The Bountiful Benefits of Tidying Up
Look, we understand. At the end of a long day, there’s literally nothing you want to do less than spend an hour or three finally organizing your bookshelf. Here’s the thing, though: As much as it sucks, getting your house looking like a realtor’s Instagram might actually help you in the long run. Here’s some stuff that Real Science People (and common sense) say are beneficial to cleaning up your room, mister.
You’ll be nice to your brain.
An organized space actually makes it easier for your brain to function. A study by the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute found that the more chaotic your visual field is, the more limited your brain’s ability to deal with the information it’s getting becomes. In other, less scientifically accurate words, your messy house is slowly ruining your mind.
You won’t fall victim to an old-timey illness.
Just like Egon from the Ghostbusters, your house collects molds, spores and fungus. Taking the time to give your space a regular scrub-down doesn’t just keep your house from looking like a haunted tourist attraction; it prevents nasty bacterial build-up. And don’t forget — regular dusting (which we often do forget) makes breathing a little easier, especially for little ones, elderly folks or anyone with allergies or asthma.
You’ll avoid treacherous floor-based phenomena.
As the Top Gun theme song prophesied, toys, dirty clothes, piles of pet hair and criss-crossed wires can take your floor right into the danger zone. Keeping your home vacuumed, mopped and clutter-free means fewer chances that you trip on an unidentified floor obstacle and nosedive directly into enemy territory. (For this metaphor, enemy territory is the unclean, disorganized floor that caused your literal downfall.)
You’ll find stuff quickly.
If time is money, then the watch you spend 15 minutes looking for every morning is making a higher salary than you. The saying goes “a place for everything, and everything in its place” for a reason: If everything in your home has a place to live, then you’ll always know exactly where to find whatever it is you’re looking for. And while getting set up with an organizational system does require a bit of spatial awareness, maintaining it simply requires that you consistently take the five seconds to put things back where they belong.
Your social life will come to you.
You don’t want to suffer through the Fear Of Missing Out, but you also don’t want to go outside because it’s cold and you can’t wear your unicorn slippers in the rain. Keeping a consistently tidy house means that you can turn your favorite spot into an exclusive party club for all your favorite people at a moment’s notice, one that they’ll actually enjoy spending time in. At the end of the night, simply tidy up whatever reasonable mess your guests have left (it was clean to begin with, after all) and shuffle your way back to bed, all without ever taking off your unicorn slippers. Welcome to top-shelf adulting, my friend.
