My House Is a Mess: How to Clean When Overwhelmed
There comes a point in every woman's life when burning down the house begins to seem like a reasonable alternative to cleaning it.
Maybe we've been through a hard season: depression, grief, or a few months when life asked for more than we had. The laundry piled up, the dishes multiplied, and somewhere under everything we set down and never picked back up is a dining room table. We're fairly certain it's still there. Or maybe your mother, who has hosted Thanksgiving for thirty years, has announced she's passing the mantle to you. Suddenly, not having a house sounds like a perfectly good excuse.
We all have that one household project we've been promising ourselves we'll tackle. This summer, I wrote about my determination to catch up on laundry. My fall project? Cleaning out the refrigerator. If you've got a project you've been putting off and can't seem to get started, here's my suggestion: grab a trash bag.
How to Clean When You're Overwhelmed: Where to Start
Spend five minutes collecting the junk that's been lying around the house. Don't reorganize the pantry, investigate the refrigerator, or sort your grandmother's china. Just collect the trash. You may not get far, but you'll have decided where to begin, which is often the hardest part. And there's a psychological reason that matters.
When Home Stops Feeling Like Home
At Every Girl Living, we focus on eight dimensions of wellness, including environmental wellness. But you probably already know that your surroundings affect how you feel. We ask a lot of our homes. They're supposed to offer shelter, comfort, privacy, and a place to recover from the world. They're also offices, playrooms, laundry facilities, and storage for things we fully intend to return to Amazon.
Unfortunately, the laundry keeps accumulating even when someone we love dies. The dishes still need washing during a depressive episode. And that linen closet we've been cramming things into while caring for everyone else is now a project of its own. It happens gradually: we skip one weekend because we're tired, something else comes first the next, and eventually what took an afternoon looks like a three-day project.
Back in 2010, psychologists Darby Saxbe and Rena Repetti asked married couples to give tours of their homes. Some described restful spaces, while others talked about clutter and unfinished projects. Among the women, descriptions of stressful home environments were associated with less favorable daily moods and differences in cortisol rhythms. You know, the stress hormone. The study was small and observational, so we can't conclude that clutter causes stress or cleaning changes cortisol, but it does suggest that how we experience our homes is connected to how we feel.
A 2016 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology also found that clutter was associated with lower well-being, particularly when possessions interfered with using and enjoying the home. A dining room table covered in art supplies after a family project is one thing. A table that hasn't been available for dinner since Easter is another, especially with Thanksgiving coming.
When a Messy House Starts Feeling Like a Personal Failure
Get a group of women talking about housework, and sooner or later someone will mention the pressure to keep a clean house. There's an old assumption that when guests walk into a messy home, they don't wonder why the husband hasn't cleaned. They wonder why the wife hasn't. Whether anyone is actually thinking that is another matter. But we can begin treating the condition of our homes as a reflection of our competence.
That pressure is especially unfair when we're dealing with depression, grief, or prolonged stress. Depression can affect energy, concentration, and decision-making, while grief can disrupt familiar routines. Now picture cleaning a kitchen under those circumstances. We see the dishes and remember the dishwasher needs emptying, open a cabinet and discover there's no room, then decide to reorganize it, which requires clearing the counter covered in unsorted mail. Twenty minutes later, we're holding a plastic lid that doesn't fit anything we own, and we haven't washed a dish.
Cleaning requires planning, prioritizing, remembering, and deciding what comes next. These are executive functions, and when they're strained, a messy room can be difficult to navigate. Criticizing ourselves for struggling doesn't make those decisions any easier.
Why We Keep Avoiding the Mess
Here's a reality we know too well: avoiding a task often feels better than doing it. If the kitchen makes us anxious, we leave. We watch television, scroll Instagram, or research organizational systems. We may even order attractive storage baskets. That immediate relief makes avoidance more likely, something behavioral psychologists call negative reinforcement: a behavior increases because it removes something unpleasant.
Meanwhile, the dishes stay in the sink. When we return, there are more of them, the task looks worse, and starting gets harder. An ordinary housekeeping problem becomes a cycle of avoidance and guilt. Waiting until we're sufficiently disgusted with ourselves to clean the whole house probably isn't the answer.
What Psychology Can Teach Us About Getting Started
There's a psychological treatment for depression called behavioral activation. One of its principles is that action doesn't have to wait for motivation. We tend to imagine the reverse: if we could just get motivated, we'd clean the kitchen, enjoy the results, and want to do it again. Yay, washing dishes!
