Some thoughts on cleaning up my shitty apartment
So, I have some crap lying on the floor. Not crap in the sence that it goes straight to recycling, just lots of tidbits which I don't exactly know what to do with; semi-sorted papers, notebooks, various VR gear, some books which I don't really have room for in my bookcase, some folders where some of the papers should probably go into, my laptop, a stone which I guess I use for weightlifting except I forget to do that, and when I see all this stuff, my brain just shortcircuits.
So I decided that, okay, I can just ignore this and try tidying up this shelf which I had tried to make into a sort of cabinet of curiosities but which over time had degenerated into a bit of mess; a LCD game, the box to said LCD game, vintage headphones, vintage phone, retro Nokia mobile, beach glass, fossils, various stones, some mess which doesn't really belongs here, a cat skull (I think) ... and of course, the same thing happened. My brain just said nope, too much to deal with.
I know there are ways to go about it. If getting my apartment in a habitable state is too much, I can ignore all of it and just focusing on one room. If my coding project seem to overwhelming, I can decide on a alpha milestone to work towards and based on that make a bucket list of the tasks and start with the most basic one, and if the first one is too overwhelming, split it up into sub-tasks. So there are some tried-and-true ways to deal with it.
But for the first time, I started to wonder what exactly goes on with the brain here? Why does something consisting of a relatively small number of sub-tasks seem so overwhelmingly hard? Is it like that for everyone, does it have a name, what?
― Terry Pratchett, Mort (emphasis mine)
Good catch! I read that one fairly recently. While I didn't really care much for the ending, it was a plenty good ride. Also, I generally like it when the author throws in small life lessons here and there, as in the quote above.
There's a little book that changed my life last year. I've had ADHD my whole life, but dealing with it while living alone really pushes the issue on things to do around the apt and how to do them.
This book is written for people with ADHD or similar disabilities and teaches you how to approach cleaning and living day to day. I definitely got the audiobook version in order to actually make it through. Even if you've not been diagnosed with ADHD, I strongly recommend it as a good resource to learn the ways to answer the questions you're asking here.
How To Keep House While Drowning
by KC Davis
I'm going to echo the recommendation for How to Keep House While Drowning, but I'd like to point out that while iirc the author has ADHD and people with disabilities are a huge target audience for her book, it's not exclusively targeted at them. She wrote the first edition back before she was diagnosed iirc, and it was targeted at women who were overwhelmed by housework, especially women with kids. She's definitely pivoted to more disability-focused content due to her own life experiences since, but it's worth remembering that advice like that isn't necessarily limited to that subset of people
I’ll second How to Keep House While Drowning. It’s a great recommendation.
I really liked the author’s delineation of what she calls “functional space.” If there’s a lot of stuff out, but it’s serving a purpose and being used, then it’s not clutter. If it’s bothering you or getting in the way though, then the space isn’t functioning and can be changed to better meet your wants and needs.
That said, my “lifehack” for clutter is bins.
If I have a bunch of stuff sitting out on a shelf, it’s clutter. If I put that same stuff into a bin, and then put the bin on the shelf in the same spot, it “feels” organized. I don’t think this necessarily works for everybody’s brains, but it works for mine.
Try it out first with an old shipping box or something. See if putting stuff in bins mentally “clears” the clutter for you or not.
I know this is cliche, but The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo helped me a lot. I felt like I could never throw ANYTHING away and I was constantly living in clutter. I realized that my "stuff" is not just stuff, but its my future projects (I'll never start), artifacts from my past, gifts from family that I'll never use but still keep out of obligation, random bits and pieces kept "just in case", and so on. The book taught me how to let go of these attachments and regain control of my belongings. I read it over 10 years ago and I still find myself saying thank you to stuff as I toss it in the dumpster. I know this book isn't for everyone, but it helped me. Good luck on your clutter journey!
I always describe that feeling myself as if I'm hitting a wall I just can't climb over. And it's just always there - in my mind, I'm always thinking about it even whilst procrastinating. It's so frustrating, it makes me so annoyed with myself. Trying to tackle a really big wall - like my master's thesis - almost made me feel physically sick at times.
