Delight and Disorder: What Tidiness Says & Doesn't Say About You

A few years ago, my husband and I had a conversation about trying to understand how my brain works. Kyle is a systems guy who worships at the altar of efficiency. He spends a lot of free time doing what we call Ky-alisis which entails Kyle’s brain taking in new environments and the people systems that make them work. This process mostly involves retail stores and restaurants but also acrobatic apparatuses at the circus and the ticket line at the state fair and lots of mental math. It’s like the Jason Bourne thing where he can see his attackers coming from 360 degrees, 24/7, except in Kyle's case it’s like a 90-second countdown timer to 15 takeaways on efficiency optimization.

Ky-alisis sounds like this. “See that guy,” Kyle might say, not pointing to a would-be assassin but a 20-something man plating flan in an open-concept kitchen. “He’s making desserts at the far end of the work station because it’s his job to restock the salad when the prep guy runs out of spinach.” 

On the day of our conversation, Kyle has his mastermind pointed at me, as we puzzle over why I sometimes struggle to find my digital files. The idea was if we could just understand what's going on in my head then we could build an external system for my computer files that would fix my occasional inability to locate the very thing I'd been working on. 

"Do you have any visual images that come to mind when you store ideas in your brain?" he asked. From the time he was a boy, Kyle’s imagined his mind as a tidy cabinet. 

I closed my eyes and tried hard. This was supposed to be helpful, so I didn't want to lie. After a few seconds of quiet, he gently wondered, "Is it just a big mess in there?" 

The truth was it was more like thoughts floating alongside clouds. But this would never help me sort my client projects from my son's senior photos. I closed my eyes again and tried harder. Something came to me. "I see something!" 

Before me stood rows and rows of books. It was like peering into a crystal ball. I called out as if conjuring a spirit, "It looks like a library!" 

“Good job, honey,” he said, relieved. With Kyle’s belief that this metaphor was both appropriate and would be just fine, he went to work creating parent folders out of the map of ideas floating inside the pages of my brain. He's very good at it. 

I, on the other hand, continued to discover new metaphors. "Oh no, I think my mind might be like my refrigerator." He gave me a look like ‘girl, I know you did not just say that.’ That’s because Kyle's refrigerator is organized like a grocery aisle. Mine is more like a cold closet where you put things you don't want to die.

"Wait! My mind may work like google,” I explained in astonishment. "It's all in there. I just need the right search terms." He reminded me of the task at hand and that even google has a system. 

"If we can fix this," I told him. "I think I’ve got a real shot at solving my whole personality." 

***

Over the last seven years, Kyle and I have had many conversations like this. And he knows he has an open invitation to upgrade and rearrange things at my house based on his vast experience, aptitude, and honestly, enjoyment. I, on other hand, earned dishwasher privileges at his place after about two years of dating. While many of my girlfriends maintain the household order and control the coordinates of daily items in their homes, Kyle is the game master at Antlerwood Hollow, his woodsy urban abode in Salem, and Village Farmhouse my 1928 bungalow in Portland. Our homes were named by Kyle. Giving inanimate objects aspirational names is another one of his many gifts.

Granted, our living situation is unique. We met after already running our own households. We don’t have 20 years of cohabitation habits like so many couples our age. We also continue to run two homes in two towns while my youngest son finishes school. Early on it was evident that Kyle’s capacity for systems and order exceeded mine. Making him the captain and myself the co-captain of all things ordered and efficient was one of the smartest decisions I’ve made. 

On the surface, this decision was all logic. But below the surface there was a lot of emotion. The truth was I had quite a bit of shame about not being good at this stuff. I’d never really kept a home neat, tidy, and sparkling clean. Whenever I visited friends’ houses, they seemed to have this already figured out and whenever I hosted gatherings at my house it would involve hours of cleaning beforehand and generally a late dinner because I had saved all the cooking and cleaning for the same day. I knew that having three active sons at three different developmental ages and a part-time teaching job at a local university and stacks of papers to grade on the weekends and a coaching business in the afternoons and a then partner who worked long hours and had little interest in household chores formed something like a reasonable excuse. But what judge wants to hear that? And what crime had I committed anyway? I wasn’t sure but I still felt guilty.

I moved around a lot as a child, living or staying in dozens of places and attending at least five schools by the time I finished sixth grade. Due to my dad’s vocation as a marijuana smuggler, which my mom insisted we tell our schoolmates was pronounced ‘ENTREPRENEUR,’ we sheltered in a variety of short term locations. My parents, Kenny and Martha, taught us to play life like a game. It was fun to skip school for a couple of weeks or a month and go to the beach (aka port venue). It was fun to live in a hotel and swim in the pool (aka hideout). It was fun to see which of us kids could stand in cold water the longest when taking a shower (aka unpaid utility bill). According to Dad, a lifelong proponent of rinsing in freezing cold water after a warm shower, this holistic bathing ritual was good in sickness and in health. “It closes your pores,” Dad would remind us with an all-knowing look. By the way, if you're wondering who won those cold shower competitions, it was me. As the middle child, I also hold records in the fake joyful consumption of fried chicken livers and kissing my parents’ ass. 

So we bounced around a lot while Dad supplied marijuana to the lower right quadrant of the United States. Unless of course we were driving cross-country, then there were more geographies involved. When Kenny and Martha did decide to settle, houses routinely received Dad’s floor plan ingenuity and craftsmanship. It’s like in another life, Dad had a show on the Home Network channel, where he was known for his love of glass doors and hardwood floors. Or his penchant for reimagining an ideal layout. At our fancy house in Roswell, Georgia, Dad and his friends relocated an entire sunken staircase to a coat closet. When it came to remodeling, Dad believed in the collective pursuit of innovation. All projects were attended by his cohort of buddies, coolers of Heineken, and the Payne Gang work crew.

