How messy is your house and does it get you down.....

[another20]

just reading other threads about awful houses and relating this to MH. Mine is a pit when I am depressed and then an ongoing decluttering project when I am better -- until i get depressed again....and it really upsets and shames me.

I have anxiety with episodes of depression. My house isn't really dirty but it's not tidy either. I would love it to be clean, tidy and uncluttered but with 3 kids and my own mh issues it just doesn't stay tidy. I have huge amounts of worry over what people will think. My Mum's judgement worries me a lot too. I'm always looking for reassurance that other live similar to us but the internet seems to be lots of people with beautiful homes and here's me just trying not to get overwhelmed. I tidy in fits and starts too soI can totally relate. It sucks!

There is more to life than wearing out carpets and vacuum cleaners.

Yes the house is a bit of a mess a lot of the time... but we clean when expecting guests... which does make us feel very righteous

Our house goes through stages of being messy then tidy. It all depends on my mood and what we are doing.

The mess tends to appear within a day or so though which is something that pisses me off but for the most part I just get on with whatever we are doing as I know I will deal with it when I can.

My house is always messy and it gets me down. I've improved in that I can now get a couple of rooms clean and tidy, but the rest of the house is still a pit and if I'm cleaning one room you can guarantee my kids are making 3x the mess/dirt in one or indeed more rooms. I find messy rooms feed my anxiety, also I end up wasting so much time looking for things. On the flip side I cleared out my fridge the other day and although the kids complain now it is empty I get a sense of satisfaction when I open the door now.

I've had a lot of ups and downs over the past year and I've found that cleaning is a lot easier when I'm not actively depressed- it just flows. Whereas when I am in the pit I can literally spend all day cleaning/tidying but nothing seems to improve- I don't know what I am actually doing during that time I think I get sucked into a vortex…I also find that when I am depressed, and the house is more messy, the kids make even less effort to clear up after themselves than normally (maybe because they can't see they are adding to the mess?) and then we get into a big mess creating snowball.

I've been doing that timer trick the last couple of days and that seems to help a bit.