How To Clean When You're Overwhelmed || a Neurodivergent Cleaning Routine to Avoid Burnout

Hello friends and welcome back to my home if you are new here and you do not know my name is Christina I am a neurode Divergent mother of five and I like all things vintage and today I'm going to get very very real with Y [Music] all I have always struggled to keep house and to be the Homemaker that I thought I should be growing up and the Homemaker that I wanted to be I've never been where I wanted to be don't scratch don't scratch I love doing vintage cleaning routines because it lays it out for me and then I don't have to expend the mental energy that it takes to figure out my cleaning routine however I have been really burnt out I have been working a lot I have been very stressed about our income we are a low income family and because I have to work from home I often find it hard to motivate myself to clean especially being n Divergent and having a lot of Hang-Ups around starting tasks and repeating tasks keeping routines um giving tasks to other people um it can be very hard I just want to share what I do in the moments when I know that I have to get my house clean um or I just want to do the upkeep but I am struggling to do the upkeep when I walk into a room and just get overwhelmed because there are so many tasks to do and I cannot figure out where to to start this is what I do if you have watched my 1920s cleaning routine you will know that the first area to tackle is the entryway and this makes the most sense for me because it is the smallest area of the house but as you can see it is also the most cluttered this is where all of my Goodwill donations go until I can take them out to the car and I also have a couple of other boxes of things to donate so I tackle the room from top to bottom I will first kind of Tidy Up This bench which houses all of the quilts that we use for picnics and things like that and then I will take out the rugs and sweep the floor my biggest tip especially if you have ADHD or are autistic is to stay in the same room when you are tidying do not leave the room bring in a garbage bag bring in all of the cleaning tools that you're going to need in my case this was a broom garbage bag uh and I will ALS also often bring in a bin for toys and then before you sweep I would recommend getting anything off the floor that belongs in that room and then sweep everything else into a pile some people find this weird but I find it very helpful because it centralizes the mess and it makes it less overwhelming because then it's not the entire room it's just one little pile it's much easier to deal with and it has helped me Focus my cleaning efforts so much so here you can see I am sitting down to organize the pile and once I am tackling the pile I will put everything into categories of whether it's toys or clothes or craft supplies or whatever I find in the entryway that my kids have brought in uh and then I will sweep up all of the trash and put it in the little bag that I brought with me and lastly I had forgotten that my husband left all of his tools on this little shelf so I put them away and I think that was it for the [Music] entryway now on this day I did not plan to come into the living room to clean because I had deep cleaned the day before and all that remained in the living room was the laundry but then my daughter decided to take all the cushions off the couch as well as all of the laundry as you can see so I had to switch my plan a little bit and come in here and help her pick those up if I were actually cleaning this in my regular cleaning routine I would be clearing off the mantle first and then I would bring in a bin for toys a bin for any laundry that needed to be taken to other rooms and after I had put away the toys that belonged in this room I would take everything else out of the room and then I would clean the floors and since our living room is quite long I do Focus first on the side with the couches and then I would go over to the side with the uh work area but again I deep cleaned this entire room the day before so all I really had to do was come in here and get the laundry back up off the floor [Music] and then we get to the dining room which is for me the most overwhelming spot in the house to tidy up because it's such a central spot in our house you have to walk through here to get to pretty much everything I find myself getting very overwhelmed when it's been a day or two and I haven't really paid detailed attention to getting things put away as you can see there's a lot of clutter on the sideboards and the desk and the china cabinet and I can definitely lose my focus and get a little bit stuck on where I should start but A good rule of thumb for me is to begin with the table and yes I am sweeping my table off because all of the crumbs were dry crumbs and I was about to sleep with the floor so why not but anyway I am also going to wash the table mind you um but because it's such an overwhelming room I try to section it off to to the area under the table and then the other areas that need to be tidied up and in this instance I was taking care of a bunch of clutter that had been there for a week or two as kids just dropped School papers on my desk or things got put in a basket under the desk I have books that I need to mail to friends I have random items that just kind of get put there because it's a convenient place to set things that you then forget about but like I said when things are this overwhelming I really try to section off where I'm going to be working and I only work in that spot I also put anything that needed to be sorted into other rooms onto the table just so that it's much easier and I'm not leaving this area and that really helps break down what I need to do and how I can get it done once I have cleared the china cabinet and the desk I go over to our Buffet which holds craft supplies and table Linens and put anything away that needs to be put away and like I said I put everything else on the [Music] table and then it is time to sort I'm sorry that this is out of focus I didn't realize my husband's camera un focuses when it shuts down and so I didn't realize I needed to refocus it but anyway then I sort everything on the table into categories of which rooms that they belong in and because I've put everything again in a central location it makes it much