We were the de-staplers and brick stackers, children highly skilled at walking around saw horses and passing under plastic barricades. Sometimes we’d fall asleep in a barely finished house and wake up to a brand new change of plans. These moves tested my will to compete for the title of family favorite. As I got older, I would cry, beg, plead to stay put. “You’re ruining my life!” I’d shout when my parents moved us from the suburbs of Atlanta back to rural Longstreet in the middle of my sixth grade year. 

So, here’s a little Payne Gang origin story for you. Longstreet was the name of our last resort destination, comprising 10 country acres in Forsyth County Georgia. In addition to a dilapidated barn, forgotten junkyard, and something we called the trouse (half trailer and half house), Longstreet boasted a rustic little hovel, enclosed in a chain-link fence and heated by a wood stove. Longstreet would make repeated appearances in my upbringing. It was the house where I lived when I started kindergarten and at 12 when Dad got busted off the coast of Jamaica and at 13 when mom left on a cigarette run to Guy’s Convenience Store and didn’t come back. It’s where I lived with my Aunt Karen and Uncle Jack and four cousins and two siblings when my grandmother Memaw became our primary custodian. 

Look, it wasn’t all bad. After all, I had all those fun skills instilled in me by my adventuresome parents. For example, when you’re the chronic new kid, you quickly discover that you’re interesting or you're nothing. I learned early in life what makes you interesting. Accents, tricks, and telling lies. On the playground, I’d valley girl talk, saying things like “Like, gag me with a spoon,” then penny drop from the monkey bars like a magic kid from a far off land. From Tenth Street Elementary in Anniston, Alabama to Mimosa Elementary in Roswell, Georgia I enjoyed entry-level fame for being born in Costa Rica, which I considered an almost-true fact, since the Payne Gang moved there when I was just a baby. The problem was while I was busy playing life, life was like hold my Heineken. 

Before our final descent to Longstreet, Dad’s business trips had started to become longer, around the time Mom’s depression and alcoholism got worse. Sometimes Dad was back in town but not living at home. And since home was not a place but the six members of my family, his defection, not his absence which we’d grown used to, demolished a few rooms. In those empty spaces, darkness and the far away music of Bob Dylan flourished. As a straight-A kiss ass, school gave me a way to press pause on my family’s telenovela. But coming home after school in this woeful era of my childhood always reminded me the Payne Gang was more reality TV than Hallmark movie. 

Going back to Longstreet in the middle of sixth grade felt like the worst thing that would ever happen to me because it meant downgrading from a 6-8 middle school to a K-6 elementary school. Life was already dramatic but my friends at Crabapple Middle School believed it should be extra exciting. At least this is what I’ve always told myself after they chose to ignore me on my last day there and then surprised me at lunch with a going away party. They really wanted me to be surprised. By the time they were placing the cake on the lunch table, I was a mess of braces and tears. To make matters worse, when I started 6th grade at Midway Elementary I earned the unwanted attention of a scary girl named Tammy who cornered me to mean whisper in my ear, “I awl-ways hated gurls name Viki.”

It was at Longstreet that my 6-person family became six individuals, cared for by various family members and governmental institutions. And by the time stuff got sorted, which is a nice way of describing a fragile family state that gets upgraded from code red to stable, I had permanent, absolutely remarkable survival skills, a fucking PhD in Resilience.

What else did I have? A community of amazing friends and teachers, some loving role models and favorite aunts, two parents trying their best to guide us, one from a federal penitentiary and the other from what she was learning from The Big Book.

What did I lack? A whole lot of regular everyday caretaking habits and practices that help you function and thrive in a stable home environment.

What did it all mean? I would grow up to earn a Masters degree in English while blasting through four novels by day and reading storybooks to my 4-year-old at night, while nursing his newborn baby brother. I knew how to purchase groceries on a budget and cook nutritious meals and keep my chin up in a difficult marriage. I could grow zinnias and tomatoes and decorate a Noble fir at Christmas time and enroll my children in Montessori school. I could train for mini-triathlons and call it fun. I could volunteer and behave as a valuable community member. I also knew how to make real friends. 

Just don’t come over unannounced. 

*** 

“Sorry about the mess.” 

How many times have you heard a friend say this? And how many times have you heard a woman make this apology in an already clean and tidy home? 

As it turns out, the social pressure for women to keep a clean and tidy home is real. In a study published in Sociological Methods & Research, sociology researchers found that women were judged more harshly than men for living in a messy environment. By simply asking participants to form impressions on pictures of messy rooms of someone named either Jennnifer or John, researchers found that both men and women judged Jennifer to be less responsible, hardworking, considerate, and likable based on the cleanliness perceived in the photos.

Social expectations for maintaining a clean and orderly home are nothing new. In 1955, Good Housekeeping published the now infamous list of 15 things wives should do to please their husbands after a long day at work. After making dinner timed to your husband’s arrival, a 15-minute freshening up, and the obligation to make ‘gay conversation’ because his days are often boring and stressful, women were also advised to: “Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives. Gather up school books, toys, paper, etc. and then run a dust cloth over the tables.”

Thankfully, these outdated expectations are no longer pushed on women, and more men, including my own fabulous Kyle, see housework as essential to being a team player. Still, the expectation that women in particular have some kind of special DNA when it comes to housework persists. As social critics have argued, it’s not so much that men aren’t able to see clutter, it’s that they’re not socially conditioned to believe it’s a problem they’re meant to solve. After all, boys have historically been given legos and blocks for play and girls given model kitchens and miniature dust pans. According to the Pew Research Center, younger generations of parents, notably millennials, believe boys and girls should be steered toward toys that break down stereotypes with more boys getting baby dolls and more girls receiving tool belts.

