It’s that time of year, and as the days warm, thoughts tend to turn to spring cleaning. You might not think of spring cleaning as having anything to do with your health. But thorough housecleaning can actually improve your health, and ways to clean can either benefit your health or undermine it.
Lessening of emotional stress through cleaning up your home and life
Even general cleaning, organizing, and paring stuff down can have a benefit to health. Illness is usually caused by stress, whether the stress is chemical, microbiological, or emotional. One of the causes of emotional stress is clutter, a feeling of overwhelm caused by dirt, disorder, visual chaos, and having too many objects to maintain. After a thorough cleaning, you will likely breathe a sigh of relief as stress lessens and you feel more in control of your life. Plus, cleaning can be good exercise!
There are many kinds of physical and mental clutter, one of which is undone projects – repairs, crafts, alphabetizing your spice drawer, calling old friends. It’s time to complete these or let them go.
You may have people in your life who take more from you than they give: the person who wants support but isn’t there when you need it, the person who wants to talk for hours when you’re busy, the negative friend who complains and squashes your enthusiasm, or the one who always seems to need a favor. It may be time to let go of some of these unhealthy relationships.
Too many activities can cause stress as well; maybe you can pare down your schedule and give yourself some breathing room.
Paperwork is a major source of stress for a lot of people, and the pileup of undone paperwork should be tackled to reduce the feeling of overwhelm and falling behind.
Need help?
If a messy or disorganized home is a significant contributor to health-sapping stress, consider hiring someone to help. Paying for a professional organizer, an accountant to make sense of financial paperwork, or a cleaning service can be as worthwhile an expense as paying for a doctor’s appointment, and can have long-lasting benefits.
Cleaning your home
Now on to the physical cleaning of your home. It’s a good idea to keep dust, which contains allergy-causing dust mites that feed on the skin cells, cleaned up. A HEPA filter vacuum cleaner can help with this chore; focus especially on places that aren’t routinely cleaned, such as under the bed and behind furniture. Wear a dust mask, gloves, and glasses to protect yourself from dust, mites, mold, and pet dander that are stirred up by the cleaning and that can cause allergic reactions.
Since allergens in dust accumulate, wash and air out those seldom-cleaned items such as pillows, blankets, bedspreads, mattress pads, and small rugs.
The products that you use to clean your house can be toxic or cause allergic reactions if not carefully chosen. Almost any cleaning product that has either a strong chemical smell or a strong artificial fragrance is usually not good for you to be inhaling and touching. It’s best to get rid of most commercial cleaners and replace them with unscented, or lightly and naturally scented, products from a natural foods store or equivalent. Better yet, learn how to use common household ingredients such as natural soap, vinegar, or baking soda for cleaning.
Filtering out the dirt
Spring cleaning time is a good time to assess and replace your home’s filters to reduce dust-borne toxins and allergens. Replace the vacuum cleaner bag or clean the filter, replace your heating / cooling system filters, and change the water filter for your home or sink.
Expiration dates
Now is a good time to check the expiration dates on your foods, medications, and supplements. If something is expired, it’s usually a good idea to toss it, replacing it with a new similar product if you still need it. Recent expiration dates usually mean that the product may be losing potency, but is probably still good enough to use; it’s probably not spoiled or dangerous unless the expiration date was years ago. Any leftover medication from a previous health condition should usually be thrown out (or, better, brought to a pharmaceutical disposal facility).
A healthy kitchen
The pantry, refrigerator, and freezer have accumulated a lot of food, much of which might not be optimal for your health. This is a great opportunity to clean out anything that is not serving you nutritionally, and replace it with food that can lead to greater health and vitality.
Whether there is an expiration date or not, most oils, and oil-containing foods such as nuts, will eventually go rancid and become harmful. If a bottle of oil has been in your pantry for years, it’s probably time to toss it. Out will go the mystery meats in the fridge, the unlabeled plastic containers, and anything fuzzy or slimy. It’s also time to get rid of most processed foods and anything with sugar, corn syrup, white flour, or common allergens such as soy, wheat, and corn. A good resource for this cleaning and restocking is the book Detox or Disease, written by Dr. Bill Kellas and Dr. Andrea S. Dworkin; this book contains a maintenance diet list of beneficial and harmful foods.
Think of how you’ll feel when you open your now well-organized pantry or refrigerator and see a supply of healthy foods, rather than those old sticky containers and boxes of cookies and bags of chips. This change in your food supplies can help set you on a path of wanting to eat more healthfully.
But don’t just throw these cans and boxes away; anything that isn’t opened or spoiled can be donated to a food bank to help others whose priorities may, of necessity, be different than yours.
Safety first
Spring cleaning time is a good time to check the house, furniture, appliances, and fixtures for any safety or health problems, and fix these.
A smoke detector and carbon monoxide (CO) detector are good ideas; carbon monoxide can come from a faulty furnace and can cause fatigue and chronic health problems at low levels or death at high levels.
Loose screws on doors and cabinets, heavy unsecured shelves, cracked furniture legs, broken glass, and things precariously perched on upper surfaces are accidents waiting to happen. Take care of these.
Cleaning inside and out
This would be a good time to do some sort of detox, as described in Detox or Disease. This way you can be cleaner inside, a good match to your newly cleaned home.
Towards a safer and healthier environment
These are all things that can make your home environment cleaner, safer, healthier, and less stressful. Have a great and healthy spring!
