Describe your home out loud
It’s 9 p.m., the kitchen is finally quiet, and the counter is still covered. You tell yourself it can wait until morning, and it can. The odd part is what the counter does to you in the meantime.
In 2010, a pair of UCLA psychologists, Darby Saxbe and Rena Repetti, handed cameras to 60 working spouses and asked each of them to walk through their own home and describe it out loud. Software counted the words. Some tours were full of clutter, piles and unfinished projects. Others kept returning to rest, light and the garden. The researchers scored the first kind as a stressful home and the second as a restorative home, and published the study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Then came 3 ordinary weekdays. The team sampled each person’s cortisol across the day and asked how they were feeling. Cortisol is supposed to run high in the morning and fall by evening, and a flatter line is a pattern other research has tied to worse health. The wives who had described a stressful home had flatter lines. The wives who had described a restorative one had steeper lines, the healthier shape. The stressful-home group also felt lower as each day wore on, and the pattern held after the team accounted for marital satisfaction and neuroticism.
Keep the limits in view. This was 60 people in Los Angeles, the link showed up in the women, and nobody cleaned anything as part of the study, so it’s a correlation. Still, the way someone described their home at the front door tracked a stress hormone for the next 3 days. That’s a long reach for a pile of mail.
When your stuff stops being yours
Think of the drawer you can’t open all the way. Now imagine a whole house like that.
A 2016 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology asked what that does to a person. Catherine Roster and Peter Jurkat of the University of New Mexico, with Joseph Ferrari of DePaul University, surveyed 1,394 adults in the US and Canada who had contacted the Institute for Challenging Disorganization for help. Most were women, and the median age was 54. The paper defines clutter as an overabundance of possessions that together make a living space chaotic and disorderly, and it asked people how far they agreed with lines like “I feel overwhelmed by the clutter in my home.”
Two things went with a stronger sense of what the authors call psychological home, the feeling that a place is yours and puts you back together: being attached to the home, and seeing yourself in your things. That sense of home went with higher well-being. Clutter cut through both. The more clutter people reported, the weaker the sense of home, and the lower the well-being.
These were people who had already asked for help with their stuff, so the effect may be gentler in an ordinary house. The direction is the useful part. Possessions build a home up to a point. Past that point they start taking it back.
The apple and the candy bar
You walk out of a room and someone offers you a snack. Turns out the room you just left gets a vote.
Kathleen Vohs, Joseph Redden and Ryan Rahinel of the University of Minnesota tested exactly that in 3 experiments, published in Psychological Science in 2013. People filled in questionnaires in either an orderly room or a messy one, then made small choices on the way out.
The orderly room won on the apple. People who had sat in it were more likely to pick the apple over the candy bar, and they gave more of their own money to charity. The messy room had its own win: the ideas people came up with in it were rated more creative by independent judges. So the finding isn’t that mess is bad. Order tilts the small, automatic choices toward the healthier and more conventional option, and small automatic choices are most of a day.
Cleaning counts as moving
Nobody logs vacuuming in a fitness app. The body counts it anyway.
NiCole Keith, a physical activity researcher at Indiana University, followed 998 African American adults in St. Louis who had joined a long-running health study in 2000. They were aged 49 to 65. Her team rated the inside and the outside of each home, the neighborhood (sidewalks, lighting) and how active each person was. Of everything on the list, the condition of the inside of the home was the thing that tracked physical activity. The university’s account quotes Keith: “If you spend your day dusting, cleaning, doing laundry, you’re active.”
The arrow could point either way. A clean home may be what an active person produces rather than what makes them active, and the work was presented at the American College of Sports Medicine’s 2010 meeting and reported by the university rather than published in a journal. Treat it as a strong hint, not a settled result.
Start where you walk in
Four studies, one point in common: the state of your rooms isn’t neutral. They also hint at where to begin, and it isn’t the garage.
- Clear the first thing you see. The home tours began at the door, and so does your evening. The entryway is where mail and bags tend to pile up first. The entry, the nearest counter and the first stretch of floor set the tone for everything after them.
- Finish or box the unfinished. Half-done projects counted as stressful words in the UCLA study. Finish the small ones tonight. Box the rest, write the date on the box, and stop looking at it.
- Let the bedroom be the calm room. It’s where every day ends. Sleep better in a clean bedroom has the research on that room.
- Pick a rhythm you can keep. A weekly reset beats a monthly rescue. How often should you deep clean? sets out a room-by-room schedule.
- Write the weekly list down. Kitchen, every bathroom, the floors, the dusting, in the same room order each time. A list is a routine to follow instead of a set of decisions to make at 9 p.m.
None of this cures anything, and none of the researchers say it does. What the data shows is a home in order keeping company with a healthier stress curve, a stronger sense of home and better small choices. For an hour a week, that’s a fair trade. Tonight, start with the counter. It was going to follow you upstairs anyway.