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Hi, My daughter's bedroom is always immaculate. I'm incredibly proud of her, and if I'm honest, a little bit jealous. I tend to cram work, exercise and a whole string of appointments into one day, so the odd thing does get left lying around at mine. The other day I was looking for a laptop. It had to be somewhere in the house. I'd been through every cupboard and every desk, and I'd even asked a relative, because I was certain it was at theirs. Nothing. I was convinced the laptop had simply vanished. Until it dawned on me that there was one place I hadn't looked: under my daughter's bed. There was the laptop. And there, too, was the secret of her ever-tidy room. When I asked her about it, she calmly explained that the space under her bed is ‘the void’. ‘Best not to look,’ she said. ‘Who knows what lives down there.’ My daughter has a brilliant sense of humour. We had a good talk about it afterwards. About order being something you build up bit by bit, and about clutter fogging up your head. Especially in the place where you're meant to switch off: your bed. Clutter has a voice in your head In a study by Saxbe and Repetti (2010), working parents gave a tour of their own homes. Women who mainly talked about clutter and unfinished jobs had a less healthy daily pattern of the stress hormone cortisol and a lower mood. That's a link, not proof that the clutter is the cause. It does ring true, though: everything in your line of sight takes a little bit of your attention, even when you're not consciously looking at it. The scent that gets your housemates tidying In a study by Holland and colleagues (2005), people sat in a room with a faint citrus cleaning scent they didn't consciously notice. Then they ate a crumbly biscuit. Those who had smelled the scent cleared the crumbs off the table more often than those who hadn't. And none of them realised. Do you live with someone who'd happily leave the tidying to everyone else? Put citrus in the diffuser. I'm definitely trying it on my teenagers. Let's turn it into a field study: try it at home this week, with your kids, housemates or partner, and let me know whether it works.
The tidy week: one small job a day We've already done Japanese walking. And the Japanese have a lovely word for this way of tidying too: kaizen, change for the better, in small steps. Not a big weekend clear-out that's undone within a fortnight, but one small thing a day that you actually finish. That feeling of ‘done’ is exactly what your head needs.
Pop some citrus in the diffuser every day (4 drops of Wild Orange, 2 drops of Lemon and 1 drop of Peppermint), so the whole house joins the field study.
Job done? Switch to Lavender and Cedarwood, so your home smells of calm.
Fancy keeping it going beyond seven days? There's a tidy-up generator on my blog. Pick how much time you have and where you want to start, and it chooses a small job for you, timer included.
Let's go!
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