Episode 232: Mental Spring Cleaning
Spring Cleaning Your Brain
Basic Assumptions
So let’s talk about spring, cleaning your brain. Shall we? I want to start with just a basic question. Do you feel like your house should be clean and you like in your heart of hearts, do you feel like you want your house to be picked up and sparkling and looking nice all the time? Do you believe that homes that are well taken care of with families that are successful and living joyous fulfilled lives, that those homes, that those families are put together, that they have a good system, that they’ve got a routine that things are put away, that people know where to put things.
I’m so curious about our beliefs, just our baseline beliefs about how our homes should look, not from a design perspective, but simply from a cleanliness or organization perspective. And I guess I don’t really want to refer specifically to cleanliness in terms of like dirt and bacteria and dust and those sorts of things, but more just like: are things picked up and tidy tidiness.
Do we assume that our houses should be tidy? Are you frustrated when you walk in the door and things aren’t tidy? Do you feel like you did something wrong or do you feel let down, I want to just take a minute for invite you each of you personally, to just explore that idea for yourself, where do you fall along the spectrum.
Where did that belief come from? What are some of the experiences you had or the things you were taught that helped you formulate your subconscious belief about the way homes should quote unquote should look or be? I definitely have for most of my life held the very subconscious belief that homes should be tidy all of the time. Like pretty much all of the time, or at least at the end of every day, things should be put away.
I got this idea from growing up in a home where cleanliness and organization was valued. We had not only our own chores, but we also had help the wonderful cleaning woman who came over to our house weekly and made sure that things were put away and tidy and wiped, wiped, clean.
I got this idea from visiting other people’s homes and from the way that things seem to always look right, or that people would talk about. Putting things away before people came over or that they would feel, you know, they would apologize for things not being put away. I definitely got this idea that homes were supposed to be put together from magazines.
I’ve always loved design and I would look through design magazines and see how nothing was ever out of place. These were just beautiful, beautiful homes. I also got this idea from people, acting like homes that were clean were. That people had had it together. Like those moms, those families just had things, had things all together that they had a good system that they were on top of things that, that things were just going smoothly.
In fact, I have this really funny comment that my mom made to me when I was dating Dave and I think I was doing the dishes after dinner. I was living at home. I was in college. I had lived away many times in my life, but I was back living at home, going to nursing school, engaged to Dave. We had signed on an apartment and I was cleaning.
Cleaning up after myself after dinner. And my mom said, Oh, you must be in love because you are paying attention. You’re like, you’re cleaning up. You’re you’re wanting to kind of nest sort of thing. Like you’re, you’re I can tell you’re in love because of the way that you’re treating your environment. You’re aware of things and you want, you want things to be nice.
And I thought, Oh, when people are in love, they clean. When people are satisfied and happy with their homes, they keep it nice and tidy. Now I will say that there is nothing wrong with a clean house. There’s nothing wrong with a tidy house, but how much time do you spend thinking about that or feeling frustrated about it?
I know that in our life, in my life, in my relationship, the topic of how I seem to shoulder a lot of the burden of thinking about the house and the house work. Not that I do all of it. And definitely not, especially in the last several years, but that I seem to care a lot more about whether things are clean or not.
Does a messy house bother you?
Then Dave has, or definitely then my kids have. And I never thought to explore that. I always just felt, you know, maybe a little bit frustrated or overwhelmed or resentful about it rather than questioning whether or not my own belief system about it was in fact valid or not, or not even whether or not it’s a valid, but whether or not it was serving me, was it, does it make me feel better to feel frustrated about the house being dirty?
Did it make me feel motivated and uplifted and relaxed and peaceful, or did it cause a lot of friction. Both whether I did it or whether I didn’t, it seems to me that backing up and taking some perspective, at least in the way that I was thinking about my house and how I wanted it to be caused a lot of unnecessary frustration.
Do you feel that way as well? Like, can you just, if you’re being honest with yourself, maybe some of you don’t and gosh hooray for you. You’re going to love the thoughts that I have to offer in this episode, because you probably already think a lot of them, but if you’re really, really honest with yourself, what’s your gut feeling?
When you walk into a messy room in your house, What is your, like, do you have to do some mental gymnastics to feel okay about it? Are you just frustrated about it or, or do you feel kind of, okay. I don’t know. I think that it’s an interesting thing to explore as your spring cleaning, just like you would, you know, look through the closet or the cupboard and decide what things are serving you and what you’re using and what you like, why don’t we do that?
