Hi! Welcome back to Practically Happy. This is episode number 287, Expect a Mess.

What comes to mind when you hear that title “expect a mess?” To me to be honest, it feels like relief, which is why I want to share about this topic today.

Our expectations are so powerful and I’m excited to share with you a few different ways that our expectations contribute either to our wellbeing or to our not feeling so great in our lives and Some things that we can do about it this episode is targeted at the idea of our own homes, maybe offices, personal spaces, family spaces that we feel responsible for.

And if you are someone who keeps feeling frustrated or bumping up against this idea that Oh, it’s just messy all the time. And I can’t do anything until it’s cleaned up. And it’s so frustrating because you’re not the only one who lives there. And if you were, maybe it would be easier, or maybe you are the reason that it’s messy, and that’s still frustrating. Or maybe you– like me– live with a circus of humans and animals and everyone’s contributions to the mess and the cleanup are something that you’re navigating, managing on a regular basis. Today’s episode hopefully will give you some thoughts, ideas, tools, practical help to feel more practically happy inside the mess.

Before I share why expecting a mess might be a better strategy for you than trying to clean it up every single day, I want to share some books I’ve been enjoying lately in a segment called the book nook.

Segment: Book Nook

Because it is gardening season and I’m spending so much on gardening projects and some home improvement projects. Like I mentioned last week in the episode, I am painting and adding trim to some bathrooms in our house. I like to pop in my headphones and turn on a good audio book that I know I’ve got 6 to 10 hours of story being told to me.

I. Also, historically have really loved reading paper books, like getting books from the library, buying them from the store, having them in my hands. And yet, for whatever reason, all the books that I’m sharing with you today are books that I listened to on audiobook while I was Working on some other sort of mindless projects.

The first one I just finished last week, and I really enjoyed it. It’s called Unlikely Animals. I heard about it from a few different friends online before I decided to download it and dive in. And I really liked it. A couple friends have said this was my favorite book of the year. I didn’t feel that way about it.

I really liked it. I would recommend it. I think it’s an interesting read. Cool characters. Some unusual storytelling. Some of the characters that have a strong voice and share opinions and stories in the book are ghosts sitting on their gravestones. So that was interesting. a narration I hadn’t seen before.

I really liked the people that I was reading about. It was easy to fall in love with what was going on and have a heart for each of the different characters. So, I thought it was fun. I’d say maybe four stars for me. It wasn’t like the best book of the year, but interesting and fun.

That’s Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett.

The next book that I read that I mean, maybe the same amount as Unlikely Animals, but it’s an entirely different vibe, is called The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo. My older sister recommended this book to me, I think because of the family dynamics.

This book is amazing. A real intricate family spiderweb, and there are people experiencing things that they didn’t ask to experience, there are some family secrets, there are some big-hearted characters that you just can’t help but adore and root for. All in all, it helped me feel like, gosh, families are all a little bit messed up.

And we are just. aren’t completely functional and that’s okay and we can still love each other and recognize each other’s needs and boundaries regardless of our lives. Be looking all very different and I have a big, complicated family and I think that my sister recognized Some of us in this book and so I really enjoyed it from that perspective So that’s the most fun we ever had again recommend it and interesting a little bit more like a little bit more Pulling at your heartstrings sort of book.

And then the next one, and the last one I’m going to share today, is the most recent Emily Henry book, Funny Story. she’s a fantastic romantic comedy writer, and this funny story I thought was great. Super lighthearted, a little bit steamy. I have I sometimes thought it so interesting how so many of the books that I read have either a writer or a librarian or like a bookseller as the main characters because people who are writing fiction, like that is so much of what they are around and what they know.

So, the protagonist in this book is a small-town librarian. She’s wonderful. And I really liked all the other characters as well. The story was funny. It was easy to follow. So again, I would recommend it. None of these, like I said, were the books that, were my favorite books of the year, blew me away, that I’ve been talking about and thinking about repeatedly.

They all are good enough to give some attention to. They take you away to somewhere else. They invite thoughts about stories and relationships and people that you might not otherwise have. That perspective is fun. And I think you should check them out.

Expecting The Mess

The backstory on today’s episode is that I have been actively working at training myself to expect a mess in my own house in a way that feels like freedom rather than like I’m stuck. The reality is that I’m living with. For humans who are not myself and don’t have my own brains, my own thoughts, my own habits, my own ideas about the way things are supposed to be.

