We recognize that habit-building and good mental health can’t be isolated to just one corner of the internet. Myrth is our favorite tool, but it’s not our only tool. In our regular Recommended Reading series, we’ll share links to articles, books, and other tools that we think you’ll find helpful in your journey.

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This week, we’re thinking about how to cultivate a sense of peace and contentment in our daily lives. It’s been spurred in part by Lauren’s obsessive consumption of home-related books lately (more on that to come soon!), and in part by our ongoing love of Outer Order, Inner Calm, the groundbreaking book by Gretchen Rubin. Join us for some good reading about building spaces that foster the kind of life you want to lead.

Before we start, a brief caveat: some mental health challenges pose severe limitations on a person’s ability to clean up their home or workspace. A quick wipe of the kitchen counters isn’t going to cure severe hoarding, and deep depression won’t be totally alleviated by folding and putting away your laundry. Intense anxiety might make it too hard to focus on cleaning for an extended period. As with many other things, these are tools that, if you choose to use them, should be used in conjunction with many other tools to tackle mental health issues. If you have questions or want guidance, it’s best to consult a mental health professional.

1. Clutter Can Aggravate Mental Health Challenges

People joke a lot about cleaning as procrastination, but it turns out it might actually be helpful if you’re trying to get work done and having trouble focusing. A recent article by the Harvard Business Review has a helpful roundup of studies focused on the interaction between a messy environment and our mental health:

A study on the effects of clutter in the home found that individuals who felt overwhelmed by the amount of “stuff” in their homes were more likely to procrastinate. Other research has shown that a cluttered home environment triggers coping and avoidance strategies involving snacking on junk and watching TV. While we don’t know if this generalizes to the workplace, it’s possible that cluttered offices may produce employees who make poor eating choices during breaks and spend less time actually working.

2. How To Make A Meditation Space At Home

If you find meditation is a helpful tool for supporting your mental health, then you might be interested in creating a dedicated meditation space. We found this handy guide to creating a meditation space at home, and especially loved Tip #4:

4. Make it happen. "People will often use 'lack of space' as the reason they can't do something," Susanka says. "It's almost never true. I know a mother with two young children who does her sitting meditation in the bathroom."

Above all, your meditation space should be a source of peace, not added stress. If you find yourself worrying about how to decorate it just right, try to refocus on what matters: creating a quiet, distraction-free place where you can have some quiet for a little while. For additional comfort, we suggest adding a meditation cushion to use in your meditation space.

3. Gretchen Rubin Has A Podcast

We mentioned Gretchen Rubin’s Outer Order, Inner Calm earlier, but we totally get it if you’re not able to sit and read a book for extended periods of time, for whatever reason. That’s why we were excited to discover Gretchen Rubin also has a podcast! Here’s a link to the episode where she talks more about the principles behind Outer Order, Inner Calm, but there are over 250 other episodes to choose from. We hope some of it will be helpful to you.

4. Housework As An Exercise In Mindfulness

For those of us who can do housework relatively easily but avoid it because we don’t like it, sometimes a shift in perspective is needed. When we found this article on washing dishes as an exercise in mindfulness, we were intrigued. 

 A sample of 51 college students engaged in either a mindful or control dishwashing practice before completing measures of mindfulness, affect, and experiential recall. Mindful dishwashers evidenced greater state mindfulness, increases in elements of positive affect (i.e., inspiration), decreases in elements of negative affect (i.e., nervousness), and overestimations of dishwashing time. Implications for these findings are diverse and suggest that mindfulness as well as positive affect could be cultivated through intentionally engaging in a broad range of activities.

It turns out that using mindfulness principles while washing the dishes - e.g., focusing on the scent of the soap, the feeling of the bubbles on your hands, the weight of the dish - was correlated with better overall mental health. It’s something worth exploring further, we think. 

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Recommended Reading! We’ll be back soon with more helpful articles on mindfulness, minimalism, meditation, and more. In the meantime, we hope you’ll keep connecting with your friends and loved ones who support, encourage, and hold you accountable.

Have you found your environment has an effect on your mental health? We’d love to hear about it. Leave us a comment below.