Spring Cleaning: Therapeutic Ways to Freshen Up

Nobody wants to dust the kitchen cabinet, and even fewer people want to dust their cabinet of thoughts. Cleaning is a part of life, both figuratively and literally. It’s something that is unavoidable and often difficult to enjoy, but necessary to find wholeness and balance in our lives. 

How can we use what we learn in counseling to clean things up in our lives? Can therapy help us to literally clean our frightfully messy house? When all is said and done, is having a clean house worth kicking up all the dust?

“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Writing The Checklist: How To Make Your Spring Cleaning Into DIY Therapy

Before we embark on a major clean, we make a checklist of all the things that need taking care of. Your mental health is no different. 

What feels cluttered? What feels neglected? What feels overwhelming? Therapy often starts here: naming what is present without judgment.

Think of your checklist as flexible, not demanding. You are not trying to perfect your life overnight. Instead, you are creating a gentle structure that helps you move forward, one small task at a time.

• Discover How To Feel Anxiety Relief When You Clean. Cleaning can be deeply grounding when done with mindful intention. When anxiety starts to spiral, try focusing on a single task. Notice the sensation of your hands moving, the smell of the cleaning products, the visible progress you’re making. This brings your mind out of the “what if’s” and back into the “what is.”

• Find Depression Relief From Your Renewed Environment. Depression often makes everything feel heavier, including your environment. Clutter can reinforce that weight, making it harder to feel motivated or hopeful. By clearing even a small space (a desk, a sink, a corner of a room), you create a visual cue that change is possible. A renewed environment doesn’t cure depression, but it can gently support you when you’re feeling low. Small wins matter. When you make your bed or clear a surface, you’re sending yourself a quiet message: I am capable of taking care of my life.

• Learn How To Clean Without Triggering Your OCD. For individuals with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, cleaning can become less about care and more about compulsion. The goal is not to eliminate cleaning, but to shift your relationship with it. Set limits before you begin. Decide how long you’ll clean and what “done” looks like. Therapy can help you tolerate your discomfort and build trust in your ability to stop. Cleaning can be your self-care, not self-sabotage.

Organizing Your Living Room: Does Tidiness Offer Depression Relief?

Research has found a link between household messiness and increased symptoms of depression. 

Your living space often mirrors your internal state, but it can also influence it. A tidy, intentional space can reduce overstimulation and make it easier to relax.

That said, perfection is not the goal. A “lived-in” home is still a healthy home. What matters most is creating an environment that feels supportive, not suffocating.

• Include Cleaning In Your Nighttime Routine. Adding small cleaning rituals to your nighttime routine can help signal closure to your day. Washing dishes, tidying a surface, or preparing your space for the next morning can create a sense of completion and preparedness for the future.

• Find Out What You Like About Cleaning. Not all cleaning tasks are created equal. Some may feel satisfying, while others feel draining. Pay attention to what you naturally enjoy. Maybe it’s organizing, vacuuming, or rearranging furniture. Lean into those preferences. Take on more responsibilities that come easily to you and accept more accommodations for the ones you find difficult. 

• Strike A Balance With Your Organization. Organization can be fun when we put it in the right context, but there is such a thing as too much fun. When organization becomes rigid or perfectionistic, it can start to increase stress rather than reduce it. Therapy often encourages flexibility—allowing things to be “good enough” instead of perfect.

Doing Your Chores: How Can Cleaning Be Your Source of Stress Relief Instead of Anxiety?

Your chores are the daily ways you take care of yourself and your immediate environment. You’d think that it’d naturally feel good to take care of yourself, and it does, it just takes a little conscious push to get there. 

• Don’t Hurry. When we find something unpleasant, we want to get it over with as fast as possible. At times, this instinct can serve us, but we run into problems when the act of rushing through starts to cause us distress in and of itself. Taking things slow, or in other words, choosing not to do something as quick as possible out of animal instinct, can help us to feel less anxious when we handle our acts of daily living. When we reframe our chores as something we can do while relaxed, they will not loom so large in our minds. Moving quickly activates the sympathetic nervous system, which can bring you into fight or flight mode. Moving slowly will activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which will help you remain calm and connected to the present moment. 

• Stop Procrastinating. This is the sister lesson to not hurrying. Procrastination is the other extreme we often fall on, and it ironically goes hand in hand with hurrying. We put something off for so long that we end up completing it in an anxious hurry or not at all. Procrastination is so devious because although it feels like a favor you’re doing for yourself in the present, it’s truly an inconvenience you’re giving to yourself in the future. It is also a sign of dorsal vagal shutdown, meaning your nervous system is exhausted from prolonged fight-or-flight activation and shifts into avoidance and apathy, resulting in procrastination.

• Generously Self-Soothe. If you don’t like folding laundry, doing dishes, or taking out the garbage, then it’s your responsibility to negotiate a way to make it enjoyable or at least tolerable. People don’t whistle while they work just because they enjoy working so much; they do it because they love whistling. Sing a song, listen to music, and put the tv on when you can. Find gratitude for what the things you are cleaning provide for you. 

“If life is a never ending loop of dirty dishes and laundry then that means life is a never ending loop of home cooked meals and comfy clean clothes.” –Maudiemoods

Allow this video to inspire you to have an attitude of curiosity and play around the things that you are currently working on, whether that be cleaning your physical space or your mental space.

Hiring A Professional: How Do You Know When You Need A Therapist? 

There are some messes that just demand the attention of a professional. Most of us are cut out to handle everyday messes, but few of us know how to get the tough stains out, sanitize the tiling of the bathroom, and all the little things that make a house glittering clean. That’s where a professional can make all the difference in the world.

Michael Anthony, LCSW, is a therapist based in St. Petersburg, FL. He helps clients nurture their inner worlds sustainably, which creates positive effects in their outer lives. With his expertise, he can guide you toward the right path for your mental health.

This is what Michael Anthony has to say for people who are considering whether their mental cobwebs require professional dusting:

Changing Your Bedsheets: How Does Counseling Help Us Change Our Habits?

Spring is a great time for new beginnings, and “spring cleaning” can have many meanings!  Studies suggest that your physical environment has an affect on your internal environment, therefore cleaning your spaces can improve your mental health!  If you feel overwhelmed and come home to clutter or things you no longer need, clearing space can help.  

Personally I am not a huge fan of cleaning, but I use a simple trick to help.  I use cleaning as a means of meditation. If you do one thing at a time and are mindful about that one thing, you will slowly see items come off your to-do list.  

Best of luck everyone!

If you’re feeling stuck on your healing journey, you don’t have to navigate it alone. Our intake specialist will take the time to understand your needs and connect you with a therapist who is the right fit. Schedule your free 15-minute consultation.

 

Sunny Ebsary is an educator, multi-modal artist, and writer specializing in the intersection of myth and mental health. Sunny’s writing walks the line between poetic and logical, giving readers a chance to interface with the mind and imagination. Sunny’s been putting pen to paper since he was a child, writing everything from albums, novels, and plays, to essays, interactive games, and of course, many articles! While studying both psychology and writing, he realized his real passion in life was helping others unlock their creative spark. Whether he’s leading a D&D game, directing a production, or diving deep into the brain, you can be sure Sunny will be ushering you toward finding meaning in your life.