Social theorists have been especially intrigued by how many millennials have also embraced the minimalist lifestyle, theorizing that coming of age during a recession shaped this generation’s preference for experiences instead of things. While millennials as a group may value fewer possessions, the minimalist style is about more than uncluttered environments—it’s also about intentionally creating aesthetically pleasing spaces to live and thrive in. So to add it all up: When it comes to neat and tidy, there are some deep-rooted gender expectations, some positive social approval for being an orderly woman, some generationally shifting attitudes (thank you millennials), and some popular social trends around tidiness and minimalism.

So, where do you land in this conversation? Has your self-esteem taken a hit, like mine, or has your social worth gotten an upgrade due to your tidy IQ? Have you ever wondered if some people are just naturally good at it? Have you ever wondered why cleaning and organizing makes you feel better—maybe even while you’re doing it? Do other people’s messes stress you out? And if you’re like me, have you ever wondered why these practices are so hard to pick up and where to start if you want to get better at it?

That’s what I want to understand in this edition of the Naked News. With the help of social science, personality psychology, and order gurus like Marie Kondo and of course, Kyle, I want to explore the history, hurdles, and health benefits of—at least when it comes to your living, working, and resting environments—having your shit together.

Your FOO Left You a Coded Message for Later

I was in my 30s the first time I heard the term FOO. I was in the middle of a 4-hour car ride with new friends and fellow parents for my son’s extended field study. If you hang out with me for more than an hour the conversation will inevitably go deep (a blessing or a curse depending on your love of philosophical inquiry), and that’s what happened on our commute to the Painted Hills of Oregon. We began talking about our families. The driver was a social worker, but it was his wife, a book agent who was already indoctrinated into sociological terminology, who asked me about my FOO. “You know, your family of origin?” she explained. I nodded along, simultaneously trying to convey this word was already part of my lexicon while also filing it away in the pocket of my brain that loves learning new vocabulary. I can only imagine the accompanying facial expression, one part manufactured confidence and two parts delight. 

So your family of origin or FOO (which let’s face it is way more fun to say) refers to the people who raised you, not necessarily your biological parents. What’s important about your FOO is that they intentionally or unintentionally modeled behaviors that you either consciously or unconsciously accepted or rejected. Your attachment to your caregivers, something I discuss in “Peanut Butter Revelation,” is also a key ingredient in your FOO because it tends to regulate the quality of your bonds later in life. 

As we dive into what makes us love, crave, resist, want, or despise order/efficiency, it’s valuable to consider how your FOO affects your preferences. Just like belief systems and patterns of dysfunction get passed down, so do habits and behaviors. And like everything else in your FOO, the reasoning behind these patterns and behaviors influences your attitude about them. So if cleanliness was godliness in your household, then you likely received a variety of lessons or in the very least some high stakes expectations around the tidiness of your room. And even if you didn’t appreciate this training — and it’s this part that’s always the most interesting to me — you still may have accepted this value as truth. Of course, you may have also grown to despise behaviors around order and cleanliness because it came with a high dose of negativity aimed at you or others. This is where your individual personality intersects with your FOO.

When I think about my own upbringing, I see that my mom had a strong belief in cleanliness. She had a practice of bleaching laundry and surfaces, something she felt was necessary to kill germs. She even taught us how to clean and iron. But my mom had some other tendencies too. For instance, there was often too much food, too many clothes, too many knick-knacks around. These items could be found in multiple locations, and because we often moved, the next house would have a completely different expectation for where to find, store, or even use something. Most of our accommodations were incomplete or something was irreparably broken so disorder and chaos seemed to be a byproduct of our in-between living. Most days this was just how it was—invisible hoop jumping that you don’t even know you're doing. But other days our collective coping around brokenness and inefficiency could be emotionally devastating.  

For instance, on the day I started my first period, I woke mom up to tell her what happened and ask her what to do. “They’re in the dryer,” she said. You know when someone says my heart sank? There was something about her (non) instructions that caused my heart to feel heavy and this heaviness seemed to control my eyeballs and I remember watching my two feet follow the subfloor that led to the unfinished bathroom, then open the defunct dryer, and remove a single maxi-pad. In some cultures, menstruation is a cause for great joy and celebration. My initiation felt like any other day with the added sorrow that the supplies needed for my journey came from the belly of a broken appliance. 

The thing about your FOO is that it shapes you in more than one way. Sure, I missed the lesson on the relationship between self-care and self-esteem (which by the way is a big part of tidiness) but I got the unintended lesson around making do and moving on with what you’ve got. And it’s these double lessons that end up causing us trouble. Because not complaining and maneuvering around unmet emotional needs, much less physical ones, is a valuable life skill. But there are few lessons on when to apply it. And so, a lot of people like me, grow up to lack awareness or insight around when to have actual expectations and when to expect more and better out of life. 

“A tree grows how it grows,” Dr. B, my wise and wonderful therapist, told me once when I was feeling especially ashamed about all the stuff I didn’t know. He explained that trees that grow in a forest grow toward the light, no matter where they’re planted. Some grow straight up to the sky and others grow a little to the left or right. Some creative trees will sprout in all directions trying to reach the sun. It’s been important for me to learn that how I grew is not my fault, and while my parents bear some responsibility, it’s not entirely their fault either because your FOO is also about who raised your parents and how they grew too. (Sorry I couldn’t resist some Seussian word play.)

So our family of origin is one piece of what we learned about tidiness, and it’s an important one, because a lot of couples and families experience daily conflict around differences in expectations. If that’s you, it may be helpful to understand that your partner's stance on clean/orderly is probably coming from somewhere, as is yours. And if you have kids, you’re passing down your own set of beliefs too. Do you like them? Do you like how they make your partner or kids feel?

Before we look at the next few sections on neuroscience and personality psychology, I want you to pause for a moment and consider what you learned about tidiness growing up. How much of what you practice today is a response to your upbringing, and how much do you feel is just, well, a part of you?

Your Brain Craves Order…And Surprise! 

