Do people actually get stressed by messy rooms?

Discussion in 'General Advice' started by theambernerd, Jul 31, 2016.

  1. Socket

    Socket fuzzy tabletop goblin

    You are not the only person like this, what other people consider mess/clutter doesn't even register to me until it hits a specific threshold (i can no longer comfortably navigate the room, and/or it is Unclean rather than just Untidy). Hair/dust/crumbs are very unpleasant on a sensory level and I will deal with that if it occurs, and I'm pretty good about returning plates and cups to the kitchen even if there is a couple of days delay. But piles of objects or clothes or objects out of place don't bother me at all so long as I remember where in the chaos I've put everything. Can I step over/on/around the stuff without requiring weird contortions? Then it doesn't tend to bother me that it's there.

    I don't register my bedside table as 'Untidy' until I can't reach over the miscellaneous item clutter to pick up my drink from the coaster.

    Also not noticing objects out of place even when you're actively tidying!! Same!!

    But yeah. A clean and tidy room makes me so happy and I feel really accomplished when the room is made nice, but my level of generic untidiness has no negative impact on me, it's kind of my neutral state, so I don't really notice it stacking back up sometimes. I've learned to periodically check whether the room is actually Other People Tidy though, and fix things up a bit if it isn't, for the comfort and happiness of those who share or enter my living spaces. :P
     
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  2. theambernerd

    theambernerd dead to all sense of shame

    Someday I'll have the spoons to both be productive and cleanly. But I imagine that time will come after I'm done with school.
     
  3. Aniseed

    Aniseed Well-Known Member

    some things register as 'mess' for me and stress me out. other stuff doesn't?

    i can't remember the last time i made my bed! my floor has dog toys all over it that are mostly kicked towards the dog's bed area and i'm okay with that because the walking space is clean and even if i step on something it's soft. coffee table covered with papers? doesn't bother me, i just don't use it. my desk is dusty. this room needs a vacuum i guess. doesn't bother me though.

    kitchen mess though? so much stress, all the time. at least most of it. i don't think about sweeping the floor. but dishes near the sink, dishes in the sink, splatter on the counters or the top of the stove, that gets to me. but i think in my case it's that that kind of stuff legitimately interferes with my day to day functioning. if the pots are all dirty i can't cook myself a meal. it's also just a huge source of issues, by which i mean to say, i'm literally the only person who cleans the kitchen and i'm probably towards the bottom of the spoons having totem pole. so it's a constant energy drain struggle that causes great stress in my life that no one else seems to really care about. i feel obligated to be the one to deal with it while 4 people can cause the mess in there to grow very fast. so it's something i have to care about in order to not let it get out of control. because when i have a bad week and don't tidy up in there daily i'll have to start closing my eyes when i enter the kitchen in order to not have an anxiety attack.

    food mess in general i try to be quick to get to because food mess results in bad smells and bugs and potentially sick pets. also things like dog or cat vomit, or if they have an accident, or if i spill water on the carpet, i try to get to that quickly. cuz that just builds up into weird stains and bad smells too.
     
    • Like x 3
  4. esotericPrognosticator

    esotericPrognosticator still really excited about kobolds tbqh

    I straight up do not give a fuck about how messy my room is. (I'm not solely responsible for cleaning anything except my bedrooms in various places, so I can't speak to how I feel about mess in, say, living rooms.) as far as I'm concerned, the floor is the laundry basket and there is a pile somewhere where I put down my laundry after I did it from which I get my clean clothes. when I have to do laundry (aka when I run out of clothes I like to wear, which is usually in a week or two) I just pick all the stuff up off the floor. why bother putting it in the basket? I also don't mind surfaces (desk, bedside table, top of dresser, etc.) being cluttered with random shit, and I am terrible about taking dirty dishes out of my room, even though I almost always eat in my room if possible. random trash, books, etc. end up on the floor and on surfaces too, especially since once my trash can is full I don't empty it, I just pile trash in its general vicinity. I don't dust or vacuum or do any sort of real cleaning (as opposed to tidying) except for cleaning up food spills. and none of this bothers me; I am good at stepping around stuff on a cluttered floor. I do, however, enjoy the rituals of tidying and/or organizing when I am in a certain mood, and I feel a sense of accomplishment after successfully neatening something up. for example, my room freshman year was a fucking trainwreck. which was not mostly my fault, because my roommate was if anything messier than I was, but still. there was icing caked into the carpet. they had to replace a section of the carpet because my roommate spilled purple hair dye on it. the whole thing was probably a health hazard. I didn't particularly mind! but last year I was in a dorm with very stringent room inspections and a clean roommate, and I was super neat. like, I got compliments on how clean my half of the room was. I just established a ritual of tidying and doing the laundry every Sunday and made a habit of putting clothes in a plastic bin under my bed once I'd worn them, and lo and beyond, the magic of routines and my love thereof meant my room was very neat. but I felt no better or worse about it being clean than I did about my earlier room being frankly unhygienic, so. guess I'm just weird like that.
     
