Spring cleaning promotes wellbeing
It rejuvenates your thought process and clears away old habits
Spring is the perfect time to transform the things that may not be working in the home.
With every change that you make in the household, there is a distinct change to your mental wellbeing that not only promotes positive and healthy growth within the home, but in all that you set out to do. Tammy Moir explains.
In most homes there are places that accumulate mess – piles of paper or objects that cause clutter and chaos. This can be a reflection of an area of your mind that needs uncluttering so to speak, and can often be attributed to having a lazy mental habit in a particular area.
This mess is a great reminder to take positive action and make a change.
For many Australians – around 1.1 million – the mess becomes much more than just a pile or two of old newspapers, bordering on the much more serious habit of hoarding.
The larger the mess, the bigger the underlying issues. Dr. Paul Cullen advises, “for extreme cases, relief can be found through medication, but it needs to coincide with counselling to be of any effect in the long run. Healing the emotional difficulties and isolation caused by hoarding is really important.” Control can play a large part, and hoarding becomes the only thing that they feel they have any control over, he explains. There are areas that they feel they cannot actively participate in and therefore decision making becomes next to impossible. “Attachment to objects can cloud judgement and makes parting with them very painful and difficult,” Dr Cullen says. In this way, nothing is ever decided upon, piles of paper get bigger and nothing is recycled or thrown out.
Naturopath Tammy Safi has found with many patients over the years that the long-term outcome of hoarding or leaving rooms as they are can lead to depression. “It can also bring about apathy, lethargy and loss of hygiene. Hoarding is used as a means of coping with situations that are otherwise too difficult for them to deal with, even though it can end up being messy and ridiculous. I encourage my patients to look inward as a way to begin the healing process and in clinic I use the Bach flower ‘walnut’ to begin the first stages towards movement, to help with becoming unstuck.”
One of the best ways to work out what the underlying problem might be is to actually get physical and set upon the task of cleaning the area of the house that is crying out for attention. You will find that throughout the process, or indeed soon after, you are able to see more clearly what it is that has been holding you back, and in the place of a clouded mind, there will be a clear indication of what it is you need to do in order to instil change in the area that needs it.
It can feel a little overwhelming at first, but with help closer and easier to find than ever before you don’t need to do it alone.
Eco organiser and home styling director Tanya Lewis works with the emphasis on responsible living and has over time developed the ten R’s. Refuse, rethink, responsible, restyle, research, reorganise, reduce, reuse, recycle and reward. “My main goal is to reduce the amount that we send to landfill and to rethink what we buy. Do you need it? Do you love it? How would you feel without it? And more importantly, how do you dispose of a product when you’re finished with it? Life is too short to be looking for stuff. I believe that people shouldn’t be wasting their time looking for things when their time could be better spent on more important things,” she says.
With careful consideration and planning, you need never again look upon an accumulated mess with dread, enabling you to spend more time with your family and friends with a clearer mind and a stronger sense of focus.
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