And in addition to that, at our house, we have four animals that are continually moving things around, nibbling on things, shedding hair. And all those components, all those different factors, even in what I would consider a fairly minimalist household and a pretty small house, means that There’s often a mess.

And for years and years I wanted clean, like baseline, of my house to be clean and put away. And we could get things out and play with them, and then we’d put them all away before we got something else out. I remember this with my kids, like having different bins of different kinds of toys and saying, okay, let’s get out one kind of toy and play with it, and then let’s clean it all up and put it away, and then get out the next one and play with it.

And then clean it all up and put it away. I for years felt like the reset was at the end of the night. Like once all the kids were down, I would go around and, pick things up and put things away and wipe off the counters, make sure the dishes were set. I did this clean sweep of the house, like a reset, like we’re going to reset before we wake up and begin the day again and start messing everything up again.

How often do you RESET?

And while, on one hand, I look back and think, yeah, there were some things that were nice about waking up to a clean house every single morning, I’m not sure that the neurological and emotional effort that went into continually expecting My house to be put together and clean was worth it. I think that I was far more stressed out more often.

I felt overwhelmed more often. I felt a little bit upset, a little bit like baseline irritated, that people couldn’t just put things away. My instinct was to Be a better teacher like teach my kids how to clean up after themselves teach them how to put things away that the way That I like to put things away Talk to Dave about what are our expectations for our family and kind of make sure we were on the same page and dividing up Our household labor so that we were both Doing the pickup.

We were both doing the cleaning regularly while that took us a certain distance and my kids do have what I would consider an appropriate level of responsibility at home and as far as helping the dishes and doing their own laundry and, having some chores now and then so that they can pick things up.

Can You Change Your Expectations?

I don’t think that it has gotten me as far as what I’m going to talk to you about today, which is to change my expectations rather than changing the process, the system, the rules, the chores, changing my mind and raising my tolerance level of A mess at home has been the best and the simplest way to feel freer, more peace, and more practically happy.

I’m not going to pretend that this is like a snap your fingers and it’s done, like easy to change your mind sort of solution. I will say that it is much easier. Much, much, much easier to practice new thoughts in your own head than it is to try to micromanage and control other people’s behaviors, other people’s ideas about the way things should be done, or to spend a lot of extra time cleaning up, picking up things, managing a mess so that it meets your expectations.

If you can bring your expectations down, raise your tolerance level, and then spend less time cleaning up and more time doing other things that you enjoy, you’re going to feel better. that’s what I’ve experienced. So, let’s just talk baseline about expectations.

What are expectations? An expectation is a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.

This is prospective idea. This is when our brain plans something in the future, and it creates an idea, of the way something is going to be. And we believe that. That is the expectation. It’s, a cognitive process. It happens in our brains. And. Then, our awareness of what is happening can create some dissonance or distance.

I thought it was going to be this way, turns out it’s not, it’s this other way. Then we must deal with that space in between our expectations and reality. Our expectations can shape how we perceive the world. If we expect a certain outcome, we’re more likely to interpret ambiguous information in our environment in a way that aligns with the expectation.

That’s called perceptual bias, when we think that the other things around us are all leaning towards our expectation. being true. We also have a cognitive bias toward our expectation. You may have heard that term cognitive bias before. This is when we tend to pay more attention to and remember things that affirm our expectation rather than any information that might contradict it.

So, we will disregard something that says that isn’t happening or that isn’t possible and affirm experiences and environmental factors that contradict it. confirm what we believe to be true. There are some really great things about expectations. For example, the expectancy theory in the realm of motivation means that people are motivated to act in certain ways based on their expectations of the outcomes.

So, you’ve probably all heard that if a teacher expects a student to behave in at a high level, that student’s more likely to behave at that level than the same student working under a teacher who doesn’t expect much of them, that they’re, in that case, their motivation may be lower. That’s a good example of the way that high expectations can work in our favor.

Consistently Unmet Expectations lead to Dissapointment

However, consistently unmet expectations can lead to frustration, disappointment, and decreased wellbeing. It’s important to remember that expectations are not. Reality. Expectations are a belief that something is going to happen in the future or that something will be a certain way. When we have an unmet expectation, that creates this distance between what is happening, what is real, what is confirmed, what could be measured, what other people would all agree is happening and what we think is real, what we think should be happening.

Often if we’re using the word should, that’s a flag, like a, just a signpost that we may be dealing with an expectation rather than with reality. One of my favorite books, The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz has a chapter that talks about expectations, and I want to read an excerpt from this chapter to just give you, some framing for what I’m talking about here.

