Work around the room systematically, making sure to work slowly and take your breaks. If your anxiety is being triggered, stop. Come back to it when it's passed. Give yourself a set limit on what you're doing (“I'm doing three 20/10s and then I'm done for today”), and hold yourself to do it.
Sometimes decluttering feels exhausting because you're thinking about all the work you need to do to finish a space or your whole house. That can be really overwhelming! What is this? Instead of thinking about the space as a whole, try breaking the work down into small steps.
Rule #1 – Don't have a Maybe Pile
This is key to making decluttering easier overall – and it feels like it should make it harder when you first read it, right? Well – the fact is that decluttering involves decision making. Decisions on every item as to whether you keep it or let it go.
One of the most common problems as to why you get so stressed out about cleaning is that you think that the cleanliness levels of your homes directly correlate to you as a person. The cleaner the house, the better person you are. Either that, or you compare cleaning with care.
Researchers theorized that people gravitate toward repetitive behaviors (such as cleaning) during times of stress. Why? It's all about control. "We want to be able to do something when we get anxious, and what we really want is to be in control and take action," says Alicia H.
Clutter bombards our minds with excessive stimuli (visual, olfactory, tactile), causing our senses to work overtime on stimuli that aren't necessary or important. Clutter distracts us by drawing our attention away from what our focus should be on. Clutter makes it more difficult to relax, both physically and mentally.
A deep teeth cleaning should take between 1-4 hours. First, your hygienist will numb you by injecting a local anesthetic. Sometimes, the hygienist will need one hour per quadrant to do the proper scaling and root planing of all the root surfaces in one quadrant.
The next time you feel overwhelmed by cleaning or tidying, try setting a timer for 15 minutes (or 10—whatever seems doable!) and tell yourself you only have to clean for those 15 minutes, after which you can stop and do something enjoyable, like watching a TV show or eating a delicious snack.
While some people who are exceptionally clean have OCD, others do not have a mental disorder. The difference is in whether the desire to clean comes from obsessive thought and compulsions or simply a desire. More to the point, a person only has OCD if the symptoms cause disruption and mental anguish.
It might be because you're not sure what to do with all that free space, which can leave you feeling slightly anxious and maybe even a little overwhelmed. You may be feeling sad after decluttering because it seems like you've gotten rid of things that still have value.
Cleaning is considered to be a form of stress relief, among other activities such as mindfulness and exercise practices. Research has demonstrated that cleaning can yield several positive effects on mental health.
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 feel comfortable until it is done completely or “enough.”
When applied to our homes, the 80/20 rule suggests that we roughly use 20% of what we own around 80% of the time. The remaining amount serves little purpose, taking up space and mostly just gathering dust. Think about it - how many of the utensils in your kitchen crock do you use daily? Probably very few!
There's a saying that goes, “If it won't matter in five years, don't spend more than five minutes worrying about it.” If you're someone who gets stuck on what to declutter and what to keep, remind yourself of this rule to keep things in perspective.
The 90/90 rule for minimalism encourages you to keep only items you've used or will use within 90 days. This minimalist rule is all about timing. When using the 90/90 rule to get rid of stuff, you'll simply want to ask yourself two straightforward questions. Have you used this item in the last 90 days?