Spring Cleaning Anxiety: Interview with Homes & Gardens

For many, doing a deep-clean of their entire home is a necessity every spring. Like taxes, spring-cleaning feels both necessary and overwhelming. Even for people who pride themselves on their cleanliness, the prospect of going room-to-room and doing a bottom up clean can cause them to feel anxious and even bring up old fights in families.

At Homes and Gardens, they take this kind of thing seriously and so they reached out the founder and clinical director of Madison Park Psychotherapy, Dr. Jordan Conrad, for his views on how avoid the anxiety during spring cleaning. In "I Tried the 'Spring Cleaning Bingo Method', and it Was a Game-Changer For a Less Stressful Clean in my Tiny Home, Say Psychologists," Jordan explains that anxiety often accompanies uncertainty and people tend to view spring-cleaning in an open-ended or “unbound” way without a clear goal: “People often get anxious by large projects because their goals and what it takes to achieve them are unclear. Projects that aren't bound – that don't have a clear beginning and end – often cause people to feel dread and anxiety because they feel insurmountable.”  

Instead of viewing the goal as cleaning your entire home, he suggests identifying discrete areas – the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, etc. – and attacking these sequentially. If you are partnered, or have a family, tasking each person with a room can make this go a lot quicker, of course, but whether you are on your own or with others, it is essential to be as clear as you can be about your criteria for cleanliness: “Be clear with yourself about what it means for each room to be clean and tidy and make a list – when big projects are broken down like that they feel a lot more manageable” Jordan says.

That clarity around what it means for a room to be clean will help avoid arguments you might otherwise have with your children or teenagers about getting back to work. If they know in advance what your expectations are, then it won’t feel as though the goal post is moving and that nothing they are doing is right. It will also avoid you feeling that you have to fight to get a simple project done.