As it turns out, Kyle was on to something when he suggested that I first understand my mind in order to organize my world. In his book,The Organized Mind, psychology and behavioral neuroscience professor Daniel Levitin explores how an understanding of how the brain works can help us devise ways for organizing our home and work spaces amidst the reality of information overwhelm. Levitin explains that there’s a section of our brain called Area 47 that contains prediction circuits. According to Levitin, Area 47 does many jobs for us but it’s especially tasked with scanning our environment and predicting what will happen next. One hypothesis for why we crave order is that it’s calming to our nervous system, but that’s not the whole story. If everything is predictable, says Levitin, then we feel bored. Area 47 is most satisfied when there’s a combination of predictability and surprise. 

I recently toured a massive food manufacturer’s facility in Oregon, as part of a two year leadership program I started in the fall of 2022. The company employs over 300 workers and ships their products across the United States. It’s a remarkable operation, but I couldn’t help thinking how much I would hate working on an assembly line—as I imagined myself working in the factory. Where would my motivation come from? Everything was so ordered, so organized, so perfectly systematized. Kyle, on the other hand, would have been over the moon.

By the way, I play the “Could I work here?” game regularly. It’s my own little Jason Bourne-ability. If I’m buying coffee, I think about what it would be like to wake up at 4am and open the store. If I’m shopping at Trader Joes, I wonder if I could make small talk and scan groceries at the same time. While the nurse is taking my blood sample, I’m wondering if I would have the courage, and let’s be honest—the hand/eye coordination— to poke someone with a needle. The answer is no unless there’s war. I’ve told myself that if there’s a war I would force myself to learn medical procedures or at the very least be one of the nurse greeters. I think I would be very good at charting.

As our tour wrapped up at the tortilla factory, I learned a reassuring fact. Employees rotate often throughout their 8-12 hour shifts. It also showed me that employers are paying attention when it comes to the health and happiness of their workers. As much as order provides us with efficiency, as humans we need some degree of variation. As Levitin puts it, “People don’t like feeling like they're cogs in a machine.” 

Maybe I play the “Could I work here game?” because I’m one of those self-employed people who occasionally realize that working for yourself comes with some high stakes (the rest of the time we don’t think about it.) But my criteria for adding a job to my list includes something else that researchers love to study: pleasure. As it turns out, the combination of order and surprise has a significant relationship with how we experience pleasure, and it’s something psychologists have been examining in music.

In a 2022 article published in Frontiers in Psychology, musicology researchers investigated what we call ‘groove.’ You know that feeling you get when you start to sway or tap your foot? That’s groove, which the researchers define as “the pleasurable urge to move to a rhythm.” Musicologists argue that what creates this sensation comes from the interplay of repetitive rhythmic patterns and rhythmic deviations. In other words, when music is too simple or too complex, groove doesn’t happen. 

I found the application of ‘groove’ to the maintenance of a clean/organized space insightful. While these tasks often feel like unwanted work to me, I do sometimes find myself ‘in the groove’ during a burst of cleaning. In these instances, I come closer to what I hear from friends who describe their tidying activities as therapeutic, even relaxing. Could it be that the work, not just the outcome, of organizing our lives makes us feel better? When my kids attended Montessori school, I remember learning that small children often hum, sing, or talk to themselves while at ‘work,’ something Dr. Maria Montessori felt that children needed as much as play. And over and over I saw this to be true. When they were little, unloading the dishwasher and singing often coincided, as they entered into a kind of flow state. 

In addition to pleasure, groove researchers are especially interested in the interplay between pattern and deviation because of the way it works with predictive processing and the ‘underlying neural mechanisms linking temporal predictions, movement, and reward.’ In this study, researchers were especially interested in how their findings could help with treatments for patients with motor impairments like Parkinson’s Disease. What I think is applicable to our understanding is how the breakdown of groove includes ‘reward,’ a feature needed for all habit forming behaviors. In other words, if you want to create a tidy habit by doing something like ‘resetting a room’ each time you leave it, something James Clear covers in his book Atomic Habits, there’s got to be something in it for you. It can’t just be work. In this example, the reward, the pleasure, comes the next time you walk into the room and find everything in its place. 

As someone who doesn’t mind washing and folding laundry but hates to put it away, my tidy friends have told me that I am missing out on the pleasure principle. “Putting away is the best part!” they say. These same folks also seem to enjoy physically crossing a task off their list. I wouldn’t say this act brings me zero satisfaction but the dread associated with putting laundry away seems to negate the good vibes that should come with finishing the work. And I know I’m not the only one. So, why do some people, like me, find less joy in such activities? And what does that say about us?

The Limits of Perception 

Habit researchers like James Clear have some amazing hacks for adopting new routines that bring you greater energy, focus, and something we'll talk about later, joy. But first I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that some people, through no fault of their own, find order and organization baffling. And ironically, it’s often this group that benefits most from better systems, organization, and routines. 

From my own experience with my children, students, and friends with ADHD, I know that this group often finds time management and staying organized difficult. Specifically, executive functioning—the mental processes that enable attention, planning, juggling multiple tasks, and more—is a challenge for many people diagnosed with ADHD (and for many undiagnosed folks as well). Learning specialists who work with ADHD kids and adults, spend a lot of time skill-building systems and preparing environments because of the dramatic stress reduction, improved focus and productivity, as well as positive self-esteem that derives from improving these habits. When you’re the kid who’s always losing their homework in their messy backpack, it can be a game changer to unzip your bag and have everything you need at your fingertips. 

While messiness may be attributed to the extra challenge of living with disability, it’s certainly not a character flaw. And this is an important point to emphasize. As you’ll soon learn when we get to personality psychology, some people value order more than others. But we live in a society that greatly esteems, at times even worships, tidiness and order. Disorder and messiness doesn’t mean someone is lazy, a word that implies moral failing. In fact, someone’s disordered environment may not align with their preferences at all, especially if they’re managing a physical or mental disability. Unfortunately, a lot of kids who then become adults internalize these negative self-perceptions. And isn’t it hard enough when other people judge you? If we’re going to have a real shot at loving ourselves, something I discuss in “Peanut Butter Revelation,” we’ve really got to separate social worthiness from our own intrinsic value.

