Counter Cleaning Stress With Pre-Planning
You are either an exceptional being or lying to yourself if you say cleaning is not stressful. It can be so stressful that your motivation to clean can become sabotaged by remembering past instances of cleaning-related stress. Stress not only make you feel helpless and off-balance but it also causes your brain to release judgement-clouding cortisol to ease off the stress. That cloud then leads you to not only say things like “I’m just fated to be messy” or “I’ll never get organized” but accept the as your truth.
Before you begin cleaning, or any other stressful task for that matter, it is vital you take a “premortem;” put Murphy’s law into full mental practice and imagine every possible negative outcome. Everyone slips at one point or another, the trick is to anticipate those failures and work on ways to mitigate the fallout, if not completely prevent the setbacks from ever happening.
If you are about to tackle cleaning an entire room, as a friend or family member to talk you through each step in your process. This will help you foresee any possible setbacks. You can work through what supplies you might need, such as bags, cleaning supplies, storage boxes and labels. You can also foresee how to work through weather conditions, active children and even pets, and put safeguards into place to deal with them. Once you have covered all of the insight into your process, and gotten all of the prep work handled, you are free to actually do your cleaning.
