Your House Is in Your Head

Your House Is Nagging You

The cabinet door that doesn't quite close. The loose railing. The drywall patch you've been meaning to finish. The garage that started with a few boxes and has now reached the point where the car lives outside.

None of these things is ruining your life, but we all know the feeling of those nagging tasks accumulating—not just around the house, but somewhere in the back of your head.

As it turns out, psychologists have spent a surprising amount of time studying this. There is some legitimate research suggesting that unfinished tasks and clutter don't simply occupy physical space. They can occupy attention, remain mentally active, affect how people experience their homes, and—in at least one particularly interesting study—correlate with measurable patterns of stress.

Your house, apparently, really can get in your head.

Your Brain Keeps a To-Do List, Too

Psychologists E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister examined what happens when people have goals they haven't completed.

Across several experiments, they found that unfulfilled goals remained mentally active. Participants experienced intrusive thoughts about unfinished goals while performing an unrelated reading task. Goal-related information remained more mentally accessible, and in another experiment unfinished goals interfered with performance on an unrelated task.

This is related to a much older idea in psychology generally known as the Zeigarnik effect: unfinished activities have a tendency to remain mentally accessible.

The interesting part is that the researchers didn't stop there. They also asked participants to make specific plans for completing their unfinished goals.

Once people had formed sufficiently concrete plans, the cognitive interference associated with those goals largely disappeared—even though the goals themselves had not yet been completed.

Apparently your brain doesn't necessarily demand that you fix the thing immediately. It may, however, appreciate knowing that you have a plan.

For homeowners, that could help explain the familiar experience of feeling considerably better after finally making a list, scheduling a project, ordering the materials, or setting aside a Saturday to deal with everything that's been hanging around. Of course, actually finishing it works too.

Researchers Actually Went Into People's Homes

One of the more interesting studies on this subject came from UCLA psychologists Darby Saxbe and Rena Repetti.

Instead of bringing people into a laboratory and showing them photographs of messy rooms, the researchers studied 60 dual-income couples in their own homes.

Participants gave self-guided tours of their houses while describing them, and the researchers analyzed the language they used.

Two categories tended to appear together: words associated with clutter and words describing the home as unfinished. The researchers combined these into a measure they called a "stressful home."

That's a wonderfully academic term for we really need to do something about this place.

Then They Measured Cortisol

The researchers also collected saliva samples over three weekdays to measure cortisol, a hormone involved in the body's stress response.

Among the wives in the study, higher stressful-home scores were associated with flatter daily cortisol patterns, and women who described their homes using more stressful-home language also showed worsening mood over the course of the day. Women whose descriptions reflected a more restorative home, meanwhile, showed a different cortisol pattern.

There are some important limits here. The study was relatively small. The cortisol relationship appeared in women but not husbands. And because the research was correlational, it cannot establish that clutter or unfinished projects caused the differences in cortisol.

Maybe a stressful house contributes to stress. Maybe stressed people experience their houses differently. Maybe both are happening. Science can be annoyingly responsible like that.

But the association is still interesting because the researchers weren't simply asking people whether clutter bothered them. They compared people's descriptions of their actual homes with a physiological measure collected over several days.

So there is at least some scientific support for the suspicion that looking around your house and thinking I really need to deal with all this is more than a figure of speech.

Clutter Has Another Problem: You Have to Look at It

There is also a separate body of neuroscience research on visual competition.

Our visual system doesn't process every object in front of us independently with unlimited capacity. Objects within the visual field can compete for neural representation, and attention helps determine which information receives priority.

Research by neuroscientists Sabine Kastner and Stephanie McMains has examined these competitive interactions in the human visual cortex.

That doesn't mean a stack of Amazon boxes is neurologically destroying you. But it does provide some biological context for why visually busy environments require the brain to select among competing information.

A clean workbench presents one visual environment. A workbench containing a drill, three paint cans, last year's Christmas lights, two pieces of trim you might need someday, an extension cord, four Amazon boxes, and something you no longer recognize presents another.

Your visual system can handle both. One of them just isn't helping.

When Home Stops Feeling Like Home

In 2016, Catherine Roster, Joseph Ferrari, and M. Peter Jurkat examined clutter from another angle in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.

They studied something researchers call psychological home: the sense of identity, belonging, security, and personal connection people derive from the place they consider home.

The researchers found that possession clutter had a significant negative relationship with psychological home and with perceived well-being.

In other words, clutter wasn't simply associated with people thinking their houses looked worse. It was associated with how they experienced the idea of home itself.

That might be the most interesting part of all this research. A home isn't just another physical environment. It's where you're supposed to be able to stop working.

If walking into the garage reminds you to organize the garage, walking through the hallway reminds you about the trim, opening the closet reminds you about the shelving, and going outside reminds you that the gate still doesn't latch, your house has found a remarkably efficient way to assign homework.

The Surprisingly Useful Power of a Plan

The Masicampo and Baumeister research provides one particularly practical takeaway: you don't necessarily have to finish every outstanding project today to get it out of your head.

Making a specific plan may itself help.

That's considerably more realistic than the usual advice to simply "get organized." Walk through the house. Write down what actually bothers you. Separate the projects you can knock out quickly from the ones that require more time, money, tools, or expertise. Decide which ones matter. Put the important ones on the calendar.

That last one has not, to our knowledge, been subjected to a randomized controlled trial. We're comfortable with it anyway.

No, Fixing Your Fence Isn't Therapy

There is an easy way to take research like this too far.

A repaired cabinet isn't a treatment for anxiety. An organized garage isn't a medical intervention. And having unfinished projects around your house doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means you have a house.

Houses are extraordinarily good at producing things to do.

The research is more interesting when it's kept in proportion. Unfinished goals can remain mentally active and interfere with unrelated tasks. Specific planning can reduce that interference. Clutter and perceptions of an unfinished home have been associated with mood and patterns of cortisol. Possession clutter has also been associated with a weaker sense of psychological home and lower perceived well-being.

None of those findings says you need a perfect house. They suggest something much more believable: there may be a real psychological benefit to closing a few loops.

Get 'Er Done

Most home projects aren't particularly profound. The door needs to close. The railing needs to stop moving. The shelves need to go up. The boxes need somewhere to live.

The hole in the drywall needs to stop being "temporary" after 19 months. And the garage was, at least according to the original architectural drawings, intended to contain a vehicle.

The satisfying part of getting those things done isn't necessarily the repair itself. It's that afterward, you walk past them and nothing happens.

No reminder. No mental note. No I really need to get around to that.

Just a door that closes.

Which, according to the research, may be worth more than it sounds.

And if the list includes a few things that require more expertise, more tools, more time, or simply more effort than you're interested in contributing to the cause, that's where BigBoy comes in.

We'll make them our problem. You can have your Saturday back.