Barriers to a Functional Home and Life

One of the most overlooked areas in the realm of mental health is the home. I don’t mean family dynamics. I mean the actual, physical home. My professional niche, as a therapist turned home organizer, is the subjective realm of domestic chaos.

Mess does not necessarily equal chaos. Chaos happens when your mess exceeds your ability to live inside it. Domestic chaos can be visible: unmanageable clutter, overflowing sinks, or moldy showers. It can also be invisible: unpaid bills, undone paperwork, or difficulty caring consistently for your own body.

As one of my clients described it, “A home this crazy is like unmanageable credit card debt. You just make the minimum payment and pray you’ll die before the full bill comes due.” When life is upended, your dishes, your laundry, and your bills mercilessly persist, piling around you, an oppressive burden.

Barriers to Cleaning, Organizing, and Life Skills

No matter whether your home is immaculate, mildly cluttered, or hazard level—if something is making functioning hard for you, it’s a real barrier. It doesn’t matter why you find a home task difficult. You only have to contend with the fact that you do find it difficult.

Whether your reasons feel valid or silly, your struggle is a fact. Trying to escape the facts or convince yourself that housework shouldn’t be difficult will not make you any better at it. It will only make you more ashamed, less capable, and greatly at risk of driving your loved ones crazy.

Cognitive Barriers

Cleaning and organizing seem simple on the surface, but actually involve a complex network of interconnected brain skills called executive functioning.

You need to be able to plan ahead to manage a cleaning routine. You need to be able to prioritize what to clean first. You need to be able to focus, shift attention, and initiate unpleasant tasks. When these skills are offline, in other words, your brain just ain’t working.

There is a wide range of biopsychological factors that can interrupt these capacities, temporarily or permanently, in childhood or adulthood. Those interrupted capacities are called executive dysfunction. Executive dysfunction is common in those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and mood disorders like depression. But it can also strike when you’re generally unwell: grieving, undernourished, and sleep-deprived.

Emotional Barriers

Emotional disturbance often doesn’t do the polite thing and stay put inside your little brain. It creeps out into your body, overflowing into your physical environment, like a visible scavenger hunt of invisible anguish.

Sadness shows itself in the loss of connection to everyday life—the grim bedroom nest of tangled sheets, unwashed dishes, and overflowing trash.

Anxiety about home care, visible in obsessively cleaned spaces, comes to the sufferer in piercing mental flashes of “What if?”

What if you get salmonella?

What if there’s an unpaid bill in the mail pile?

What if your mean aunt comes to visit unexpectedly and chastises you for doing everything wrong?

Boredom, our old enemy from childhood, rears its head when it’s time to do tedious tasks, which is all the time. Adults try not to acknowledge they’re bored (to set a good example for the children!). But it’s a shoddy performance at best.

We get sucked into preferred tasks (e.g., scrolling) over nonpreferred tasks (e.g., folding the laundry) all the time—proving that difficulty tolerating boredom is rarely left in childhood.

Shame, the conviction that something is inherently wrong with you or your life, causes you to hide your home chaos, from a fear of being humiliated or rejected by others. Housekeeping shame thrives on the belief that people just know how to be adults. And because you don’t just know, you must just be an immature slob at your core.

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This isolation, unfortunately, prevents the flow of any information that would disprove your self-loathing theory. That’s where connection comes in. If you find yourself unable to manage your feelings related to housework, it is probably time to seek additional support.

Sensory Barriers

The squish of the burned rice soaking in a pot in a sink. The nose-stinging smell of disinfectant. The rumble of the dryer.

For people with sensory issues, the smells, sensations, and sounds of cleaning can cause distress, bordering on pain. They have a heightened awareness of texture, sound, temperature, light, and smell.

Unmanageable sensory issues are most commonly seen in people with developmental disorders such as autism. But most adults have at least one sensory quirk—a sensation that they can’t stand, either because it’s associated with a bad experience or just because it’s yucky. And fear of feeling that sensation can cause chore avoidance.

Physical Barriers

Physical disability simply means “I can’t do that because my body won’t let me.”

Home care can be very physically demanding—even something as simple as cleaning up a spill. You have to be able to see the spill, locomote your body to it, then contort your limbs to clean it up. An able-bodied person can do that without any interruptions or protests from their body.

But what if you can’t see very well? Or you can’t stand for long? What if your back spasms every time you bend down, or your hands don’t have the dexterity to hold a rag? For people with physical disabilities, cleaning tasks can be (on the mild side) a great frustration and (on the severe side) an agony.

Managing Your Barriers

There is always a barrier—a colicky baby, a broken ankle, an incontinent cat—that caused the home to fall apart. And once you understand that barrier, compassion is the natural consequence, and also hope, because if you can understand a problem, you have a shot at fixing it.

Identify your barriers to functional living. Take them seriously. Then, get curious about what can be done to manage them so you can live a more functional life.