Then I was diagnosed with ADHD and the meds made the wall go POOF. I can still procrastinate and be lazy, but when I decide to finally do something about something - or if I want to create a new habit or keep something clean - it's like I'm looking at a single-brick on the ground, and I can step over it with ease. Or, outside of the metaphor, looking at a big task and dividing it into small tasks suddenly doesn't seem like a big deal at all anymore.
I also struggle with this although maybe not as much as you. Some good advice I received was to choose an area to organize that you use, where progress will improve your life. In your case that might be the floor of your bedroom. Don't waste time on drawers or garages until visible space is done. Also, if you start cleaning an area, don't get distracted by another area. If you move a book from a space where it is clutter to a space where it belongs, don't then notice that the space you took the book needs organizing and switch gears. Go back to where you were working and keep going for the fifteen minutes or however long you want to work on it.
Edit, having too much stuff for space is a problem. Culling, donating or gettting a box for storage or taking other measures so that things have a place to live is important.
The only thing that works for me is actually sort of the opposite of this. I put on an audio book or a podcast and then just let myself ping pong around the house. I pick a thing to clean, start doing it, and if I get distracted halfway through and want to clean something else, that's fine, as long as I'm still cleaning. If I decide to steam clean half of the couch even though the dishes aren't done, well, that's what gets done today. Usually the daily chores like dishes and cleaning the litter box are so rote that I do them first, but if not, as long as the bare minimum for hygiene is met, I let myself sort of zone out and do whatever.
If I have a good book, or a decent backlog of podcast episodes, I can get my apartment to where it's really clean and easy to maintain fairly quickly. It takes about a week to a week and a half, depending on how long I was neglecting it for.
My best advice is to tackle this in small doses. Start with 10-15 minutes, try not to get overwhelmed.
1: Sort. Put like with like and stuff that goes together, well, together!
2: Trash. Anything not of use, consider donating, selling, or trashing. Sentimental things may or may not be exempt. Up to you, its your stuff
3: Return any thing borrowed.
4: Decide on homes for stuff. Bins are excellent, but if you need a cabinet or bookcase, consider if that will work to store the bins.
5: Don't beat yourself up, and remember to pat yourself on the back every time you accomplish some tasks.
It may get worse before it gets better. That's okay. Be mindful as you go through everything. Remember as you go if it gets to be too much, set that task aside and do something else or another task.
Once done, stand back and admire your work!
I consider this an inherently hard problem, because it's more about habits than tackling a particular task, and new habits are hard to form. One day you could hypothetically summon a huge amount of motivation and clean everything up in one fell swoop, but then your clutter would still increase again for same reason it happened in the first place. Maybe part of your brain knows this so it feels like a futile endeavor. So rather than trying to focus on how to make cleaning up easier, you could try to develop a habit of cleaning up for five minutes a day.
One good way to start is by habit stacking. Pick a habit that you do every day like showering or brushing your teeth. You could clean up for five minutes just before that habit, knowing that you have to move on to showering soon so you can get on with your day. You're time-boxed, so there's less pressure to do some heroic cleaning effort. Five minutes might not be a lot for any given session, but assuming you shower every day, that will add up to a lot of cleaning over time. The central idea is that your goal is to complete the five minutes, not to clean up everything. Five minutes of effort is easy, while cleaning up everything is hard.
I've used this technique a lot, and while it feels a little funny having a bunch of five minute habits, it keeps a lot of parts of my life well enough in order, considering the previous alternative was nothing.
P.S. I think the name for what you're feeling might be "cognitive distortion." You know intellectually that it's not that hard of a problem, but it feels like a hard problem. I see a lot of what cognitive behavioral therapy calls "labeling." You use words like shitty, crap, should, mess, and habitable (as if it's not). These are value judgments, and usually the suggested solution is to try to replace them with more objective statements. So if you are thinking that your house is "shitty and uninhabitable," you could try to replace that thought by saying "this area is less organized than before and has become a minor hindrance." That's being honest while leaving the door open to becoming more organized again.
