Cleaning your room can benefit your life. It sounds so simple, it even sounds stupid. Why clean your room? It’s not like it’s for anyone else to see. You might think, “This is my room! So I can be as messy as I want.” But I believe it’s not the final state of having a clean room that is beneficial, more so, it’s the act of doing the cleaning yourself that can make a profound difference in your life.

When you clean your room with your own two hands and feet, as meaningless as it might feel, you are practicing your ability to restore order in the tangible world, your world. You are proving to yourself, with every dirty sock that you pick up, every dust bunny that you wipe away, and every piece of garbage that you toss, that things can get out of wack in your life, but you still have it in you to rise up and deal with the matter at hand. 

You might think that cleaning your room is the least of your worries, but the practice of restoring order, and being functional in an imperfect world, can trickle down into other aspects of your life. For example, after cleaning your living space, you may finally feel the motivation to get your finances in order. With a clean room, you might find you have also cleansed your mind and rid yourself of old habits that no longer serve you. You may finally have the energy to strengthen your relationships with your family and friends, maybe even your relationship with yourself.

As you practice tending to your own room, you create a space that you do not just live in, but one that is deserving of your being and who you are to become. You train yourself to become the type of person who can then face bigger, larger, sometimes even, horrific things that may happen in your life. A death in the family. A fatal illness. A financial crisis. I’m being a little extreme here, but only as a way to prove the point.

The world can be so chaotic. Life events can be so random. So many events that happen in life can be so unexplainable and unfair. But if you can clean up your room. If you can practice becoming the person that can rise up despite the chaos in your life on a daily basis, then at the very least you can still make things bearable, and at the very best, you can have the life you’ve always dreamt of living. Who knows, you might even get to a point where you can help others by telling them to do something as meaningless as cleaning up their room.

Change your life by cleaning your room.

And yes, this post was inspired by Jordan Peterson, but also by Marie Kondo, the OG.

by Jason Lam