But what about people who make messes and don’t care? I know some of my friends are thinking about their kids right now. What about people who dare I say like messes? Well, it turns out that some of these folks are some of the smartest and most creative people on the planet. 

Albert Einstein, famous for revolutionizing our ideas on space and time with the theory of relativity, was also well-known for his extraordinarily messy desk. With Einstein as our role model, it’s almost unsurprising to hear that research has shown that while a clean desk promotes prosocial behaviors like healthy eating and generosity, it also promotes conventionality. On the flip side, studies have shown that messy desk owners tend to be freer thinkers. According to Dr. Kathleen Vohs, a psychological scientist, “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights. Orderly environments, in contrast, encourage convention and playing it safe.” Aware of the messy desk critique, Einstein responded, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” 

In a world that needs freethinkers to solve big problems, it’s fascinating to analyze how perceptions continue to play a part in how we esteem someone’s social value. In a study designed to measure just that, participants were asked to evaluate someone’s personality based on the order or messiness of their desk. This time researchers weren’t looking at the different perceptions based on gender but instead how someone’s messiness portrayed them in the workplace. Participants ranked personalities based on extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The messy desk owners were perceived as less conscientious, more neurotic, and low in agreeableness. Not really the kind of person you want as a co-worker, right? Interestingly, this study wasn’t actually measuring whether someone had any of these traits (everyone was made up)—instead what they discovered was that a messy desk created a negative perception. So let’s just pause here. A messy desk didn’t indicate a person was actually unconscientious or disagreeable but rather the messy desk created the perception that they were these things.

As one of the study authors, Sarah Dyszlewski, concluded, “Once trait information about a target becomes activated in perceivers’ minds, either consciously or unconsciously, that information can subsequently affect how they process information, the types of questions they ask, and how they behave toward the target, possibly bringing out the very trait information that they expected to see from the target in the first place.” In other words, our interactions with someone we believe has these negative traits due to the way they maintain order and organization, due to the way we assign a positive value to tidiness traits, can actually contribute to our own confirmation bias. 

If you have conflict with your spouse, co-workers, or kids about your different attitudes toward neat and clean, take a moment and think about what assumptions you’ve already made about them. Could your beliefs about these traits be influencing your interactions? If it helps you soften your stance, remember that messiness isn’t a character flaw and tidiness isn’t a badge of honor — it’s a preference. 

To Nap or Clean? Your Personality May Hold the Answer

As I researched this topic, I was really hoping to find studies that looked at tidiness as a personality trait. Some argued that Type As were more interested in orderly environments, but mostly I discovered that being clean and organized is considered a personal value not a fixed trait. 

And I think we need to unpack this word ‘value.’ We often use it to indicate ‘good values’ versus ‘bad values.’ Ethicists define a value as belief that motivates human behavior. While some values like love, truth, respect, and freedom feel universal, other values are highly individual and don’t fit neatly into the categories of right or wrong. I think this is an important distinction because messy people are often socially criticized for being lazy (a word Marie Kondo or her translators use too much in my opinion) and tidy people are often seen as exemplary. But I think we can agree that no one is going to write, “She was exceptionally neat and tidy” on a tombstone. Is it possible that tidy people have a personal value around order and the less organized a value around something else? After all, our values represent what we choose to prioritize. 

Personality researchers have done a lot of work trying to understand if individuals represent types. The Enneagram personality test argues there’s one dominant trait that motivates people, typing individuals into nine categories sorted by number. Other tests seek to explore the relationship between ourselves and others, like the Love Languages Quiz. And since 1975, the Meyers-Briggs personality test has fascinated the public by breaking human complexity down into 16 different types. Fun fact: The test was created by a mother-daughter team, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. The test is based on the ideas of Carl Jung and Meyers and Briggs' desire to bring his findings to a larger audience. 

When it comes to psychological science, Meyers-Briggs isn’t necessarily embraced by scholars. Some even think of it as psychological astrology. However, it is one of the leading personality tests used by businesses and organizations, who apparently find some satisfaction in the results. Why I’m talking about it today is simply because there’s not a ton of research on personality and order, beyond what we’ve discussed in terms of perception. So in this area, Meyers-Briggs proponents are the trailblazers. For our purposes, I want to look at a poll conducted by the group called 16 Personalities that asked its readers to agree or disagree with the statement “Having a neat and tidy home is a priority,” and then compared their responses to their personality type. 

Before we do that, let me give you a brief overview of how Meyers-Briggs works (MBTI). The testing revolves around typing individuals in four dichotomies: extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. When it comes to understanding your tidiness preferences and personality, I find just knowing these personality aspects helpful. The first category relates to how much you enjoy socializing. Extroverts want more and introverts less, and of course introverts like other people–it’s just that some extroverts like me think it would be really fun if our friends lived downstairs and we had coffee together in the mornings and said “Good night John Boy” before we blew out our lamps.

Next up is sensing and intuition. Whether you tend toward sensing or intuition can be an important distinction and save you from a lot of boring conversations if you lean sensory. Sensing folks enjoy a hands-on approach to knowing whereas the intuitives like deep thoughts, and if they’re an intuitive verbal processor like me, that can be very taxing especially for the introverts. I mean whoever heard of verbal processing alone? Sensing individuals are also more observant of their environments and for some types this is a key ingredient in preferring tidy spaces. 

The thinking/feeling categories speaks to your tendency to rely on logic or emotion to understand the world. Of course, we now know that everyone is using emotion all the time to make decisions. It’s just that the feeling folks like me think that’s helpful and those with more logical tendencies believe reason is the ultimate guide. The last dichotomy, judging/perceiving, is one of the most important qualities when it comes to tidiness. When you hear judging, think structure/order and when you hear perceiving, think spontaneous and looking for something better to do. 

