Daunted by spring cleaning? Blame your brain, professor says
Closets bulging with clothes and shoes. Plastic bins of stuff shoved under the bed. Stacks of mail covering the dining table. Has anyone seen the car keys?
Its spring, time of rebirth and rejuvenation. Time to throw open the windows and do some spring cleaning. But the magnitude of the project is daunting. How to begin?
If you want to know why its so difficult to tackle a big project like spring cleaning, blame your brain, said Randall OReilly, professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at 窪蹋勛圖. 泭
The brain is wired to be very cautious and conservative in starting big projects, because once you do start, it takes over your brain, he said. The brain, researchers think, is wired to track progress towards whatever it is youve decided to do, like spring cleaning, which is hard work. You have to make a lot of difficult decisions and the outcome is uncertain. Your brain recognizes that and says, Maybe I wont start on that project after all. Its an adaptive property of the brain.
Once we get over the initial stalling and begin the project, the brain rewards us with small hits of dopamine as we make progress. This provides an incentive to stick with the task.
- Start with the simplest tasks. If you think about the magnitude of what lies ahead of you, starting can be too difficult.
- Move to the next simple task and then the next, and so on. Thats when momentum kicks in.
- Dont beat yourself up. Realize that dealing with a mess is hard and everyone has trouble with it.
Dopamine is a chemical released by neurons that sends signals to other nerve cells and plays a major role in both mood and reward-motivated behavior.
So, youve tackled cleaning and decluttering and youre making progress. And then you notice the teapot that belonged to your grandmother stored in the back of the cupboard. Its sweet and dainty and evokes fond memories of your grandmother, but its not your style at all. Now youre confronted with a dilemma: Keeping a teapot you never use is taking up much-needed space, but getting rid of it would feel disrespectful to your grandmother.泭
Things with an emotional attachment take on meaning, OReilly said. The teapot is not just a teapot. It has a personal history, so its unique in that sense. If you get rid of the teapot, it feels sacrilegious. Its valuable to you because it carries that authenticity and history with it, so it feels like youre disrespecting that value.
One way to overcome that, OReilly suggests, is to take a photo of the teapot so you have the memory of it. He has done that with his kids artwork. Their drawings show up on his computers random photo screensaver, so he can see them and appreciate them more than if they were packed away.
So, why do we accumulate clutter? The answer is found in the dopamine system, which is based on expectations. When we accumulate something or have a pleasurable experience, the brain releases dopamine and we feel good. As soon as our wants and desires are satisfied, however, the brain discounts that feel-good moment.
You can see mathematically that the brain is constantly comparing what we have versus what we expected to get, he said. Every moment of our lives, thats what our brain is doing. How much better is that movie versus what you thought it would be? How much better was that cookie than you remembered? Every single thing is being compared to a baseline of what your expectation is.
Attachments to things are like those expectations. We want them and feel that we need them. This is where it gets diabolical, OReilly said. If something we like泭is meeting our expectations, we no longer get a dopamine burst. Our brains are constantly trying to up the ante, so we continue to acquire more stuff to feel better.
Professor Randall OReilly
To get the dopamine surge, the experience needs to be better than what you expected. If it just meets expectations, guess what? No dopamine for you! The flip to the reward of dopamine is a downer.
If the experience was less than you expected, theres actually a reduction in the firing of dopamine neurons, leaving you feeling disappointed, OReilly said. Then the brain tries to come up with new ways to get the dopamine. It needs to be better than what you expected.
The expectation system is what drives learning, he said. This system in our brains drives us forward, to learning more and more. Youre changing your expectation level, your sense of self. Dont have attachments. Have ambition.
Why do we allow clutter to accumulate? OReilly said its because we dont want to make decisions about throwing things out. We think we might need that item someday. Blame the psychological effect called loss aversion. Humans are averse to losses. Our brain says, If we get rid of it, then weve lost it.
Can the process of removing physical clutter help us release negative emotional attachments in our lives? OReilly says there is a basic, intrinsic pleasure in increasing order.
OReilly has found that people will organize things as a way to relax and pass the time. An example he finds noteworthy is walking down the aisle of an airplane and observing people playing solitaire on their laptops.
Theyre sorting fake, digital cards on a laptop, he said. Why? I cant think of a more meaningless activitysorting stacks of cards that arent even real cards. And yet we love to do it, because its satisfying to put things in their place.
Theres so much to learn in psychology and neuroscience, OReilly said. There are huge, deep, fascinating mysteries about how the brain works and weve just started learning about them.
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