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2016
    • Like x 3
  5. renegadereveler

    renegadereveler Floof King

    Guys. I don't know if I can impress upon you the absurdity of this room. I go to school with eP, but I'm a grade above him, and thus during his freshman year I never set foot in his dorm. And I still knew about how ridiculous this fucking room was because it was literally campus news.
     
    • Like x 4
  6. esotericPrognosticator

    esotericPrognosticator still really excited about kobolds tbqh

    holy shit, was it really? were people actually talking about it? not just our Latin class? that's hilarious. and yeah, it was ridiculous. like... well, in my roommate's defense, she had terrible impulse control when she was manic and did not really want to live in squalor, but she did extract the ink-holding cores from like fifteen highlighters (by dint of stabbing them with scissors until they cracked open) and put them in a two-pint thing of hand sanitizer to see if they would color it, and when it turned out they did (pretty nicely, too!) she then proceeded to smear the sanitizer on a spare full-length mirror I had in the pursuit of, like, Modern Art, idk. the mirror then sat in our singular closet for the rest of the year. also there was the time where she got ahold of my pomade and proceeded to smear it all over her Doctor Who poster. and the fact that there were a number of small singe marks on the walls from where she had thrown some of those little popper things that explode when you throw them at something (totally banned by the school, btw) against them. and the totally illegal hamster that lived under her bed for like a month and a half. it was kinda nuts.
     
    • Like x 2
  7. theambernerd

    theambernerd dead to all sense of shame

    Oh man, nice. My dorm rooms are just sorta messy, though I did find a roommate who out-messy'd me this year. Which didn't bother me in most regards, except for one time she used one of my pots to blanche broccoli, then didn't drain the water, just covered it with the lid and left it there.
    for two weeks.

    I asked her to clean it at least three times during that time. I think it was the only time in the year I didn't give up and clean up her mess after her

    it was also stressful because I didn't mind most of it- she left used dishes with a lot of leftover food scraps on them out a lot, which was my only pet peeve- but my other roommate, who shared a bedroom with her, did. And also is too socially awkward to confront people directly. I would just listen to her rant about it for half an hour when other roommate was out of the dorm. So I was stressed just because other people were stressed
    and it sucked cause I could 100% tell this came from brainweird, almost definitely severe anxiety- she would do no homework for several days, then literally do nothing but homework for days upon days. She did an all nighter almost weekly winter term, and during finals stayed up for three straight days. Every time she did phenomenal work that outshone everyone in the class as far as effort and result went. And every time she would say it wasn't good enough and that she should've worked harder and done better. Every. Time.
    and then one time when we were talking and I just sorta was like "So, you know you have an anxiety disorder, right?" she said "No, I think I experience a normal amount of stress" and completely refused to listen to me.
    I think she still thinks she's neurotypical to this day
     
    • Like x 2
  8. dorkfang

    dorkfang not here

    I am... not typically bothered by mess, like, to any degree, at all, because my mom is basically a hoarder. Like, I mean, food garbage and wrappers and shit everywhere in her room, the living room, piled up in the kitchen... I grew up in a house that most people would think is absolutely revolting. I try to clean things up as it happens but there's just so much of it, so I pretty much have given up at this point. :T I try to keep my space (which is basically just... the couch and the space immediately next to the couch) clean, but that's about all I can do. It was always funny when I would go to a friend's house and they would be like "oh, sorry about the mess, this is so embarrassing" and there would be like... a piece of paper on the floor. But like... I'm not really bothered by it anymore except for, like, the embarrassment factor. Only a few of my closest friends have ever seen the disaster area that is my house.
     
  9. renegadereveler

    renegadereveler Floof King

    YES. I WAS SO CONCERNED

    "Kinda nuts" is right. A teacher actually cried when telling me about the fucking hamster situation.
     
    • Like x 2
  10. albedo

    albedo metasperg

    Huh. Okay, my axis for "comfortable" is apparently totally orthogonal to y'all's.

    [​IMG]

    YES, GIVE.

    [​IMG]

    YES, GIVE.

    [​IMG]

    DISTRESSED WHIMPERING.

    I feel unsafe unless I have a den. It absolutely must have my back to the wall and places to hide. I'd be fine with that last picture if the bed were in the corner like the beds of normal people.