So how this all works is that your test results provide a four letter acronym such as INFJ or ESTP that often corresponds to an aspirational name and storyline. For example, I’m an ENFJ or Protagonist and Kyle is an INJF or Advocate. Some say that if you retake your personality test often your results will change but that’s never happened to me. I type out as the Protagonist every time, which MBTI describes as a ‘warm forthright type’ who loves helping others. I don’t hate it that Oprah and MLK Jr. are in the ENFJ club. Also, Mufasa from the Lion King. 

The INFJ types are considered one of the rarest types because they are freaky good at reading others. The Psychology Junkie says that INFJs “Seem to intuitively understand people and situations and how events will unfold. With their highly-developed intuition, they are constantly looking ahead to determine what will happen in the future.” Hot, right? And doesn’t it perhaps explain Kyle’s fascination with figuring things out. 

So now that you know a little more about MBTI and more than you probably want to know about mine and Kyle’s personality types, let's take a look at how that applies to the need for order. According to one article, extroverts and feeling types (moi) actually value cleanliness and order more because they tend to be more social and care what people think. That said, my intuitive tendencies do put me in the category of many thinkers who care more about ideas than environment. Those who are more introverted, intuitive, and structured (Kyle) often want an orderly environment as a foil to their internal world. In other words, when you go inside for thinking, learning, and self-knowing it’s helpful to have a peaceful external world. Neither of our personalities typed out as known neat-freaks or as messy enthusiasts. 

Alright, so now let’s look at the poll I was talking about that asked participants to rate their agreement or disagreement with the statement “Having a neat and tidy home is a priority.” The group most likely to value tidiness, with 75% agreeing, are what the pollsters called Sentinels. These types prize structure and logic and are detail-oriented. In the MBTI assessment, Sentinels actually comprise four unique personality types but what they all have in common is the observant trait (S) and the judging trait (J). The observant trait makes them more attuned to their environments, while the judging trait indicates a higher need for order. An interesting layer to these results included that Sentinels who had the extraversion (E) trait scored highest in agreement, which pollsters theorized is due to their higher need to socialize. 

According to the assessment, both Kyle and I are what’s called Diplomats. In the poll, my type scored pretty high with 73% of Protagonists agreeing that tidiness is a value. My type even scored higher than Kyle’s and the theory again goes toward extraversion (83%). So while I have yet to master the skills required for tidy living, I do wonder if my tidy low self-esteem comes from the fact that people like me actually need order and care about what other people think, even when they don’t perform according to their own standards. Fascinating, right? 

Since I love to get geeky about knowing myself (this used to manifest as “what’s wrong with me?” but now it’s more like “what makes me cool”), I’ve long pondered why I prefer and function better in orderly environments but struggle to create them for myself. I get that my livelihood is built around creativity and creative people (thank you Einstein!) may have messy environments because we’re spending a lot of time in our heads. But I have another theory about this and I’ve been hard pressed to find a direct link in scientific literature, which sometimes makes me think I need to become a neuropsychologist. The first time I had this idea I was a third year English major but when I realized I’d have to start undergrad from scratch I decided that was way too long. Turns out the joke’s on me because it can still take two or three careers before you find what you love. 

And that means you get a psychological theory from a non-expert like me. Oh I tried asking my contact who is a learning specialist about this in a very awkward email that she didn’t answer. I am either weird or she’s busy. And honestly, I’m okay with either explanation. 

Here's some background to my theory. In addition to struggling with systems and order (yet preferring them), I struggle to read maps, graphics, and have very little sense of direction. I honestly can’t tell you if I really know left from right. All I know is that I have a callus on my right hand from writing with a pencil and whenever I want to pick left or right I rub my ring fingers for reassurance. I get especially nervous when I have to take my seat on an airplane because the corresponding letter/number system (A19 for example) doesn’t make sense to me. Since some airlines have added pictographs that show a stick figure or window symbol I’ve improved a little, but Lord help me if anyone is sitting in my seat. I am never sure if they’re wrong or I’m wrong and getting confused worsens my confidence. Just ask my kids how many times I’ve gotten lost while using Google maps, one wrong turn leads to another wrong turn which leads to curse words and more wrong turns. I have completely given up trying to look at the map itself – I just read the words. I also struggle with most things that involve what science calls spatial awareness. I enjoy puzzles but only when they’re under 250 pieces. I like sudoku but I do the ones designed for kids. And even though I’m a word wizard, I stink at games like Wheel of Fortune and Scrabble. Jeopardy, trivia, spelling? I am great at all of that. You’re presently learning from a former high school champ in both regular Quiz Bowl and Spanish Quiz Bowl. 

Okay, you get it. I’m a nerd. But what does that have to do with tidiness and my theory?! I'm glad you asked. I feel like there’s got to be a link between people with high spatial intelligence, preference, and tidy efficient environments. And by the way, Kyle is great at all of these things. He can paint you a picture, design you a logo, or build your IKEA furniture. Happily. Ergo, there’s got to be a link between low spatial awareness, preference, and messiness. Kyle laughs at my theory, mainly because I’ve introduced words like geographic dyslexia, a real term used by some psychologists who readily admit it’s a poor descriptor because the root ‘lex’ means ‘of words’ and there are no words in map reading (unless you’re me and you're reading the words). I’m pretty sure geographic dyslexia sounds made up to Kyle, like calling your garbage collector a sanitation engineer. 

Speaking of throwing things out — in our final section, I’m going to tell you what is finally working for me as a diagnosed person of order who lacks natural ability. But first, let’s not forget those who actually don’t give a flip about tidiness. Because they’re real and deserve respect for their anti-social behavior. As poet E.E. Cummings wrote, “To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.” So let me be the first to say that if messiness doesn’t matter to you, fly your freak flag, baby! 