Just like put all of your underlying beliefs on hold for a minute or, and just go with me for the next 15 or so minutes while we chat through some ideas of maybe some beliefs or ideas or thoughts in there that might not be serving you and what, what might serve you better. I wanted to mention just briefly too.
I think the role that social media, not only Instagram, but also just generally like blogging, the accessibility of peaks into other people’s homes, but not in a candid camera sort of way more of a curated camera sort of way has just perpetuated and intensified the idea that. We are doing it all wrong.
Instagram and blogs didn’t ease the burden, exposing us to the reality that everyone’s house is messy. Sometimes I think that it further the narrative that perfect was normal, accessible and easy that these women were. Not only were they put together in fashionable clothes and had great makeup and hair and a great exercise routine, but they also had a stunningly styled living room or kitchen, no matter what day of the week, it was no matter how many kids they had at home.
And of course here and there, there have been little peeks behind the curtain where someone will draw back and say, Instagram versus reality. Or let me show you, you know, the behind the scenes, this is all the stuff that I moved out of the frame. So I could take that really pretty picture, but that doesn’t change that what we see most often out there in the world, not in our homes, but in everyone else’s home.
Seemingly is looking pretty put together. I can think way back to my first apartment. I just barely had started blogging as a total hobby just for fun. And I remember the instinct of I’m going to take pictures of our living room, which by the way, I was so trend forward that my living room was painted pumpkin orange. I don’t know.
I don’t think that pumpkin orange is it on color right now, but I know people are going back to color in a big way. I definitely had an orange living room and a plum colored study and Robin’s egg blue bedroom. I was not afraid of color back then. I definitely had the automatic instinct of these pictures are going to be on the internet for anyone to see.
I’m going to make sure that they look really nice. Like I moved stuff off of the table that was sitting there so that I could take. A picture of a more put together table or I’d, you know, adjust things for the picture. I think this is something that people forget and it’s like, we know it, but it’s hard when you don’t really internalize it all the time.
Styling vs. Living
That pictures are not reality. And maybe some of you don’t struggle with this at all, but I remember Emily Henderson, the incredible designer, Emily Henderson years ago posted a blog post that totally rocked my world view and changed my life in a positive way because she did an entire post about styling.
I had never really heard the term styling. And now of course, Emily Henderson has an incredible book called Styled by Emily Henderson. It’s one of my favorite design books. In this blog post, and I’ll link this in the show notes, because I think it’s really, really effective. She explains what it means to style a room for a photograph.
Styling is different than just living. She shows pictures in this blog post of her kitchen on a regular day, and that includes a coffee maker on the counter. It includes her daughters. High chair sitting next to the Island. It includes male on the edge of the countertop, where they set it down after grabbing it from the mailbox, just a regular, I mean, beautifully designed as far as the actual kitchen, but just a regular kitchen.
And then she shows how, in order to take the photographs for the blogs to show off the design itself, the tile and the cabinets and stuff that she styles it. And this is different than living. She moves the high chair. She takes the mail away. She unplugs the coffee maker and puts it in a different room for a little while.
Yeah. She even goes so far as to explain how they photo her team, photoshops out the outlet covers on the backsplash, because of course in a functional kitchen, you need to have a place to plug in the coffee maker. But that’s distracting in a picture when you’re trying to just show the beautiful tile.
And so whether you agree with it or not, I mean, it’s kind of like Photoshopping, like a cosmetics ad of a person’s like the model space. Some of it’s not done in a sneaky way. It’s done this adjustment or the styling and the, and the touch-ups postproduction are done in a way that highlight what the purpose of the post or the photos are.
So it makes sense from that perspective. But I remember I’m a young mom I’m living in this apartment. I am. And, you know, loving blogs and all of the access to other people and other moms and other worlds and, and things that I’m getting just, you know, in my living room from the computer. And I see this post and I realize that it’s okay for my blender, that I use every single day to sit on the counter.
I’m like unplugging it and putting it away every single morning so that my counter looks styled because I want it to just ever, I want everything to be put away all the time. And like I’m following the kids around a little bit. Like after they play for an hour in the living room, I like put everything back away or help them, you know, clean up, clean up, clean up, and we put everything away before we go on our walk and then we come back and they take all the toys out again.
