I’m willing to bet that if I took any online quiz titled “Which FRIENDS Character Are You?”, my results would say Monica Geller. Why do I think that you ask? Because, like her, I have an unordinary affinity for cleaning. I’m not nearly as intense about it as Monica, but I am definitely the “make my bed every morning” and “clean for hours without even realizing it” type.
I like cleaning because I’ve found it to be incredibly therapeutic for me. I typically spend my Sundays in a trance: listening to music, scrubbing countertops and sorting everything in sight for hours on end. Afterwards I feel accomplished, prepared to take on the upcoming week, and extremely satisfied by the feeling of being in a clean environment. In order to maintain that, I usually spend a couple minutes tidying up on a daily basis. But sometimes, I’d rather not. Especially after a long day of classes, work and club meetings! Last week I had the thought: could a messy room really be that bad? And after one glance at the large pile of laundry I didn’t feel like doing, I came to the conclusion that it was a hypothesis worth testing.
And so, it began. For a full week, instead of spending a few spare minutes cleaning my room, I did literally anything else instead. And by the end of it, I came to the conclusion that being messy isn’t all that bad. That is, until you need to find matching socks.
Typically, when my room starts to look messy I try to rearrange my schedule so that I have time to clean, because the messier it gets the more anxious I start to feel. But by the end of my week of not cleaning I became accustomed to the mess and the disarray that came with it. And when I stopped stressing about how relaxing my room looked, I actually felt a lot calmer. Instead of stressing about what my room looked like I was able to focus my energy on things I enjoyed – like naps.
Much to my surprise, I actually enjoyed my week of not cleaning my room. I will admit, things were a lot more unorganized and chaotic than I’m used to, but overall, I found not being concerned about how messy I was being both liberating and oddly exciting. I couldn’t help but give a sly smirk every time I threw a rejected outfit onto the piles of clothes in my closet or came home and dropped my bag and coat in the middle of the floor before collapsing onto my bed. Sure, my bedroom floor was hardly visible and made finding my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night a safety hazard, but this self-inflicted experiment seemed like a good enough justification for me to leave it that way. The hardest part of the whole thing was trying to find a matching pair of socks. I’ll be honest – there were a few days that I ended up being late to class as a result of my inability to do so in a timely manner. But that was a small price to pay for a couple extra minutes snoozing or on my phone.
I had always assumed that if I didn’t clean my room I’d feel anxious and scatter brained. And while that was to a limited extent true, having a messy room wasn’t the end of the world. I think what’s important is to find just the right balance for you. For me, being in a clean and well-maintained environment helps me feel centered and reduces a lot of stress overall in my everyday life. But I no longer feel pressure to have a clean room at all times. No matter where you fall on the spectrum of tidiness, I encourage you to try changing up your routine. You’ll either notice a positive change in how you feel, or have the reinforcement that you need to continue being as neat or messy you naturally are. If you do decide to test this out, just remember – it doesn’t matter if your socks match.