In the poll on tidiness values, it’s probably no surprise that those called Explorers (ESTP) are less interested in tidiness. Although they have the observant trait (S), which makes them more aware of their surroundings, Explorers, also nicknamed the ‘life of the party,’ are primarily driven by spontaneity which is a key component of their personality type (P is for prospecting). The group least likely to care about tidiness are called Virtuosos (ISTP), with only 21% indicating they make order a top priority. This group tends to be more individualistic and, according to MBTI experts, cares less about external connection. Instead, they tend to be more interested in exploration through hands-on activities or experiments and may ‘decorate’ their environment with tools or equipment. If you’re a parent of a teenage boy like me, you’re probably wondering if they’re all Explorers or Virtuosos. One of my friends likes to post pictures of the fork searches she undergoes at her house, inevitably finding a fork in her teenage boys’ dirty laundry. All I can say is that this poll did not break things down by gender and age but that would be very interesting! 

If you didn’t hear your personality type mentioned in my summary, don’t worry. You can take a personality test and then find your type in this article and see how well it matches up. If you’re like me, your results may not fit like a glove but I hope that’ll encourage you to ask why. Maybe you’ll even develop your own theory about what’s missing in your personality puzzle. To be honest, understanding where you fall on the personality scale is probably less significant than how you rate the same statement researchers asked participants. How strongly do you agree that having a neat and tidy home is a priority? Because understanding how your passion or disinterest for tidy living is affecting your level of personal satisfaction, mental health, and relationships is how we’re going to wrap this whole thing up. 

Your External Environment Meets Your Inner World

So as we’ve seen, how your brain works, your physical and mental strengths and limitations, your upbringing, and your personality preferences all play a part in your relationship to order and organization. Understanding this is crucial to whatever you want to do about it because haven’t we all experienced enough shame for just being who we are and liking what we like? Let’s let go of that and instead talk about the benefits and drawbacks that we derive from our environments. 

Let’s start with the warning signs first. Psychologists have found links between messy environments and depression. Because depression often includes low energy and motivation, the desire to clean up and maintain an orderly space may fade for depressed folks. In this case, the mess may not be a sign of your personality preference but an outward manifestation of your mental state. 

While depression can make it harder to keep your space tidy, tidiness can reduce stress and improve your mental outlook. If you’re dealing with a messy house and depression, incorporate any tidying you do into your wellness plan. And if you haven’t read “The Dog Ate My Compass," read that next. I wrote it when I was depressed and dealing with an existential crisis about how to get unstuck when you’re feeling especially lost. 

Also, if you feel like you're drowning in messes, ask someone you trust for help. I know this can feel like walking around naked in public but trust me. Your friends and family love you, and if you’ve been ghosting them because it takes too much effort to be in touch, they’ll appreciate your call. If all that sounds crazy, turn on your favorite cleaning music and set a timer. As my fitness instructor Jen says in my HIIT classes, “You can do anything for 40-seconds. Now push it!” 

And what about anxiety? Well, an obsession with tidying or a resistance to throwing away can be a sign of other conditions like anxiety, OCD, or compulsive hoarding. In some cases, cleaning and organizing can feel therapeutic as and be a stress-reliever but for some the urge to do these behaviors may parallel a desire for control that’s insatiable. In these instances, excessive tidiness (or its opposite) may be a substitute for other areas of your life that feel out of control or a false sense of assurance that everything in your life is in order. Licensed psychotherapist Natalie Capano warns, “Organization can be an illusion that we have our life together, when in reality there are big issues just underneath the surface.” If any of these anxious cleaning behaviors resonate with you, you’re not alone. During the pandemic, many people turned to cleaning and organizing their homes to cope with the stress of a worldwide crisis. 

Okay so as we’re rolling out of this section on the negative effects of messiness and an obsession with cleaning/organization, I want to pause because I know some of you may be wondering if your messes are a warning sign or if your passion for a neat and tidy environment is out of control. A good way of assessing this is to notice how your habits and behavior are affecting other areas of your life like your work, family, or ability to relax at home. And if this all feels like too much to tackle through self-exploration, definitely seek help from a mental health professional — those guys are trained to help us unpack what’s going on and help us build healthier coping mechanisms when life feels like too much. 

Alright, so let’s now talk about the amazing health and lifestyle benefits of tidy living. Marie Kondo, famous for her first book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, gave us language and systems for our tidy efforts. If you’ve heard of the KonMari method, you know that Kondo asks us to physically hold each item and ask if it brings us joy. If the answer is no, then it’s in the discard pile. It reminds me of something Kyle told me once about dating other women before we met. “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no,” he said. 

Things are rarely that black and white for me but I like that they could be. And I especially appreciate that Kondo uses joy as her measuring stick. Because in a consumer society we have a lot of stuff. Some of it we bought, some was given to us, and some of it we inherited. Using joy as the primary measuring stick asks us to get into our bodies – to feel what matters to us. If you’ve tried this, then you know that a lot of stuff brings no emotion but when you hold something that brings you joy – you feel the spark from within. So, the first benefit we receive from creating a tidy environment is greater mindfulness. We start to notice and feel — something that can be harder and harder to do in our busy world. 

[What’s the difference between happiness and joy you ask? Elation or celebration? Make sure to get Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, her amazing book that outlines 87 different human emotions and experiences. You can buy it over at our store, the Naked Library.]

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up also breaks down a very systemic approach to tidying. The reason she believes people (and I’m one of them) struggle to maintain tidy spaces is that they tidy by going room by room. Kondo’s method is intense and strictly enforces doing the work by category not room. It can take up to 9-months to really get it right, but in her telling, none of her clients have ever needed to do it all over again. And if you don’t enjoy cleaning and organizing, like I’ve felt for most of my life, this promise can be a huge motivator. To me, cleaning my home or car usually feels like the movie GroundHog Day. 