Barry says, when people evaluate an experience, they are performing one or more of the following comparisons. One, comparing the experience to what they hoped it would be. Two, comparing the experience to what they expected it to be. Three, comparing the experience to other experiences they have had in the past. Or four, comparing the experience to experiences that others have had.

Each of these comparisons makes the evaluation of an experience relative, and this may diminish the experience or enhance it. For example, if someone is out for a great dinner and she’s just read a glowing review of the restaurant, her hopes and expectations will be high.

If she’s recently had a great meal in another restaurant, her standard of comparison with her experience will be high. And if just before the dinner she listened to one of her dining companions describe in a static detail a meal that he had recently had, her social standard of comparison will be high.

Given all this, the chef in this restaurant is going to be challenged to produce a meal that will move this person’s hedonic thermometer any higher. Hedonic thermometer in this case refers to the ability for this person to feel pleasure beyond these high expectations that she already might have. Now in contrast, someone stumbles into the first restaurant she sees because she’s very hungry, and if the place looks modest and its menu is simple, and if she had an awful dinner out the day before, and if her friend told her about a recent culinary disaster, chances are she won’t be too hard to please.

The same meal in the same restaurant can be judged negatively based on the first set of comparisons and positively on the basis of the second. And by and large, we are unlikely to realize that our evaluations are as much a commentary on what we bring to the meal in terms of expectations as they are on the meal itself.

I think that is such a clear and dynamic example of the way that our expectations comparing reality to what we thought would happen really determined so much of our experience.

What are some of the comparisons that we make?

When it comes to our home and the cleanliness and tidiness of our home. One, the comparison to what we think that it should look like. Where do we get the idea of how we think our homes should look daily? I don’t know about you, but for me, most of the information I see about other people’s homes in my, a similar stage of life to me, comes from the internet comes from social media, and let me tell you, the standards of people sharing about their homes on social media are extremely unrealistically high.

These ideas that your home is always photo ready, that it’s cleaned off and styled before it’s shared. Even when we go to a friend’s house for dinner, that likelihood is very high that they have tidied up in advance of our sharing. Coming over because that’s what we do. We, I know I use other people coming over as a great excuse of a deadline to pick things up and tidy up very seldom in our lives.

Do we have an opportunity to see homes in their natural state? At least I don’t. If you add to that growing up in a household where you had a parent who was extremely tidy or neat freak. I hear about moms who would pick things up and do all the cleanup and were really perfectionist about their home being clean and tidy.

And so, their children grow up in this environment with this unrealized expectation that is true. The way that things here’s this word should be that everything is supposed to be clean all the time when I work with one-on-one coaching clients who are trying to rediscover themselves. Remember who they are as people outside of motherhood, build a business or in, engage in creative hobbies. When we bump up against this idea that I don’t have the time that I wish that I had to myself because I’m spending a lot of my time cleaning my house. We come back to the idea of expectation. Where did you get the idea of what your house is supposed to look like?

What length of time is appropriate for the house to be messy?

I really love the question of what is the length of time that it’s okay for a mess to be present? I mentioned earlier that when I had young kids, we would often play and I would, often play with them. Like we would be on the floor with, I’d have a toddler or two. We’d pull out all the bricks and we’d build stuff.

And maybe I’d go make lunch or something. But when we finished with that playtime, it would all be put away. I’d put it away. I’d help the boys put it away before we moved on to a different activity. So, the length of time that a mess was like, okay, was an hour or two, maybe. I remember thinking on, it was a special occasion when Plum was probably two or three.

The boys were little. all preschool and early elementary age, I remember thinking the boys have spent a long time building this car track and they had used like tape and, cardboard and they had spent a couple hours in the day building this race car track. And I told Dave, I’m going to let them leave it until tomorrow.

And I thought, I should have a halo that I was allowing this play slash mess to be out. That we’d leave it out because they wanted to play with it again the next day. Now some of you might be thinking, you’re a psychopath, and I’m not. I did have very unrealistic expectations. about playtime, messes, raising young kids.

And they negatively affected everyone in my house. They negatively affected me, probably most of all because I was clearly the most uncomfortable with a mess. The kids didn’t care. They would have been thrilled to leave their messes out because that meant more easily. Engaging in their imaginative play the next day because they didn’t have to start from scratch Dave didn’t care that much.

