-order