Now, she spends her weekends and a few evenings a week doing free cleanings. Most of the time, she cleans within driving distance of her home in Canada, but she travels for cleanings, too, often with Scrub Daddy footing the bill for flights and accommodations. Her husband’s flexible job and an “awesome best friend who watches my kids all the time” allow Ingram to keep taking on free cleanings. Though the messes are sometimes a bit intense and require her to have “an iron stomach”, Ingram says the work is rewarding and impactful.
“A few days of my time changes the entire course of their life,” she says. “They go from having no hope at all, and living like that for years, to a clean slate without that constant stress and overwhelm.”
But it’s not just hoarders she’s out to help. Wherever you are in your relationship to cleaning, Ingram has tips to get your home – and your mental health – in better shape.
Start small
Cleaning is not something you can do in one quick session, according to Ingram. “Don’t try to clean the whole house at once,” she says. “Don’t even try to clean a whole room at once.” Instead, she recommends choosing one corner or surface in the room.
“It sounds silly, but I say just pick one, like, two- to three-square-foot space and just clean that,” Ingram adds. Habit formation starts small, and once you can keep a tiny space clean, it will become easier to keep larger areas in the house tidy.
“It’s about not having insurmountable, unrealistic expectations about getting the whole house clean,” she says. “People get stuck because they see a huge task they don’t want to do or don’t feel like they can complete, so they just don’t.”
Stick to a schedule
Having a schedule for cleaning can help reduce the overwhelmed feelings. If you’re just starting out, set a timer for just a few minutes a day.
“You do your five minutes, and all of a sudden you have motivation,” Ingram says. “It’s crazy how it happens. You get a little shot of, ‘OK I completed something!’ And you feel like, ‘Well, maybe I can do something else.’ It snowballs.”
Sticking to your schedule also means only cleaning for a set amount of time each day and trying not to overdo it. “If you’re spending hours or a whole day doing something, chances are you’re just adding to the negative relationship with cleaning and subconsciously making yourself dread doing it again,” Ingram says.
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Schedules are a very personalised thing. Ingram cleans her home for 30 minutes each day, focusing on a different room. Then, for eight weeks twice a year, she adds a few more intense tasks to her daily schedule for each room – things like scrubbing walls and baseboards or cleaning behind the refrigerator – for a deeper cleaning.
“There’s not one schedule that’s going to be for everybody because our houses are different, and our energy levels are different,” she says. “I always tell people to just think about your life, write down all the rooms in your home, and then just make little bullet points underneath each room of things that you could do in each one daily or weekly, not to deep clean it, but just keep it tidy.”
Don’t go it alone
It’s common to think about everyday clutter as a shameful thing, Ingram says. People get stressed about cleaning before company arrives and feel a need to apologise for even the most minor messes. None of that is helpful. Instead, Ingram says, people need to recognise that most of us have some version of the same struggles, and teamwork can help.
“Body doubling” is another common technique used by people with ADHD. Essentially, it means doing potentially frustrating tasks in the company of another person, whose presence can help reduce distraction and procrastination.
“Over the years, especially when I had small children, I had friends that came over and helped me clean, or they’d come over and sit on the couch for hours and talk to me while I did all of my laundry,” Ingram says.
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Ultimately, Ingram says, her best advice when it comes to cleaning is to let go of the idea of a perfect, spotless home. While it’s easy to be fooled by things like social media, she says, very few people live that way.
“We’ve just become so accustomed to thinking everything has to be perfect and being ashamed and feeling judged if it’s not,” she says. “It’s just not realistic. But you can get to a place where you feel good about your surroundings, and that can help you feel good about everything else.”
Washington Post
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