Look at her.
Smug cow.
She can gaze all day at her open wardrobe without the slightest hint of frustration or confusion.
Her whole wardrobe is neatly laid out and colour coordinated. There’s nothing in there that shouldn’t be - she doesn't have carrier bags stuffed in the shelves or old, stinky shoes in a pile at the bottom of her hanging space.
The closest I get to that level of smugness is when I decant the contents of my suitcase into a hotel wardrobe, but even then I still manage to get slightly panicky about what to do with undies and gym clothes if there are no drawers and just open shelves.
I crave the Zen feeling she obviously has, but yet my wardrobe and cupboards still don’t magically arrange themselves in a Zen-like fashion on a daily basis.
Sure I have days when I blitz the hell out of my storage areas, but the more I think about it, the more I realise I need to train myself to stop being a stuffer in the first place.
Of course, I’m well aware that the girl in the Sharps bedroom advert is a mythical beast created for the purposes of selling built-in wardrobes.
Her own wardrobe could well look like a landfill site, but whenever I find myself feeling slightly envious of what I see around me, it’s an emotional signal that it’s probably a goal I should be pursuing to some degree or another.
I often get annoyed when I’m sifting through messy cupboards and either can’t find what I want, or it’s slightly crushed or damaged in some way due to the chaos around it.
When my surroundings are tidy I relax and my brain functions better.
Back in the heady days of COVID, I watched a TV series starring house-organiser Marie Kondo, and it made me literally clean up my act, and I loved the way my house felt for a few short weeks, but the clutter has gradually crept back into my life.
I have a theory that the reason it returned to a state of mild mayhem was because although I made the effort to declutter over a few days, it didn’t become part of my daily routine to give cupboard-loveliness my attention.
I had bad storage habits ingrained into my brain.
After re-reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, I’ve been inspired to set a longer term goal for myself that has involved going around my house and counting up the number of small spaces that I could give attention to over the course of the next 3 months, and set myself the goal to declutter one of those spaces every day.
There are (quite neatly) one hundred spaces I have identified (individual shelves, cupboards and drawers) and by the end of the three month period, I will not only have a Zen-like home, but I’ll have also maintained my focus on cupboards for a sufficiently long period for my brain to re-wire with some new long-term habits.
Well that’s the theory anyway!
As you can probably tell, I’m slightly nerdy about studying my own behaviour and coming up with challenges for myself.
There will be no bad outcome to this experiment.
I’ll either have some evidence that it’s a good strategy (for me at least), or I’ll know it doesn’t work and I’ll try something new in the future.
When you set goals for yourself that don’t work out as you’d like them to, then the important thing is you’ve learnt what doesn’t work for you - and that’s valuable information.
Do you have any minor frustrations about yourself that you’d like to sort out?
Then work out a strategy for yourself and see if you can make positive changes.
You might even feel as smug as the girl in the Sharps advert!