He has a much higher tolerance of mess than I do. Naturally, some of that may have to do with gender set point. Some of it may have to do with, having different families of origin. Some of it may have to do with just simple, paying what we pay attention to. He, there’s a lot of things Dave doesn’t seem to really notice because they don’t seem as important to him.

And for a long time, some of these things were important to me. It felt important for things to be cleaned up and cleaned up and cleaned up. When I talk to clients about this process, when we talk about that length of time, like what is the length of time? Oftentimes, I think it’s not very unusual for woman who I work with to feel like, the end of the day, and this is something that I shared earlier that was not unusual for me either.

The end of the day felt like a good time to reset. And I’ve seen this online, I’ve heard this all over, like this power hour, after dinner, everyone helps clean up together, we reset the house for the next day. That’s great. If that is working for you and you don’t feel stressed out or overwhelmed or frustrated about it, then wonderful.

I think that expecting that your house is clean every single morning when you wake up is a high expectation. So, can you stretch it out? Can you stretch it out from maybe one day to, I’m going to let the house be a little bit messy for a couple days in a row before I spend the time and energy to whip it all back in shape.

I understand that you may be thinking, if I do it every day, then it’s less of a mess to clean up. I think that in some cases that’s true. In a lot of cases, you’re spending the same amount of time to do that reset every single day rather than just giving it a couple days and just that’s when you reset it.

My Tidiness Expectations are Low

My current personal expectations for cleanliness in my home are what I would call low. So, my timeline is stretched out to about every two weeks. I have a cleaning team that I hire to help come in and do the deep cleaning. So, they’re mopping floors and washing windows and wiping counters, those types of things.

And that is also our cue to do a pickup reset because my cleaners don’t do that part. the day before the cleaners come, that is the deadline for making sure clothes are off the floor and putting socks in the bin and, making sure that some of the laundry is cleared out and, we don’t even have to make beds because they do change the sheets.

Making sure that there’s clean sheets available for that linen change. Within probably four to five hours of the cleaners coming, the house no longer looks sparkling clean. It’s clean. It’s usually not picked up anymore, because the kids and I and Dave and the animals live there. So, there’s stuff out again.

There are backpacks and there’s socks and there’s, a basketball in the front and whatever. But at least I know that we’re doing the cleaning. Management of like hygiene of cleaning things out and vacuuming and stuff between that five hours after the cleaners comes and Maybe 12 hours before they come again.

My expectations are just low. I step over dirty socks coming down the stairs. I scoot Backpacks and papers to the side of the counter so that I have room to take them out Do the dishes. What I’ve noticed as I’ve actively worked on lowering my expectations for the tidiness of my own home is that my peace and joy and ability to feel comfortable.

Ability to put things aside and work on the thing I need to work on, even if there’s a mess present has dramatically increased because there’s no longer this wide distance between what I believed should be the case and what was reality. I was able to understand that living. In a house with other humans is messy.

We’re supposed to use the dishes. We’re supposed to wear clothes. We’re supposed to read books and play with toys. We’re supposed to get out snacks. And while there are some good general baseline understandings and skills that my kids need to have to be successful adults and not You know, not know how to clean a floor, clean a toilet.

In general, I don’t want my life to be dictated by whether things are clean at home.

I don’t want my hobbies to have to wait until the laundry’s done. I don’t want my ability to have a nice time watching a movie with my daughter to go on pause until the kitchen is clean. If you’re nodding along thinking, okay, yes, I’m on board with this idea.

I would like to reset my expectations about my household cleanliness to better enjoy my life. Then let me share a little bit of how you might approach that. Because changing our expectations or changing our mind, our thoughts, our belief in general is a little bit of a process. So, the first step is going to understand that this is an incremental process.

 You’re not going to go straight from my house must be picked up every single day to I don’t care at all and it’s okay if my house isn’t clean ever again. The first step might be stretching out the timeline between when you expect it to be clean and the mess, a little bit. So maybe if you’re cleaning up every single day right now, you say, I’m going to clean up every other day.

And see how that feels and get comfortable with the discomfort of looking around your house and not having it be pristine. Get comfortable with the idea that it’s okay to live in this house that you live in. So that’s the first step. Having a positive expectation even of the process of changing your expectations.

Do you have access to realistic expectations?

That’s another step might be making sure that you have access to some realistic expectations of what a house looks like. One of my friends, Monica Packer, is About Progress on Instagram, and she’s been doing a project that I think is cool, where she does something, she calls a reel and she just says, here’s a real room in my house today and scrolls around the room.

