I have always been a messy girl – I am unorganized, hardly practice healthy habits, and I love to sleep a ton. At the beginning of the summer, I decided I wanted to change. It started when I would constantly see TikTok’s of super put-together girls. They would get up at five in the morning, workout, eat healthy and achieve a million things before my first alarm had even gone off. While I do love a good vlog, it started to feel discouraging to see such aesthetic videos and it made me feel like I wasn’t doing enough.
As someone who struggles to get into a routine and stay consistent with it, I knew it would take a lot for me to fix my day-to-day life. At first, I tried to go all out and change my routine completely. Not shockingly, this failed. It took a while, but by the end of the summer, I had finally learned a lot of simple habits that have been easy to incorporate into my days.
The first step in becoming a partial-clean girl is to remove yourself from social media accounts that you feel are toxic. This is extremely basic advice, but it is what I had to work on the most to even see a slight change in myself. Social media is one of the biggest factors that made everything bad for me, especially TikTok. Since these social media are often filtered by what you watch the most, I decided to stop liking and viewing videos of such super-perfect routines or even of people with extreme workout habits. With them off my feed, it helps so much to not have to see how others are spending their time. It has made me focus a lot more on my own goals and what I need to get done, rather than hyper fixating on others.
Another easy habit I have developed is not getting on my phone when I wake up. I used to lay in my bed and go through everything for so long in the morning. Within the last few months (excluding weekends), I get up to get ready before going on my phone and checking all my social media. I am not sure why, but this has changed my mood so much for the better. I notice that when I just get up and start my day, I am so much happier and feel way less tired than if I let myself scroll aimlessly on my phone.
My last fix for my routine has been just to listen to myself. If I need a nap, I take one. If I feel up to exercising or doing a little bit of organization at the end of each day, I let myself do it then. Being organized and having a routine can be as easy as you want it to be and can look different for everyone. It has been important for me to learn that it is fluid and every week can be something new.
It took me a while to realize that not everyone has the perfect “clean-girl” aesthetic. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, we should be proud of and master our “messy-girl” routines!