easier to focus and it feels a lot less overwhelming I think this is probably my top tip for anyone who is neurod Divergent and finds that they have a hard time focusing on what to do in an overwhelming room putting things in the center of the room or in a central location or on a central location is so so incredibly helpful and I apply this to pretty much every room in my house whether it be putting all of my clothes on my bed putting all of the laundry on the couch putting all of the toys in the center of the floor whatever it is I just try to keep things very focused for lack of a better [Music] word and of course if it is a large room I also try to section off the room into different areas just so that I'm not feeling like I have to focus on the entire room all at once but that is the dining room done and I actually this took less time than I thought it [Music] would the kitchen has always last on my tidying up because often I will be bringing dishes into here from other places and I have been doing a fairly decent job at keeping a routine going in here every evening so there wasn't a whole lot to do other than wash a bunch of dishes from the day and the day before as you can see the baby was moving my camera and I want to touch on this because as a neurod Divergent mom often when things are not written out for me or they were not Concepts that I grew up with and I'm trying to find different ways to parent than maybe my parents would have I struggled for a long time with how to keep my kids entertained while I was trying to clean up because to me me I had to entertain them with toys or TV or something like that side note this is where my mother-in-law butt dialed me and sent my phone into a sink full of water on accident the phone was fine um I caught it just barely in time anyhow I've always struggled with the concept of being present in my kids lives while I have a lot of upkeep to do and realize that they are just happy to be with me so putting the baby on a stool and letting him play with the water and a cup and safe baby things while I'm washing the dishes he was content to just be there for 20 minutes or so while I was doing everything it was so helpful to me to have someone say that all they want to do is be around you you don't have to play with toys with them all the time they don't have to be entertained by anything special just let them be with you while you're doing things that you're doing and they will be happy [Music] as I was cooking dinner this evening I was thinking about all of the common themes that I see in my comments or the advice that I get from people in my daily life and I wanted to address those so here is some footage of me making a simple chicken dinner if you want to know what I was making you can check out the comments and I will also put it up on screen but I'm not going to be talking about the [Music] recipe the most kindly meant advice that I get in real life or in my comments is to clean up as you go and I think this works well for a lot of people but for someone who is neurode Divergent it can be extremely difficult to do [Music] so neurod Divergent people are often very single task oriented and can only focus on one thing at a time and while I do seem like I multitask in reality when I look like I'm multitasking I am simply running overwhelmed thinking of all of the things that I have to do and trying to do all of them at once and that's a very quick way to burn out cleaning as you go is a task in [Music] itself I want to be playing with my kids throughout the day I want to be creative I'm writing a novel I'm revising a novel I am doing content creation there are so many other things that I enjoy doing throughout my day and I do not exist simply to tidy my [Music] house so while some people might be oriented in the way of tidying up as they go throughout their day it works far better for me to either take an hour or two just to clean or take a day to clean to have one day on cleaning my house and one day off where I doing more creative [Music] things I have learned over the years that there is a definite e and flow to how my own Journey with homemaking works that does not look like a lot of other people's Journeys to homemaking I know a lot of people who do really well to do the chores as they present themselves but that is so unstructured and for someone with my little style of spicy brain it's [Music] chaos one of the other very common themes that I see mostly in my comments is to give my kids chores people ask all the time why my kids aren't cleaning or why my kids aren't helping me or why don't I give them chores I do give them chores and in fact while I'm filming this voiceover they are all working on their chore [Music] lists however I am not here to monetize my kids they certainly enjoy to be on camera and I don't mind all of you seeing little snapshots of them as I move throughout my day and on the days when you see me cleaning up a plethora of toys it's simply because they played before school and we didn't have time to pick anything up before we left [Music] as a neurod Divergent mother it is also sometimes very hard to manage other people especially when I'm having a particularly rough mental health day and I often film these videos after I've had those moments so what you see is often the worst that my house gets because that's when I need the most motivation to clean my house [Music] anyway that is this video I hope that it was helpful to some of you who struggle with the same things that I do and if you don't I hope that it helped you understand a little bit better the people in your lives who do struggle with homemaking because not all of us are lucky enough to have the kind of brains who manage households effortlessly [Music] and lastly I just want to say that I'm so thankful for everyone in the comments who is always offering up advice or sharing their own routines or what they did when they were younger I find it so interesting and fun and helpful and I often have there are often very sage and wise comments down below so that is it for this video I hope that wherever you are you are feeling safe and loved and I will see you in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: With Love, Kristina

Views: 15,356

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Id: C64x1hKXWsI

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024