Why you should clean your room even if your mother doesn’t ‘smashing her back'[최고야의 심심(心深)토크]

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A messy room makes your brain tired

Just like warming up before a full-scale workout, I tend to tidy up my desk before studying. It is a kind of preparation ritual to manage the mind that does not want to study while buying some time by tidying up the desk. A previously published article (‘Why do I clean my desk before studying?’), we looked at the problem of procrastination, in which students clear their desks because they don’t want to study and keep putting off studying that they have to do. However, the problem here is that you only organize your desk and do not study ‘in earnest’.

Rather, the act of clearing the desk before starting study or work that requires concentration is a great help in increasing attention efficiency. If your efficiency does not increase compared to the time you spend sitting in front of your desk, look around you. Is there a mess of unimportant clutter? All the factors we thought we could just ignore without paying attention to them grab our attention and tire our brains without us knowing.

Let’s learn about the effects of cleaning that can help you avoid ‘smashing your back’ from your mother and increase your concentration.

Brain tired of sorting clutter

When you are in a space cluttered with clutter, your brain can’t rest and works constantly. This is because when visual stimuli continue to enter the brain, the part of the brain that interprets them is activated even without being conscious. Suppose you are sitting in front of a messy desk with empty cups, snack bags, smartphones, writing utensils, and various papers. At this time, the brain recognizes and categorizes objects without even knowing it, filtering out whether or not the information we see is the information we need right now. Even if it seems like an insignificant task, this makes the brain tired and reduces the efficiency of work processing.

A research team led by Professor Sabine Kastner of the Department of Psychology (Neuroscience Institute) at Princeton University studied the correlation between visual stimuli and attention. The research team randomly showed participants some of 2056 photos of city streets or natural landscapes. Then, they were asked to quickly classify if there was a car or person in the photo. While looking at the photos, they divided them into three categories: △There are cars but no people △There are people but no cars △No cases.

The research team took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the neural activity occurring in the brain while they were doing the classification task. As a result, the frontal lobe in the brain, which is responsible for cognitive control, working memory, attention, and emotional response, was activated not only when viewing pictures of people or cars, but also when viewing pictures that have nothing to do with people or cars. Even if the information is not necessary for the classification task, the brain interprets it and decides whether to use it for decision-making.

The research team evaluated that our brain has an excellent ability to quickly detect and categorize complex visual information. But the problem is that this process takes too much energy interpreting useless information. “Clutter can visually overwhelm us and force the brain to do more for simple tasks,” said Professor Kastner. “The more conflicting stimuli, the more energy the brain has to expend to filter out what we need. ”he explained.

If you’re always good at looking… Must clean up

If you have a habit of wandering around here and there, cleaning the clutter is even more essential. A research team led by John MacDonald, a professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University in Canada, found that people who tend to lose their focus and lose their sight can reduce cognitive load and increase work efficiency by removing visually hectic elements.

Research has shown that our brains have built-in mechanisms to ignore distracting visual stimuli. It serves to help us focus on the important things. However, the problem is that this mechanism works well if the level of stimulation is not strong, but the more intense the stimulation, the harder it is to ignore it. If you are a person who is usually distracted, you are more vulnerable to the temptation of strong stimuli.

A cluttered desk creates a situation where several objects compete for attention. If there are items on the desk, such as intense fluorescent memo pads or moving mobile ornaments, they will attract more attention. In this environment, stimuli are constantly pouring in, and attention is repeatedly distributed to various places. In addition, when the surroundings are cluttered with clutter, it is difficult to quickly find the necessary object, and the act of rummaging through the object to find it causes additional cognitive load.

However, according to the research team, there are individual differences in whether or not concentration decreases according to the surrounding environment. Some people can concentrate well where needed even in a distracting environment, while others can be very vulnerable. Therefore, if you have a lot of experiences where your eyes are easily taken away from other places and your concentration is disturbed, you should try to work in a clean environment as much as possible.

“If you clean the house, can you do anything?”

In addition to neurophysiological mechanisms, there are other reasons to clean to increase the efficiency of your life. When you organize the space around you, you feel that you have control over the situation as well as the space, with the feeling that you can control this space as you wish. When all objects are placed in the designated location according to my will, not only can I efficiently control them, but I can also quickly find objects when I want, which increases actual efficiency.

Jordan Peterson, a former professor of psychology at Harvard University and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada, recommends that those who come to him for psychological counseling “clean the room first.” He emphasizes the necessity of cleaning the room in his books ‘Beyond Order’ and ’12 Rules of Life’. When you sit in your room as if meditating and think about what you need to do to create a better environment, things that need to be corrected become visible. Then, you can start doing things that you can reach out to do right away, such as organizing a pile of papers nearby or wiping the dust on the monitor. As you clean your room, you eventually find the strength to improve the physical area, including the living room, kitchen, and the entire house, as well as the mental area. It is explained that the promise of ‘I will try to put order in my room’ can lead to ‘I will put order in my life’.

Colin Ellard, professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who pioneered the field of ‘psychogeography’ by combining psychology with architecture and environmental design, also emphasizes that control over space can develop into control over life. In his book ‘Space Moves People’, he focused on Dharavi, the largest slum in Mumbai, India, where he attempted to improve the surrounding environment by gaining control over the small space of a house. As the residents of Dharavi reorganized their residences, they created a commercial district and made efforts to escape from the slums. After fixing the poor environment of the house, I believed that the situation could be improved, and it led to practice to improve my life.

Cleaning your surroundings not only improves your concentration by improving your brain’s fatigue, but also prevents you from wasting energy by focusing your attention elsewhere. Furthermore, I gain the power to organize and control my space, my mental world, and even my life. Now that you know exactly the benefits of cleaning your room, all you have to do is clean up the clutter. Let’s lift our heads and sort out the things we can reach first.

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