The feeling of having a clean home is a simple pleasure we can all appreciate. Decluttering and organizing your home can leave you with a sense of fulfillment, and feeling that you have everything under control.
A clean home has been shown to improve mood and overall mental state. The benefits of having a clean environment can be felt by everyone in the household, not just those who do the cleaning. A recent study showed that people with less clutter and more natural light were happier than those who had dirty homes.
So, save the charm of a dusty, dingy, musty space with stuff bordering levels of hoarding for old book stores and vintage shops. Learn how to clean efficiently, and do it often in order to take control of your physical space and boost your mental clarity. Here are 7 benefits of having a clean home.
1. Improves Air Quality
Getting into spaces that collect dust and dander, sweeping and mopping corners of the floor including spaces behind large furniture items, changing your bed sheets and pillow covers once a week, regular vacuuming at least once to twice a week, and mopping your floors, are all guaranteed methods to immediately boost air quality.
Poor air quality has a direct effect on your quality of sleep and can trigger allergies. It affects the state of your immune system, which of course when weakened leaves you in a less than optimal state mentally and physically.
By controlling for air quality in your home, you reap the rewards by feeling more awake, your space will feel less stuffy, all of which promotes a more positive mental state.
2. Cleaning Your Home Allows You to Practice Discipline
Navy SEALs all have to undergo the same training. One of the first things that they have to accomplish is making their bed properly every morning.
You might think, what does an elite soldier gain from making their beds properly? The concept is simple: if you can’t even make your bed well, how are you ever going to engage in a complex mission correctly?
There are variables that are all just way out of control when out on the battle field. One thing that SEALs can count on controlling is the tidiness of their living quarters.
As you go about consciously cleaning your space, you create opportunities for yourself to do it better. The more you do it, the more of a habit it becomes. Positive habit forming through discipline is one of the best ways to hack your brain. Take control of your mental state by having a clean home!
3. Helps You Stay Organized
Regularly cleaning your home helps to to keep track of your immediate surroundings at home. You become more mindful of the stuff around you. In turn, this helps you to be cognizant of the type of consumption you engage in.
In Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, one of the major tenets is “tidying ought to be the act of restoring balance among people, their possessions, and the house they live in.”
Through the act of cleaning and organizing the space around you, you create the energy in your physical space of zen. An organized space is positive force that will feed your psychological state.
4. Sparks A Feeling Of Accomplishment
Cleaning your home is something actionable that provides immediate results. Results, even the smallest, are directly linked with a feeling of accomplishment which signals the brain to flush itself with dopamine.
When you take control of your immediate space and do it well, even when nobody is there to give you approval, you know you have done it. That is integrity that you can build within yourself. Integrity and accomplishment are two emotional variables that will always leave your state of mind with a more positive outlook.
5. Sets a Standard For You to Work Around
The inner sanctum of your home can a physical manifestation of your mental space. Your space says a lot about the things you enjoy, the material comforts you rely on. It houses some of the hobbies and interests that you might have.
The space that these things are housed in can say a lot about the deeper aspects of your personality. It can speak to how detail oriented you are. It shows how much respect you have for your surroundings, and in turn how much respect you have for yourself.
Take control of your self worth by taking control of your immediate surroundings. Clean your living space for yourself! It will provide you with a baseline standard of finding confidence in doing things for yourself, and that is a much steadier place to work from.
6. Brings Out Your Creative Side
Clean living space is also conducive to bringing out your creative side. Not only does it allow you the freedom of being able to think outside of what might be distracting around you, but a cleansed surrounding will ignite parts of your brain that are responsible for spurring creativity and problem-solving abilities.
Being surrounded by mess and disorder is a physical manifestation of mental stagnation. By creating an organized space, you are allowing yourself room to grow in your mind as well! Take control of the clutter that comes into your life by taking control over what enters within you!
7. Increases Productivity
When you are surrounded by a clean space, your productivity will increase. There is no room for clutter in the mind of an efficient worker! By keeping yourself organized and free from distractions, it makes focusing on what needs to be done that much easier. It also becomes easier to commit information into memory when there isn’t anything there to cloud your mind.
Keeping a clean space will increase the likelihood that you are more productive when it comes to tasks in life!