But motivation isn't always available. Behavioral activation encourages small, purposeful actions even when we don't feel like doing them. It's a bit like faking it till you make it: we do the thing, and sometimes the motivation follows. Over time, meaningful activity can create opportunities for accomplishment and enjoyment.
Will cleaning your house heal depression, resolve grief, or eliminate chronic stress? No. But applying this principle to a manageable household task can help us get unstuck. Remember the trash bag? We didn't need a schedule or an entire afternoon; we picked up trash. And dang it, that feels good to get at least that much done.
A Few Ways to Make Cleaning Easier
Once we've started, how do we keep going without turning a simple task into an enormous one? Wondering how to clean when overwhelmed? Here are a few strategies worth trying.
Sort by five things. KC Davis, author of How to Keep House While Drowning, teaches the Five Things Method: trash, dishes, laundry, things that have a place, and things that don't. Work through one category at a time. It's easier than making decisions about everything in the room at once.
Set a timer. Five minutes may be plenty on a hard day. On the other hand, we might have fifteen or thirty. When the timer goes off, we're allowed to stop. Otherwise, five minutes quietly becomes clean until bedtime.
Pair it with something you like. Researchers call this temptation bundling. A study involving entertaining audiobooks and exercise found that pairing an enjoyable activity with a less appealing one could encourage participation under certain conditions. The study wasn't about housework, but the idea is worth trying. Save a favorite podcast for folding laundry.
Bring company. Having someone work alongside you, even over video, may make starting easier. This is sometimes called body doubling. People report finding it helpful, although research specifically on household cleaning remains limited.
Share the load. If other people live in the house, consider whether the work is shared fairly. Household management includes noticing what needs doing and remembering to do it. One person shouldn't be responsible for everything because she's the first to notice the bathroom.
Hire someone. Sometimes there isn't anyone to share the load with, or the job has gotten bigger than we can reasonably manage ourselves. If it's within your budget, consider hiring a house cleaner, professional organizer, or junk removal service. There's nothing wrong with paying someone to help you tackle a project that's been hanging over your head for months. And frankly, some things are worth paying someone else to do.
What Does a Healthier Home Actually Look Like?
A healthier home isn't necessarily a spotless one. For someone recovering from depression, it might mean clean sheets and enough dishes to prepare a meal. For a family with young children, it could mean a living room you can cross without stepping on toys. For the woman who inherited Thanksgiving, it might mean a clear dining room table and a roasting pan she can locate.
Environmental wellness is about creating surroundings that support how we actually live. Maybe clean laundry doesn't need to be folded immediately, toys can live in a big basket, and a dining room used for crafts and homework doesn't need to look ready for a formal dinner every Tuesday. The question isn't whether our homes meet someone else's standards, but whether they work for us.
So choose one thing that would make your day easier and give it five minutes. If you have more energy, do more. If you don't, you've still made progress.
Coming Next: Our 30-Day Home Reset Challenge
Next week, we'll explore how habits form and how to make household routines easier to maintain. We'll also introduce our 30-Day Home Reset Challenge, running October 27 through November 25, just in time for Thanksgiving. Rather than assigning everyone the same thirty tasks, we'll help you create a personalized roadmap with manageable goals and practical behavioral strategies. Miss a day? Pick up where you left off. No catching up required.
Want to join us? Download the free EGL Fit app so you'll be ready when the challenge is released. You'll also have easy access to our latest blog articles, wellness resources, and upcoming events at Every Girl Living. It's a simple way to stay connected and keep up with what's happening at EGL. Once you've downloaded the app, use the code JXUZPU to join.
And if depression, grief, anxiety, or ongoing stress is making daily life harder to manage, remember that you don't have to figure everything out alone. Our counseling and coaching services are available when you need additional support. Schedule a free consultation to learn more.
In the meantime, start with the trash. Your mother may still expect Thanksgiving dinner, but at least she'll have somewhere to sit.
References and Further Reading
Saxbe, D. E., & Repetti, R. L. (2010). No place like home: Home tours correlate with daily patterns of mood and cortisol. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(1), 71–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167209352864
Roster, C. A., Ferrari, J. R., & Jurkat, M. P. (2016). The dark side of home: Assessing possession 'clutter' on subjective well-being. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 46, 32–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2016.03.003
Uphoff, E., et al. (2020). Behavioural activation therapy for depression in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD013305.pub2
Milkman, K. L., Minson, J. A., & Volpp, K. G. M. (2014). Holding the Hunger Games hostage at the gym: An evaluation of temptation bundling. Management Science, 60(2), 283–299. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1784
Davis, K. (2022). How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing. S&S/Simon Element.
I enjoyed this read. Hopefully, it will help with my organizational skills (or lack of).