And then we clean up, clean up, clean up and put it all away. And like how many times can you do the same thing? Because I want to walk into the room and have it be clean. I want it not only to be clean. I want it to be styled. I want to live in a home that feels like it’s styled and. Again, maybe I’m the neurotic one.
Maybe no one else feels like this. Maybe you don’t care if the pillows are fluffed. And if the you know, chair is pointing the right direction, or if there’s a, you know, if the mail is all stacked up on the counter, or if everyone’s like backpacks are all over the room, maybe that is fine. Well, and here’s the thing.
This is what I’m going to tell you is fine. I just think it’s interesting to back it up and say, So much of what we see and our idea of the way things quote unquote, should look or what I put together house is like on the day to day basis is incorrect. There are so many things that we do to put things together for a purpose, like you’re hosting a dinner party or your, your house is being photographed for a blog.
I mean, not very many people experience that, but you know, influencers and bloggers and social media like that. That’s what it is. You move things out of the way. So the picture looks nice, but that doesn’t mean you live like that. Do you understand where I’m going with this.
Thinking it should be the way you think it should be doesn’t necessarily serve you. And it’s actually totally inaccurate for most people. So instead of hitting our heads against the wall to live up to an unrealistic and actually not real perspective or standard, let’s lean into spring cleaning our brain so that we can love the life that we are living.
Let’s love the home that we’re in, in the state, that it is at any time.
I’m going to share three beliefs that you can work on believing three thoughts that might serve you rather than some tips about how to dust from top to bottom or a checklist of what to declutter this week. I want to leave these three thoughts with you and explore them just a little bit.
Belief 1: Things Belong In Use as Well as Put Away
The first thought is from a book about organization from a professional organizer that I saw about a year ago. That is such a simple concept, but it just sort of clicked something in my brain and my perspective. The idea is that things have more than one home. Our belongings, our possessions don’t belong only put away they also belong in use. And that may seem like, Oh yeah, of course. But often we think that things are in the correct position when they’re at rest put away.
If you can change your idea and believe the thought that things not only belong put away, but they also belong in use, that can be really transformative. I’m going to give you an example. You look at your sink full of dishes and you think I need to do the dishes. All the dishes need to be put away. They need to be washed and dried and put away. That is because your underlying belief is that dishes belong at rest in the cupboard.
That is where they belong. That’s where they should be. And almost like that’s where they should be. Pretty much all the time, but what if you allow space for the dishes to also exist in other places as the correct place dishes belong in the cupboard, they also belong on the table during meals. They also belong in the sink as they’re waiting to be washed.
They also belong in the dishwasher and they also, you know, then go back to belonging in the cup, in the cupboard or the cabinet. What, if you felt good about your dishes being in any of those places, because they’re supposed to be in all of those places, they belong at any point in the cycle of use, they don’t just belong in the cabinets, not being used.
They also belong in use. Now you can extend that idea to any of the things in your home, the books that your kids read, don’t only belong on the bookshelf. They also belong. On the floor in their hands, on the couch, in the tree house, on the hammock, they belong in a pile behind the, the chair where your child is, stack them up for reading time. They belong tucked underneath the covers from where they grab them as they’re going to sleep. What if the books belong in all of those places? Those are all the correct place for them to be. They don’t just belong in their homes on the shelves, but they also belong.
In use the same thing could be said for clothing, clothing belongs in the closet, it belongs on your bodies and it belongs in the laundry bin and all of those places are fine. All of those places are just right. You may even extend it too, that the clothes can also belong on the floor in front of the laundry bin because they haven’t quite made it to the laundry bin. And that’s also a place where, you know, that’s part of the process. The part of the system is in the drawer, on the body, on the floor, in the bin, and then through the laundry and back to the drawer again, what if it’s okay for things to be in all of those places?
So. I want you to think of a couple ideas for yourself, something that maybe kind of bothers you when you feel like, Oh, it doesn’t go there. But question that belief and think, do things belong other than at rest? Can I make space in my thoughts and in my brain for the items in my home to not only be at rest where they belong when they’re put away, but can I make space for some of those things to also belong in use in any part in their life cycle? So the first thought is things don’t always belong, put away things aren’t supposed to be put away all the time. See if that one serves you.
Belief 2: My Timeline for Cleanliness Can Extend
The next thought as you are spring cleaning your brain that I want you to consider begins with one of your current thoughts. I want you to think for yourself, what is the length of time that for you and your personal belief system is acceptable between the house being tidy? Is it a day? Like, do you feel like things should be put away at the end of the, at the end of the day? How often do you have your kids clean up the playroom, or how often do you feel like you need to pull things together?