I'd like to push back on this a little bit. "Cognitive distortion" as described in CBT isn't intended to be used when you know something intellectually but feel differently. Cognitive distortions are thought patterns, not feelings. The difference may seem pointless, but CBT is all about the relationship between your emotions, your thoughts, and your behavior. So it's important not to conflate them.
An example of a cognitive distortion that could contribute to the feelings of overwhelm when it comes to cleaning would be thoughts like "If I can't even keep my house clean, I'm a complete failure". But the emotion of being overwhelmed and upset at the state of your house is not the cognitive distortion, and CBT doesn't approach thoughts and emotions identically. You shouldn't treat an emotion like something you're wrong for feeling. Rather, CBT would focus more on automatic thoughts that are leading to these emotions.
It's also possible to feel overwhelmed by a task for reasons other than negative thought patterns (though negative thought patterns will still not help). For example, I have ADHD, and the resulting executive function issues make it easy to get overwhelmed by tasks even if practically I'm capable of doing them. Avoiding negative thought patterns around it can absolutely help to an extent, because those would further hinder me. But it's not going to magically improve one's executive function either.
I know I'm kind of playing armchair psychologist, but I think saying things like "shitty apartment" and implying that the space is not habitable are appropriate examples of Labeling in this context. OP looks at the space and the words they use to describe it are "shitty" and "crap" which are more feelings than a reasonable assessment of the situation. If the space were not habitable OP would not be able to live there. Why is this task harder than other tasks that take more time and skill? Why does OP look at this task and their brain just says nope? Likely because some negative thought pattern is getting in the way. Not trying to diagnose or trying to push this exact term, just trying to suggest an avenue to explore for terminology, since OP asked about what this might be called.
The part you quoted was supposed to paraphrase what OP wrote and link it to cognitive distortions. I was trying to suggest that it feels like a harder problem than it is because of an unproductive thought pattern, not trying to provide a definition for what cognitive distortion is. Thanks for providing a better definition of cognitive distortion though. I'm often not precise enough in my wording and don't think about how it could be interpreted differently from the meaning I intended.
Maybe you're just overwhelmed by the task? Usually that has to do with feeling in control of the challenges you have to deal with. You might be interested in this video which talks about active and passive challenges.
My guess is that you feel like you're dealing with a problem that feels out of your control at the moment: You got a bunch of knick knacks and things encroaching on your physical space. Some random stuff, expensive stuff, and other stuff that might be useful for entertainment or decoration. So now you have to do more work by sorting through everything before you can get rid of stuff! Personally, I would start putting things in boxes or piles and slowly figure out what to keep, throw away, recycle (regular and e-waste), and donate. I'd probably block off an hour in my calendar for the next 3 weeks and see where that gets me. Just remember that it's okay to go at your own pace. 🙂
I turn some music on with my trusty headphones and the world becomes an easier more manageable place. I can wash the dishes and do these small chores that otherwise seem impossible. I need that OST to my life if I want to do anything meaningful with my day. I am unable to clean, work out, go to the store without some kind of music. And if I don't have music and I have to do something, I turn on the music in my head or create something from the repetitive sounds in my environment.
Get rid of it.
Seriously, you have so little respect for the stuff you own you call it shit. Not only is owning it not making you happy, it's actively reducing your quality of life. Sure, there is stuff that can make you happy, but the overwhelming majority of items in the world do not. If they are in your house, evict them.
If you can't bare to do that in an effective manner, here's what I would suggest doing: get some cardboard boxes and shove all the stuff into it. Make an entry in your calendar for a month or so away labeled "decluttering day". When you take the stuff out of those boxes, they don't go back. Get other containers for them in the interim.
On decluttering day, throw away those boxes. You don't use them. They don't contain things that make you happy. If there is something in them that has emotional weight, frame them and put them on the wall. For the stuff that came out of the boxes, spend the day coming up with permanent places for them. Someplace where you can say "when I am done with it, it goes here". Purchase additional storage if needed.
The game, the phones, and the headphones may have rare or dangerous metals in them that shouldn't just be thrown in the trash. This was really tough for me when I was moving and getting rid of all of our e-waste. Finding a place where you can ethically get rid of things like that can be daunting.