Cleaning as therapy. Getting out and about as therapy. Being watched.

Having just vacuumed most of the house, I am moved to write about what is being called “Cleaning as Therapy”. Cleaning “gurus” abound: Marie Kondo, Mrs Hinch, Lynsey “Queen of Clean” Crombie - is there no end to them. And yesterday I read that a study published in 2008 in the Journal of Sports Medicine said that 20 minutes vigorous cleaning was enough to reduce anxiety and depression by 20%.

Well, I could have told them long ago that doing a good clear-out is good for the soul. There is something very satisfying about sorting out a mess. I am not convinced that it is really a long term solution to depression and anxiety though. It’s a sort of displacement activity, like tidying up your pencil case before you get on with a difficult piece of homework. In the end the difficult piece of homework or the causes of the depression need to be addressed. But decluttering and tidying up, like making a list of what you need to do, is a valuable step on the way.

Getting out for a walk also helps to declutter the mind. No headphones, no music playing on your phone, no podcast to listen to. If a walk outdoors is going to help you have to have no more external stimuli than what occurs naturally - birdsong if you are lucky, traffic noise if you are not. But you should not be listening to anything specific. Your mind should be free to ramble where it will. Zen and the art of walking around! Could I become a guru?

The Duchess of Cambridge, aka Kate (formerly-Middleton) Windsor, has, it seems, been doing her bit by building, or having landscape gardeners build, a special garden at the Chelsea Flower Show to encourage parents to let their children play outdoors, get wet and muddy and leave their electronic devices behind. Good stuff if you have some outdoors to run around in getting wet and muddy! Not to mention the time to do so and the facilities to wash the muddy clothes and children afterwards!

Just saying!

I wonder if the outdoor places are monitored by CCTV. Kenan Malik, in an article on surveillance culture, was writing about the number of CCTV cameras in the UK (some estimates suggest that 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras are here!!), and about facial recognition technology, and had this to say about surveillance in general:

“Almost without realising, we have created an entire infrastructure of surveillance. If you’re reading this online, you’re being tracked. If you bought a print version of the newspaper at a supermarket, your purchase was probably recorded.”

And he goes on:

“Every time you go shopping, use public transport, make a phone call, engage with social media, you’re likely to have been tracked.”

That sounds like a good reason to buy things with cash and not a credit or debit card. As more and more of us have our train and plane tickets in an app on our phones, not to mention linking our phones to our bank cards so that we can pay contactless just using our phones, it gets harder and harder to be anonymous.

It seems to me we have gone way beyond 1984. No wonder we get stressed and anxious!