4 Ways to Stay Zen While Deep Cleaning Your Home & Belongings
How to make cleaning therapeutic and stress relieving instead of another chore
Clean in short bursts, put something on in the background that you enjoy, or try out Marie Kondo’s method of tidying up.
As always, Edison Mail’s Unsubscribe and Bulk Delete options can help you clean out your inbox quickly and easily.
For those of us who have been lucky enough to ride out Covid-19 from our homes, three camps of people seem to have emerged. There’s the camp of those who have gotten so annoyed by all the mess and clutter in their homes that they’ve gone on a cleaning rampage the last few months. There’s the camp of people who may not want to clean, but with all the global chaos and uncertainty around them just want to have control over some areas of their lives. And finally, there’s the last camp of people who are finding themselves months into the pandemic surrounded by mess and stressed by it all.
Regardless of which camp you’re in, but especially if you’re in the last one, cleaning house can be a great help. After all, psychologists have found that cleaning can help people manage their stress levels. Clinical psychologist, Alicia H. Clark, Psy.D., has said that, “We want to be able to do something when we get anxious, and what we really want is to be in control and take action. While there are times we have to accept some situations in life, we do not have to accept an untidy home.”
Even as some states are beginning to reopen and people are allowed to leave their homes, the influx of cleaning and secondhand donations are still strong. So strong in fact that some secondhand organizations have asked people to stop donating items. Alongside this decluttering of physical items, now may also be a great time to do a digital deep clean. Regardless of what exactly you’re deep cleaning, we know both how helpful and freeing it can be to do a good deep clean (just ask Marie Kondo). But in case you’re stuck, here is a list of ideas to help you master a zen mindset as you cleanse your home — both digitally and physically.
1. Don’t Clean All at Once
Sometimes you desperately want to clean but find it difficult to allocate the time needed. After all, why would you spend three hours of your Saturday cleaning out your closet when you could spend those three extra hours in bed? The solution to this is simple — clean in short bursts. An easy rule of thumb to follow is the 20/10 rule. Simply set a timer for 20 minutes and then clean everything you can in those 20 minutes. Once the timer goes off, do something you enjoy for the following 10 minutes, rinse and repeat. You’d be surprised by how much you’re able to tackle in just 20 short minutes, and by doing something you enjoy between cleaning sessions, cleaning just sucks less. But if even 20 minutes is too long, then simply clean off the messiest or smelliest surface you can find. Just starting to clean can help you feel better or help motivate you to keep going.
2. Use the Kondo method to spark joy, or cull out clutter
Marie Kondo has been famous for years, but her Netflix show is what really put her on the map. Her method of cleaning up, the KonMari Method, has been lauded for years for its ability to get a home neat and tidy. The first step of the KonMari method is to hold a belonging in your hands and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If the answer is yes, keep it. If the answer is no, thank the item and donate, sell, or — if the item is a little worse for wear — throw it away.
There is, of course, more to the KonMari method (such as keeping items that may not spark joy but are useful to own such as a plunger), but a blog post can only cover so much. For the full course on the KonMari method, Kondo has both a book and a show. Now once you’ve found all the items that don’t spark joy and can be donated or sold, there are many options available. Unless your neighborhood Goodwill has announced they’re no longer taking donations, there are plenty of easy drop-off options. Or if you’d rather try to make some money from your belongings, apps such as OfferUp and letgo are great options to help you clear your home.
3. Put something on that you enjoy
Maybe you don’t like cleaning because it’s boring. An easy solution to that is to play a favorite movie, a much-loved TV show, or even a fascinating podcast in the background. As long as you don’t get too distracted by the noise, putting on some background sounds can help dull the monotony that can come from continuous cleaning. This advice of course goes double for digital deep cleans.
If you’ve failed to catch up on all your unread emails, Edison Mail’s iOS app can almost make handling all these unread emails enjoyable. All you have to do is open up your Unread Folder in the app and pull down at the little blue dot. You pull away, let go, and it’s marked as read. If you’re watching some TV in the background, you can basically handle this with muscle memory. Or if you’d rather do it all at once, go to your Unread Folder, hold down on an email, wait until a blue checkmark appears, and either Select All or tap on the emails you’d like to mark as read or archived. Regardless, it’s quick, easy, and seeing your unread email count go from the 1,000s to 0 is one of the most satisfying parts of email.
4. Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe
Our 2017 State of Email Report indicated that most (74%) of America feels overwhelmed by the number and frequency of emails they receive. And the type of email that Americans are most likely to delete is from someone they don’t know (76%), followed by retail emails (65%).
Did the pandemic show you that retailers you shopped at once 5 years ago still have your email address? Are all the emails about upcoming sales clogging your inbox? Then do we have a solution for you. Edison Mail has always been great for unsubscribing from email newsletters, and that hasn’t changed. To see exactly how many marketing emails you’re subscribed to, go to the Assistant Tab on the left side panel of the app and tap on the Subscriptions option. From here you can see all the companies that have you on their email mailing lists (if you’re anything like the average person, it’s probably a long list). All you have to do to unsubscribe from these emails is tap the large Unsubscribe button at the bottom of each item.
On top of that, if you select Edison’s newest Assistant located on the upper right corner of your inbox, you’ll see that Edison mail provides you with a Subscription Review. Tap on the icon and you’re directed to a carousel of companies that you can easily one-tap unsubscribe from.
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