Lockdown has made you a slob. Here's why. ??

Lockdown has made you a slob. Here's why. ??

On the scale of tidiness - 1 being I have never owned or touched a piece of home cleaning equipment and 10 being I pride myself on telling people they can eat their dinner off of any surface in my home - I'd say I was a solid 6.5.

But in lockdown, that above-average rating has been sliding, and I'm not the only one. Hair is being left unwashed, teeth are being scrubbed once a day (if they're lucky), and wearing pants has become a luxury rather than necessity. What's going on? 

Homeward bound   

The first and most obvious thing is you're working, socialising, eating, sleeping and living in one location, all the time. In the good old days, your mess was spread out: between the office, restaurants, pubs, gyms, and cinemas.

Now, all that takes place in one or two rooms that you never leave, meaning the mess build-up is inevitable. The second element to our current untidiness is to do with routine, or the lack thereof. The moments where we'd normally do the dishes or clean our clothes have lost their mooring as our daily lives collapsed into binge eating and eBay buying (just me? Oh ok). 

"When people don't have a routine or structure to their day, it can cause increased stress and anxiety, as well as overwhelming feelings, lack of concentration, and focus," says psychologist Rachel Goldman

Goldman has found the lack of structure and routine in people's lives can exacerbate feelings of distress and helplessness. In other words, once your house starts to get messy, in the absence of structure we start to feel a little, well, ?? - creating a vicious circle that's difficult to get out of.

But for many of you reading this you might be thinking to yourself, who gives a damn? It's not like I've got people coming over? It turns out our brains don't really like messiness, and if left unchecked, makes us messy in other parts of our lives. 

Clean house, clean mind 

Sabine Kastner, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University, has been studying the effects of clutter for years. 

“Many of us aren’t good at processing clutter,” Kastner told National Geographic. “It can become overwhelming and make our brains do more work to complete simple tasks.” The more conflicting stimuli we’re dealing with, the more our brain has to work to filter out what we need.

Essentially, if we're trying to get that presentation done and all we can see in the corner of our eye is all those plates piled up in the sink, or the dog hair everywhere, we find it harder to concentrate. The increased mental strain placed on your brain trying to think about all the things all the time, means at the end of the day, your levels of exhaustion tend to be higher. 

And you know what nobody said ever at the end of a long, exhausting day? "I'm going to scrub the toilet." 

Tidy yourself happy

When you take away this strain on our brains from competing objects, focusing becomes much easier. In 2011, Kastner found that people who cleaned up their homes or workspaces were able to focus better, and their productivity increased. Other research teams have confirmed that decreasing visual distractions can reduce cognitive load and free up working memory.

Career coach and writer Marty Nemko points out another soothing effect: a routine is “something you know you can do well.”

“Modern life, increasingly defined by unpredictability, can be anxiety-provoking, and routines provide an anchor of predictability.”

So while lockdown has reduced our routines and our social lives to little more than wake up, sit at laptop, eat at laptop, chat at laptop, go to sleep, there's still a need to clean your teeth and put on a pair of fresh pants every morning. If not for your sake, for the people who choose to share lockdown with. 

If you like this I write about this all the time in The Brink - the daily newsletter about what goes on inside your head. Sign up!

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