Thanks to your comments to the Question of the Day – No. 404, I started to wonder why we tend to feel better while cleaning our surroundings if we have a bad mood. Is it cathartic? If so, why?
Let’s consider the following scenario: you sit around your house feeling neutral (or even good) and all of a sudden something happens and your mood gets down faster than your pants after holding in that sh*t all day long. Then you start to clean your house or you go outside to wash your chickens. The strange part is that these activities make you feel better. Why is this happening? It’s not like you can win an argument by cleaning.
Does it have a metaphorical effect?
The first thing that comes to my mind is that the action of cleaning our surroundings have the same impact mentally. It’s like that dusty table is equal to a dusty thought and the action of cleaning the table is equal to cleaning the thought. If that’s true, I’m on my way to clean the whole neighborhood.
Is it because of the energy being consumed?
Doing chores consumes our energy, right? If we think about the moments when we get angry, what do we physically feel? Besides the desire to hit the source of our anger with a shovel, we feel energized. Doing our chores consumes a part of that energy and the result might be a smoother thought process, without all that energy being transformed into killing scenarios.
It might be because we want to seem the better person?
Think about the times you have an argument with your significant other. If there still is some anger in you after that argument/fight, then you’ll go wash the dishes so you can prove you’re better that that person. Okay, this might not be a conscious thing, but that’s how things might seem to be.
Whatever the explanation might be, at least, we’re doing something to feel better. I honestly don’t remember if doing this fixes the problem or that if it makes me feel better, but from time to time, it surely does the trick.
In your opinion, why doing the chores makes us feel better sometimes?