One last thing about the KonMari method. Even though everyone talks about Kondo’s stance on joy, I think her practical advice on a 5-tiered system for tidying that starts with clothing and ends with mementos is equally important, especially if you feel like it’s all just too much work. The logic behind her formula is to start where we have a lot of stuff and perhaps lower levels of attachment so we can experience more success. If you’re like some of my friends whose clothes are mementos, you’ll want to adjust the order to work for you. I am especially attached to books so I would probably move them from second in her tiered system to second to last.

The results of tidying your home and office have tremendous benefits while you’re in your space and while you’re away. Not only has science shown that an ordered environment promotes healthier living, better moods, focus, energy, and peace of mind, it’s much easier to be social whether at home or out and about. You don’t need to stay home on a Saturday and clean all day when you’ve been maintaining your home all week long. 

Kondo’s latest book Kurashi at Home: How to Organize Your Space and Achieve Your Ideal Life builds on the KonMari method by introducing the Japanese word Kurashi into her philosophy. Kurashi means ‘way of life,’ and Kondo applies this term to our ideal environments. What I love about this book is that it’s not about being neat and tidy for others, it’s about using the space you have to nurture and inspire yourself. And that’s how I believe we can transform the way we value tidiness, not as a marker for who is good and who is not but as a way to take better care of ourselves. If you read Part II of “Peanut Butter Revelation,” you might remember my Self Shelf challenge, which invites you to notice and nurture yourself by tending to the congestion in an often-used area. By loving ourselves externally in these places, we receive immediate and regular benefit while in that space. 

Tidiness Goes Viral at Village Farmhouse

In the three weeks it’s taken me to create this article, I’ve been intentionally and at times unintentionally recreating spaces in my home and office. What started as my 14-year-old wanting to move from upstairs to the vacant room in the basement became a massive project engineered by my favorite lifestyle guru, Kyle. 

While I heard ‘bedroom swap,’ Kyle envisioned a systems update and a new office with a view. In less than a month, we moved my youngest downstairs and designed a lovely upstairs office for me. Along the way we also installed a new kitchen pantry, a wall of cabinets in the basement, and a reorganized outdoor shed. This process also included exhaustive purges of closets, clothes, broken items, books, and once loved mementos. And because I was reading Kondo for this article, I completed KonMari level one, when I loaded up two thirds of my wardrobe for donation and consignment into my car. I wouldn’t say I’m done, but I will say that I’m started. And I wouldn’t lie to you. It feels great! 

My initial findings are that it’s so much easier to take care of my spaces now and experience joy in the caretaking with these changes and updates. I’m definitely in the honeymoon phase so expect a Naked Librarian update on this in a couple months. 

After researching this topic and doing this work myself, I also have this to add. A lot of tidy people are just so good at this stuff that they’re actually not great at giving you advice. They may not know the starting point because they’ve been living the tidy lifestyle for so long and it’s so intuitive that it just feels like plug and play. But from watching Kyle, listening to Marie Kondo, and doing this deep dive, here are six things that I’ve learned. 

1. Being neat and orderly is more than a set of habits. It’s about having the least amount of things possible to care for. It’s about having assigned seating for your salt and pepper, a designated spot in your drawer for your nighttime fuzzy socks. You can’t get there until you remove all the shit that doesn’t matter. Give away, donate, sell, purge. 
2. You may have real deficits that make keeping your home clean and orderly difficult. Family members, family baggage, seasons, disabilities, pets, stress, breakups, hangups, etc are authentic challenges. Decide what you want and work from there. Check out Kondo’s Kurashi book for inspiration – she really will get you thinking about how you want to feel in your home and work environments. 
3. It’s impossible to be organized if you don’t have systems that support you. Before my kitchen pantry installation, I had food in 3 different cabinets. You may not have the ability to get a new pantry or set of cabinets but you can look around and notice what systems you lack – a coat rack, a shoe tree, drawer dividers. This may be over the top but I now have little boxes in my lingerie drawer. I got tired of searching for my thong underwear when it was time to dawn my yoga pants. Now my iddie biddies have an assigned location and my downward dog is sans panty lines.
4. You need help. How many times have you organized your refrigerator or garage only to do it again? If you’re one of the tidy all-stars you probably don’t do it that much. But us groundhogs can do it over and over and it feels like no end in sight. You need an extra pair of eyes, hands, and words of encouragement. If you’re not good at this stuff, like me, find someone with the visual aptitude who can help you. Some people do this for a living and some people do it for fun. Find one of those people! I personally have an awesome friend and house cleaner who visits me every three weeks, which means I get professionally cleaned bathrooms and floors every month. If professional organizers and cleaners are not in your budget, Kondo’s first book is an excellent starting point and costs less than $20.
5. You’ll feel great. Maybe not while you’re doing it but when you wake up to a clean and organized bedroom or kitchen or when you can finally find your rash ointment because you threw out all the other expired medications you’ll even feel proud of yourself. You’ll start doing weird things like color matching your garments and hangers and rolling up your socks instead of flipping them inside outward because Kondo says they work hard all day and need to rest at night. You’ll start to feel grateful because your environment feels like a partner not a competitor.
6. Life is about living. Whether we’re doing that at home or doing it somewhere else we can be more present when our environments bring us peace, joy, and satisfaction. And remember, it’s not a race. Kondo says it can take almost a year to really go for it. 

The Last Word on Longstreet

When I think back to that girl who lived at Longstreet, I see that there was no time for such frivolous life lessons like tidying. My life was about survival, about getting on a yellow school bus and taking a break from the emotional turmoil and uncertainty of my family life. I’m proud of that girl – she could not be bothered with learning to alphabetize her closet; she was too busy channeling her unconscious despair into acing her spelling test. She deserves a big hug and round of applause. No more critiques for what she did not learn. I actually like her more and more for all of who she is, including her geographic dyslexia, airplane amnesia, Could I Work Here? daydreams, and her reliable sense of wonder. 

That Victoria. She is a good and sturdy little tree. 

And so are you.