While cleaning your home may seem like another box to tick and nothing more, for people with neurodivergencies such as ADHD or mental illnesses such as depression, it really isn’t always that simple. In fact, it can feel like a steep hill to climb.
Claire Bowman, an ADHD advocate who has ADHD herself, said that when it comes to cleaning, “it’s not the inability to do a small task, it’s the chronic overwhelm that comes with it”.
However, KC Davis, another creator with ADHD said that one simple mindshift change helped her to cope with this feeling of overwhelm. Instead of seeing cleaning as a moral imperative, she has changed her mindset to seeing it as something that leads to her home being ‘functional’ adding, “when I thought I was supposed to have a clean kitchen all the time, I almost never had one because that was far too big and nebulous a chore.
“However, now that I aim for a functional kitchen every night before I go to bed, it’s totally doable!”
She adds that ‘functional’ will mean something different for everybody, but when she asks herself what makes her kitchen functional for her home and family, she knows that she needs: enough clean dishes for the day, enough clear counter space to prepare food safely, access to her sink, a clear stove, empty trash can and clean dish towels.
This works, she believes, because while a “clean” kitchen can take hours because there’s always more that could be done, a functional kitchen only requires a finite list of tasks.
As for the rest of the rooms in a home?
In a recent TikTok video, Davis said, “there’s only five things in any room: trash, dishes, laundry, things that have a place and things that don’t”.
She said this approach, plus using adaptive tools like grabbers and laundry baskets on wheels have helped her as well as remembering that “cleaning is morally neutral and your struggles with cleaning are morally neutral”.
And, as she said on her website, “no one eve lays on their deathbed wishing they’d cleaned the bathroom more”.