Is it a day? Is it a couple of days? Is it a week? Whatever that idea you have is whatever your own personal opinion or belief about how, what the timeframe is like. It’s okay for the, the house to be messy for X time, but. There is like for most of us, there’s a line where if it crosses this line, then we, then we’re annoyed.
Then we have to do it. It’s time. We got to put it away. It’s taken too long for the second thought. I want to just invite you to stretch out that timeline a little bit. So during my retreat last weekend, I went on a morning, run a couple of the days with some of the attendees. And one of the days I was running with one of the attendees and we were talking about this idea about houses and cleanliness and you know how often we need to pick things up and the tidiness and my friend mentioned, I just feel like it’s okay for things to be messy for a day, like until the end of the day, but I really want things to be put away by the end of the day. And I mentioned that I used to feel that same way.
And with the pandemic, with all my kids home all the time with homeschooling, with playing at home, with being together at home, with everything being at home all the time, it was too much. It was like silly that we would clean everything up. And then the next day we would get it all out again. And so I decided to extend the timeframe in my brain. So rather than the house needing to be tidy each night, I thought it’s okay. If the house is tidy at the end of each week, we’ll just pick things. We’ll play all week long. The kids leave their toys out.
They can Milo the other night built I mean, not the other night, it was the daytime, but he built like a ramp for his cars on the table. It was like books and boxes. And he had things on the side and he spent like an hour and a half building this ramp and it was towards the end of the day. And we had, we ate dinner out on the porch because his, his invention, his building ramp thing was on the table. And luckily the weather has been so nice.
And he looked at me with these eyes and said, do I have to put it away? And I was like, no, No play, you play with it tomorrow. You can add to it. You can have fun with it. It was so refreshing to have stretched out my timeline, my own personal belief system timeline to where. It’s okay for my kids to have multiple day projects.
It’s okay for them to play a game and leave everything out for a few days. And then, you know, about once a week when things are sort of getting out of hand or we’re kind of forgetting what things are being used for, or they’re not out being used, they’re just out, then we’ll pull it all together. We’ll do a family power hour and we’ll put things away.
And in the meantime, I won’t worry about it. Rather than every day feeling like, okay, it’s dinner time. We got to clean up so that we can have dinner so that we can get on with our life so that you can wake up and mess it all up again. We can just say, we’re going to live. We’re going to play. And it’s like, my house doesn’t need to be cleaned every day. My house needs to be cleaned about once a week.
Does that sound relieving to you? Like the idea of whatever that timeline is for, you know, some of you may already be at a weekend. Maybe you want to stretch it out to two weeks. Maybe if you feel frustrated at the end of the week that like things aren’t all put away, maybe you’re like, that’s fine.
Let’s do two week projects. Whatever feels like it would be a relief because you know that whatever timeline you have that you’ve invented for yourself, that’s not. Like some hard and fast rule. It’s just your own arbitrary idea about the way things should be. Is it serving you? Is it causing frustration and resentment and friction?
Do you seem to be the only one in the family that knows what this timeline is? Is everyone else sort of confused or annoyed when it’s, again, time to pick everything up or do you sort of have around putting things all away and think, why am I the only one who cares about this? If any of those things ring true for you?
I want to invite you to consider extending your timeline a little bit. There’s no one who says that you can’t. There might be people in your life, your mom, or your mother-in-law or your sister or a friend, uh, super judgy friend. There may be people who are going to think, gosh, her house got messy or she’s not really holding it together these days.
And guess what? It does not matter what they think. You can just enjoy feeling a little bit more peace. By inviting and considering the thought and the belief as you are spring cleaning your brain, that your house is only going to be cleaned once a week.
Belief 3: Mess is life.
The third and final thought that I’m going to leave you with in this episode is the idea that mess is life!
I want you to think about the last time that you were a little bit annoyed or frustrated or felt some friction or resentment around the way that your mess was at your house, whether it’s toys on the floor or your husband’s socks next to his side of the bed, or, you know, the windows that haven’t been cleaned in six months.
What, if you, in all of the thoughts, the negative thoughts that you had about that, what if you inserted life or living instead of mess? What if you walked in and thought, gosh, look at how much life has been happening in this house. What if you looked at the way your kids played and the way their toys got strewn about the house and you thought, gosh, my kids are sure living.