And it looks like a house that people live in. There’s stuff everywhere. And there’s, groceries sitting out on the counter waiting to be put away. And Monica and her husband recently moved into a gorgeous house that they completely designed and renovated. It is a stunning blueprint.

Like the background is this gorgeous house and they live in it like a human family. Making sure to include in your scroll people who are sharing real parts of their lives, real homes can be helpful. Another place that I like to have exposure to this is in TV shows and movies where the protagonist is not a designer or like some super wealthy millionaire ad executive.

The sets of TV shows and movies for real people and real homes can be fun to see like the magnets on the fridge and the clutter in the kitchen. And of course, A lot of this is stylized because they have a set designer but seeing the way a set designer portrays a real person’s house in like middle socioeconomic class in America can be really a good way to start feeling like these things are more relatable, like your expectations of a perfectly styled, perfectly put together, pristine house is not very realistic.

Try Cognitive Reframing

Another idea is cognitive reframing. Cognitive reframing involves identifying a negative thought pattern and replacing it with something more positive. For instance, instead of thinking, my house is so messy right now. You could think, my house is so lived in right now. Look how much living we’re doing in this house.

I know that sounds silly and a little bit cheesy, and I can tell you from personal experience that it can also work. Adding that little element of meaning to the socks on the floor and all the bikes, strewn all over the sidewalk in front of the house, knowing that’s because you have kids there who are comfortable, neighborhood kids who love coming over and jumping on your trampoline.

My kids are responsible for cleaning their own rooms about every two weeks in advance of the cleaning team coming and the days in between when they’re really just Normal messy kids rooms I go in and I can see the mess as part of their childhood This is what it looks like to be a 10 year old girl It means that you have seven different outfits Put on the floor in front of your dresser because you needed to find the perfect thing to wear to field day There’s something really sweet and meaningful about these things, about the mess itself, if we can find it, if we can reframe to be focusing on the life and the beauty and all of this wonder that we probably at one point expected to have in our life.

The life we have is the one we wanted!

We really looked forward to having a family. We really looked forward to having a home to live in, to having a pet, even though they’re leaving hair all over. That’s a sign of life. That cognitive reframing takes some work. It takes some effort. And it’s beneficial. If the cognitive reframing feels like too big of a stretch for you, the next thing that you could try is something called acceptance, where you recognize that there’s a mess and you don’t really like it, but this is the way that it is right now.

And just allow yourself to say, this is what’s happening right now. And it’s okay. I don’t have to do anything about it. I don’t have to fix it. There isn’t a problem. There’s just a mess, and I can handle a mess. And finally, of course, one of the answers seems to always be gratitude. Finding a way to practice gratitude for the mess.

Recognizing, and some of this is like the cognitive reframing, but, that what a blessing it is to have a home. To have dishes, to be in the sink, to have clothes that can be left on the floor. What a blessing to be surrounded by friends, family, animals, or even just your own belongings. Maybe you live by yourself, and you can find gratitude for surrounding yourselves with beautiful things that you appreciate and remembering when those things were acquired and now that they’re part of your life, how beneficial they can be.

If you simply try to practice the thought process of focusing on what you appreciate rather than how annoying and frustrating it might be. I know it’s not a perfect solution, and that’s okay. Even one step at a time toward raising your tolerance of realistic homes and lowering your expectations of perfection at home can help you feel a little bit better.

Like I mentioned, I went from feeling a little bit frustrated and stressed out and overwhelmed a lot of the time because my house wasn’t clean, and I didn’t really feel like spending all my extra time doing it to just acknowledging I don’t really feel like spending all of my extra time doing this.

It’s okay if we do it occasionally. It’s okay if we do it all together. And if the system isn’t perfect for it to be clean every single day, then that just means we’re living. That means that we’re living a full, beautiful, meaningful life, and there are much more important things to me than having my house be picked up all the time.

I can tell you that expecting a mess has helped me feel better, and I imagine that if you give it a try, it can help you feel a little bit better too.

Thank you so much for tuning in and sharing some of your attention with me today. I hope that if you feel like you’ve And if you could use some help with that, or with anything else that’s causing a little bit of friction or tension in your life, consider reaching out to me to work one on one to I can help you rediscover your values, find your strengths, help determine what it is you desire, and then form some practical steps to help get you closer to your goals.

All the information for my one-on-one coaching is on my website and in the show notes, and you can sign up for a free 30-minute discovery call. I can’t wait to meet you. Have a wonderful week. Bye.