A TikTok cleaner shares her best tips for keeping your home tidy

Ingram’s popularity on TikTok and Instagram, where she posts as @nottheworstcleaner, stems from her videos discussing the connection between mental health and homemaking. Research shows that a cluttered environment can significantly affect our well-being, leaving us stressed and overwhelmed. Ingram has dealt with this firsthand. She was diagnosed with ADHD as a child and went on to study psychology in college, she says, “because I understood that my brain was not the same as everyone else’s, and I wanted to learn more about it.” She also struggled to keep her own space tidy while working three jobs to attend school.

“My apartment looked like one of the houses I clean in my videos,” she says. “I had neglected it so much, and it was so bad that it affected me so much. If you don’t keep things clean, it will affect your mental health. But at the same time, it is very difficult to keep your environment clean if you have poor mental health.

“It’s just a vicious, non-stop cycle,” she adds. “I had to learn ways to change my relationship with cleaning, and I learned things that worked for me.”

Ingram kept things under control for several years, she says, by developing a cleaning schedule and finding methods to overcome her struggles with procrastination and motivation.

But during the pandemic, when she was home with her husband and three children, the task of cleaning up started to feel overwhelming again. This time, Ingram shared her struggles on social media.

“It blew up when the first video where I shared my ADHD-friendly cleaning schedule,” she says. “It went viral overnight and never stopped.”

Followers began sending requests for help cleaning their homes, and Ingram tried to connect them with professional cleaners. The first time, she says, it went “swimmingly.” She raised money from followers and paid a crew to clean the home of a single mother of five. But that success proved difficult to repeat. When the professionals quoted prices in the tens of thousands, or told her they couldn’t help because the houses were too dangerous, she took matters into her own hands.

Now she spends her weekends and a few evenings a week doing free cleaning work. She usually cleans within driving distance of her home in Halifax, but she also travels for cleanings, with Scrub Daddy often footing the bill for flights and accommodations. Thanks to her husband’s flexible job and an “amazing best friend who watches my kids all the time,” Ingram is able to continue doing cleaning work for free. Although the mess can be a bit intense and require “an iron stomach,” Ingram says the work is rewarding and impactful.

“A few days of my time changes the entire course of their lives,” she says. “They go from having no hope at all and living like that for years, to having a clean slate without that constant stress and overwhelm.”

But it’s not just hoarders she wants to help. Wherever you are in your relationship to cleaning, Ingram has tips to get your home—and your mental health—in better shape.

Cleaning isn’t something you can do in one quick session, says Ingram. “Don’t try to clean the whole house at once,” she says. “Don’t even try to clean an entire room at once.” Instead, she recommends choosing one corner or surface in the room.

“It sounds weird, but I say just pick a space that’s two to three square feet and just clean it,” Ingram adds. Habit formation starts small, and once you can keep a small space clean, it becomes easier to keep larger areas of your home tidy.

“It’s about not having insurmountable, unrealistic expectations about getting the whole house clean,” she says. “People get stuck because they see a huge task they don’t want to do or they feel like they can’t complete it, so they just don’t do it.”

Having a cleaning schedule can help reduce feelings of overwhelm. If you’re just starting out, set a timer for just a few minutes each day.

“You do your five minutes and suddenly you have motivation,” says Ingram. “It’s crazy how it happens. You get a little shot of, “Okay, I completed something!” And you feel like, ‘Well, maybe I can do something else.’ It’s snowing.”

Sticking to your schedule also means only cleaning for a certain amount of time every day and trying not to overdo it. “If you spend hours or an entire day doing something, chances are you’re just increasing your negative relationship with cleaning and subconsciously making yourself afraid to do it again,” says Ingram.

Schedules are very personal. Ingram cleans her house for 30 minutes every day, focusing on a different room. Then, twice a year for eight weeks, she adds a few more intensive tasks to her daily schedule for each room—things like scrubbing walls and baseboards or cleaning behind the refrigerator—for a more thorough cleaning.

“There isn’t one schedule that fits all because our homes are different and our energy levels are different,” she says. “I always tell people to just think about your life, write down all the rooms in your house and then make little bullet points under each room with things you could do in each room on a daily or weekly basis, and not to do it thoroughly to clean. but just keep it neat.”

It’s common to view everyday messes as something shameful, says Ingram. People get stressed about cleaning before the company arrives and feel the need to apologize for even the smallest mess. None of that is helpful. Instead, Ingram says, people need to recognize that almost everyone has some version of the same struggles, and that teamwork can help.

‘Body doubling’ is another common technique used by people with ADHD. Essentially, it means completing potentially frustrating tasks in the company of someone else, whose presence can help reduce distraction and procrastination.

“Over the years, especially when I had little kids, I had friends who would come over and help me clean, or they would come sit on the couch and talk to me for hours while I did all my laundry,” Ingram says.

Ultimately, Ingram says, her best advice when it comes to cleaning is to let go of the idea of ​​a perfect, spotless home. While it’s easy to be fooled by things like social media, she says, very few people live that way.

“We’ve just become so used to thinking that everything has to be perfect and we feel ashamed and judged when it isn’t,” she says. “It’s just not realistic. But you can get to a place where you feel good about your environment, and that can help you feel good about everything else.”

Kate Morgan is a freelance writer in Richland, Pennsylvania.