What if, as you looked at the dishes piled up in the sink, you thought we have created such life in this family, in this kitchen. If you can experiment with the idea that mess equals life and start to just play a little game with yourself, where you word swap you word, swap that mess for life or living, and then see how that feels.
In my experience, your relationship with mess will dramatically improve because it will no longer be something to be scared of or ashamed of or frustrated by. It will be something to welcome. Something that feels like fulfillment of your hopes and dreams.
Now, I know a lot of you at this point are probably thinking: I just can’t with the mess. Like I walk in and physically I’m unable to function or I lose, I lose my focus. Like I can’t function in a messy house, but what if you tried, what if you started to dig into some of your beliefs and some of your ideas about it and thought this isn’t a messy house. This is a house full of life.
These things are all going to be put away. In a couple of days and that’s great. I can handle that. In fact, there are so many other things that I want to do. I’m not going to waste my time worrying about this right now. What have you just tried? What if you wanted to spring clean, not only your closet and your cabinets, but also your thoughts around the way that you have to upkeep things.
Bonus Thought: We Can Choose our Thoughts and Beliefs, We Can Declutter and Clean Our Brains!
What if you changed a little bit of your idea about how things have to be, I am not going to say that I’m perfect at this. I will say that my relationship to my possessions, to my family, to my time and energy has dramatically shifted during the last six months year when my default is that my house is not tidy.
The default is that there are Barbies in the living room watching Sophia with Plum, and that there’s Legos strewn down the hallway. And that there is a ramp built on the kitchen table and that they’re socks next to the toilet in the bathroom and that the kids rooms are just pleasantly lived in. And my automatic reaction is not to be frustrated and annoyed and feel like I’m not doing enough or that why doesn’t anyone else care about this? It’s to feel like it’s all good. We’re fine. We’re living, we’re doing it. It’s been a really interesting shifts to think things aren’t only supposed to be at rest. They’re also supposed to be in use.
It’s been really enlightening to think. There’s no rule out there in the universe that your house has to be clean. At the end of every day, I am super happy leaving dishes in the sink because I know that I wake up the next morning and I feel a lot more energized and motivated and that I can ask my kids to help do.
It’s not all my responsibility. It’s fine. And I especially love the idea that we’re not messy, we’re living or we’re creating. We’re enjoying our life, that there’s so much more to it than putting everything away all the time. So as your spring cleaning over these, these next days and weeks and months, I want you to consider not only some strategies for getting rid of the excess clutter, but also getting rid of those thoughts that aren’t serving you, getting rid of the guilt.
Around what you think your house or home should be like getting rid of the idea of perfection and magazine, worthiness and styling all the time and just enjoying living there. Because I will tell you that if life is Instagram versus reality, I will take reality. Every step of the way. Reality is what we are living reality is every day.
In the eyes of the ones that you love. I hope this episode has been helpful in some way, if some small thought or idea will help you feel a little bit lighter, feel a little bit better, feel like it’s totally okay to not have everything put away all the time, because what fun is that? That’s my goal. And as soon as I get home, which I’m not home right now, but when I get home, I’ll try to show you some.
Reality reality on Instagram. We’ll try to give you a little bit of an insider scoop. I’ve been taking a break from Instagram on the whole, as I think I shared with you a couple episodes ago that it’s felt really good to just be fully present in my life. And although it’s such a fun community over there, I also have felt the need to connect deeply with myself and with my people and with my friends and with nature and just with quiet.
And it’s been really, really nice. But I will make sure that I give you an inside scoop at my reality, which is a very lovely lived in home.
Conclusion
I want to thank you for listening in. I hope that you’re enjoying listening to live free creative. If you haven’t shared with a friend lately or taken a screenshot and posted on social media, know how much that means to me.
I would love for more women to feel a little bit lighter as they live a more creative, adventurous, and intentional lifestyle. Listening to the show. Every week, I drop an episode Thursday mornings at 6:00 PM Eastern, and I hope that they have served you in some way. Please feel free to leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts.
It’s really fun to read all of those reviews. I read every single one and I am just so grateful for you sharing your experiences with me and also with the other. Women and people out there who need a little bit of a boost and, and love hearing what you’ve been enjoying about the show. I hope that you have a really beautiful, wonderful week and I can’t wait to chat with you again next time.
See you later.
