 Did I ever tell you the story of the spider thread? It's a story that's going to make you stop and say, wait a second, I might have my own spider thread. I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question and I get to help you find an answer. Now over the last couple of years, we've been helping people through the pandemic go through all their closets and their cupboards and pull out all the stuff that they have in their storage units and get rid of the clutter in their lives. We have a group called Hoarding World. Come over and join us. You do not have to be a hoarder, but it is an opportunity for you to change your relationship with stuff. All right, so today I want to tell you about the spider thread. It started out about 20 years ago and I had a light colored carpet and as I was walking through the room, my heart jumped when I saw a spider that was smashed in the carpet. Now I don't like spiders, I'm terrified of spiders. There it was on the floor as big as day and it literally sent through my body a sense of fear. It was a physical reaction to seeing a spider on my floor. The second thought, and it wasn't as conscious as it was just when I realized I have to get rid of it. So the first feeling was, I'm afraid there's a spider on my floor. The second thought is I need to get rid of it. And then when I started looking at it, there was a sense of despair, like oh no, it looks like someone has mashed it into the carpet. And then as I looked at it and I got closer trying to decide how I was going to pick it up and get rid of it, lo and behold I discovered it was only a thread. It was a thread that had come out of a pair of pants or a blanket or something and it wasn't a spider at all. And so at the same time that I was feeling the sense of fear and then angst and then worry, like how am I going to get rid of this, I had this feeling of relief. So my body went through a physical state of several behaviors while my mind was trying to process what it was I was seeing. All right, then I went from that to a sense of guilt for this reason. Part of me says, well I should pick it up and get rid of it. And then another part of me said, I'm in a hurry, I'll do it later. And I walked by the spider thread. Okay, what happened when I came through the room the next time? I saw it again and again without even thinking about it and without remembering I had seen it before. My mind jumped to the exact same process of fear and angst and then worry. And then, oh yes, really, relief, it's just a thread. And then that sense of guilt one more time, I should pick it up. And then I started laughing at myself, which is almost a comical relief, like haha, I can't believe I left it there and then I had to go through this process all over again. Now again I'm in a hurry so I walk by and I leave it there. As I left it there and I'm walking away I had another thought. I wonder if I leave the spider thread in that spot. How many times my body has that same reaction? How long does this process of going through several emotions over a simple spider thread last? So I left it there. And every time I walked through the room I went through those same feelings and those same emotions and although they got faster and faster and faster I still had to go through that at an unconscious and a conscious level. Okay, but I continued to leave the spider thread on the floor. All right, one day I noticed as I was walking through the room that I no longer noticed the spider thread. There it was still sitting there in the carpet. But what had happened is my mind started sending a new set of signals to my body in response to the spider thread. It still had all those same initial reactions. The fear, the angst, the worry, the guilt of not removing it, the wonder of how long do I leave it, does this series of feelings run through my body. And then all of a sudden there I was realizing a new sense of behaviors which is like let's ignore all of those feelings and emotions we just experienced because of the spider thread. So now my body had added to it another element. The reason I tell you this is not to say, oh, how lousy it is that I did not pick a thread up off my floor. But to say that at an unconscious level everything that is inside our homes that is not where it is supposed to be unconsciously goes through a series of those behaviors and unconscious processing in our minds. So we might come into a room that's super cluttered. We got a box from Amazon and it's still sitting there after months. In the beginning we probably had feelings of like, oh, I should take this and go put it in the other room. Oh, I should open it up and I should see if what's inside fits me so that if it doesn't I can return it. Oh yes, that's too much hassle. I'll do that in a little bit and we never got around to it. There may be boxes that are sitting there that you haven't even opened yet and now your mind doesn't even see them because it's added that extra element of this item is not as important as I initially thought it was. Here's where it gets interesting. When your mind goes to that end result of it's not as important to ignore it what happens is now we're starting to mute or mask those feelings which are set up originally. Originally it was fight or flight like, ah, there's a spider, right? I don't want it to bite me therefore I should get rid of it, right? So that was a message my brain was sending to my body saying, hey, be afraid you might be in danger. And so the more we ignore those feelings what happens is they start piling up without us even paying attention. The point where it is easy to get overwhelmed and anxious and feeling depressed and sad and sorry and a whole bunch of other weird feelings that come from us just living in a house with a bunch of stuff, right? There are things that are there that we may not be paying attention to. For example, it could be the mail and you come in from outside and you brought in a stack of mail instead of putting it away you put it on the counter and you go through a whole weird series of events where your mind says, oh, you should open that it's probably a bill. You probably owe someone money. Oh yes, I owe someone money, I also owe these other people money. Oh, I just can't deal with this right now I'll deal with it later, right? But every single time you walk by that kitchen counter and the mail is there, your brain is processing that at a very quick level and to the point where it starts blocking it out. I don't even see the mail anymore and it stops sending us those messages but it just builds up as like this internal angst and we don't know why. So my suggestion is can we in those early feelings when something triggers like, there's a spider. There's a spider thread on my floor. Can we stop and pick it up right then at that time so that we don't have to keep retraining our mind all these different things that have to go through to process every time we walk through the room. It's just a spider thread. It's not a real spider, it's just a thread, right? And then masking that so we don't even see it anymore. So whether it's the mail, whether it's stuff inside your house, whether it's boxes that you haven't put away or processed, let's start taking a different look at what are the spider threads inside our home and what is it causing us at an unconscious level as far as angst and fear and worry and stress that we didn't even know was being caused by these weird little metaphorical spider threads in our lives. Okay, if you have questions or comments, those go in the notes below. Come join us over at Forting World. We have space for you and until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.