The act of cleaning—washing dishes, vacuuming the living room, making one's bed, scrubbing one's toilet—is associated with positive psychological outcomes.
Research suggests it triggers the release of exercise-related reward chemicals in our brains and bodies, helps reduce stress and anxiety, can dampen symptoms of depression, can reduce nervousness and fatigue, can improve concentration, focus, and self-reported levels of inspiration and creativity, and can actually make us healthier.
That latter claim is tied to the physical outcomes of cleaning and even tidying up: clean sheets on one's bed can result in more and better sleep, less dust and pollen and other such microscopic detritus can reduce allergy symptoms, cleaner surfaces can reduce one's chance of catching something, and so on.
There's some evidence, though, that the mere act of resetting one's space, bringing order to chaos, and organizing things in a way that makes sense to the one doing the organizing can be beneficial because of how empowering and satisfying the ordering of disorder can feel, and how we tend to incorporate our physical space into our neurological processes: we think and process, in part, using our geographic location, and aligning our spaces with our preferences may thus amplify our thinking capabilities.
The available research weighs heavily in favor of cleaning and tidying and organizing, then, because in general all of these activities seem to trigger or amplify positive affect in those doing the cleaning and organizing and such.
One consistent warning from researchers in this realm of inquiry, though, is that it's possible to tip over into problematic, compulsive levels of cleaning and ordering our spaces, at which point the outcomes are less positive and more disordered—in some cases even triggering increased anxiety, phobias, and even things like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
In other words, semi-regular, routine maintenance of our spaces—cleaning, tidying, organizing—is generally healthy and leads to positive psychological and physical outcomes.
But extreme and compulsive versions of the same, as tends to be the case with most activities and habits, almost always lead to the opposite and can become real problems if we're not careful.
Paid Brain Lenses subscribers receive twice as many essays and podcast episodes each week. They also fund the existence and availability of all the free stuff.
You can become a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year.
You can also support all my work (and receive gobs of bonus content) via Understandary.