    Clutter and mess bother me; I tend toward minimalism and tidiness when I have the spoons, because Mom's a hoarder and mess makes me twitchy. But it's defensibility that's my main axis for comfort.
     
    • Like x 4
  11. Ouija

    Ouija Nani the fuck?

    This is my room. As you can see, it's a bed in the corner of the living room.

    It's also not made cuz I hate the feel of made-up beds.
     

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  12. theambernerd

    theambernerd dead to all sense of shame

    I love the feeling of made-up beds actually c| It's the one thing I'll do to help me de-stress, is make my bed right before I go to bed so I can feel the lovely feeling of 5 well-organized blankets pressing down on me <3
    can't do it in the summer tho, parents keep the house at like 77 and it's too warm to have more than one blanket :c makes me sensory sad
     
    • Like x 1
  13. Ouija

    Ouija Nani the fuck?

    Actually I sleep with two comforters, four quilts, and two throw blankets (they're all between the couch and the bed itself, lol)

    None of them can be "straight" though or I get uncomfortable.

    I also don't sleep with a pillow? I sleep on my stomach, with the pillows put at the top of my head but I'm not laying on them, and eventually they'll get thrown over the side where the blankets are too...

    Basically I spared everyone from the nightmare that is "so much fabric" that happens when I sleep
     
  14. albedo

    albedo metasperg

    Huh. Yeah, I sleep upside down with, blankets sort of haphazardly piled on top of me as cold weather demands, with no pillows for my head and my feet propped on a pile of them. Everything ends up in a vague nest sort of thing, although right now my bed just has a fitted sheet and a couple pillows to prop my feet on, because it's hot.
     
    • Like x 1
  15. Ouija

    Ouija Nani the fuck?

    (fingerguns) electric fan, mofos

    i practiced heat death for the past 10 years by wearing nothing but denim jeans in climates of 115+F heat. also i risk monsters eating my exposed footsie because i live life on the edge.
     
    • Like x 4
  16. sirsparklepants

    sirsparklepants feral mom energies

    Yeah it's like... regularly 85F or over at night here and I sleep with 3 blankets, a sheet, and the dog and boyfriend in bed with me. We keep the AC at like. 77ish, too. I also sleep with my feet out from under the blankets and then am perfectly comfortable.

    Of course I am a delicate hothouse flower who thinks that when it dips below 70f that's time for long sleeves and anything below 65f is sweater weather, so.
     
  17. theambernerd

    theambernerd dead to all sense of shame

    I usually wake up sweating and in some sort of minor pain with just one blanket with the 77ish ac, when i'm in my college dorm i usually have the ac somewhere between 72 and 70, then i can bundle up the way i want
     
    • Like x 1
  18. mizushimo

    mizushimo the greatest hits

    I live in a family of hoarders, so giant piles of stuff doesn't bother me at all. Every surface of my room is covered in stuff, but I consider it 'clean' as long as the clutter is off the floor.

    I love neat and tidy rooms, but its so hard to achieve.

    In the kitchen, I only need to clean off as much space as i need for meal prep, it's very easy to ignore everything else.

    Edit - beds: i need at least one thin sheet no matter what. I wake up in the night if my feet go past my sheets (if they get untucked), i usually kick them back in place, only to wake up when the sheet starts riding up again. If I had AC in my house, I'd be pickier about blankets (i was when I was younger). Summer heat waves have beaten the comforter/blanket requirements out of me.
     
    Last edited: Aug 4, 2016
  19. theambernerd

    theambernerd dead to all sense of shame

    I just really, really love the feeling of being weighed down by a bunch of blankets. it's so cozy and calming. I love the feeling of being in a cozy warm next and feeling the cool air on your face, it's just the most comfortable, relaxing thing and summer is hell because i don't get my cold room and cozy blanket fest
     
    • Like x 4
  20. Starcrossedsky

    Starcrossedsky Burn and Refine

    Witches. Witches need 57 candles. I am pretty sure I in fact own >57 candles right now. (Though most of them are birthday candles tbf.)

    FUCKING SAME, GOD. The Aunt wouldn't put furniture up against corners properly ever it fucking drove me bananas. I eventually said fuck it to where she put the dresser, shoved it up against the useless closet door, and then the room was actually bearable. She gave me hell about it but frankly I ignored her. If it's going to be my room it's going to be my space and that means I am not keeping access to a closet door I DON'T USE because not having access to it bothers YOU.

    Similar but with a lean specifically towards dirt. I am our local street child, it's me, followed by growing up in a literal barn, I don't notice dirt until it gets really severe. Clutter in general is a spoons thing for me but I don't notice fine/discoloring dirt like literally at all.

    [same hat]
     
    • Like x 1
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