She helps hoarders clean up, and she has thoughts on your mess
Brogan Ingram isn’t a cleaner by trade. But never mind that. Her cleaning videos have landed her 7 million social media followers and lucrative partnerships with major companies such as Scrub Daddy. The 31-year-old from Halifax, Nova Scotia, cleans in extreme environments: bathrooms so dirty they’ve become unusable, insect-infested kitchens full of trash, bedrooms piled to the ceiling because of hoarding. And she does it all free.
Ingram’s popularity on TikTok and Instagram, where she posts as @nottheworstcleaner, stems from her videos discussing the connection between mental health and housekeeping. Research has found that a messy environment can significantly impact our well-being, leaving us stressed out and overwhelmed. Ingram has dealt with this firsthand. She was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, then studied psychology in college, she says, “because I understood my brain wasn’t the same as everybody else’s, and I wanted to learn about it.” She had also struggled to keep her own space tidy while working three jobs to put herself through school.
“My apartment looked like one of the houses that I clean in my videos,” she says. “I had neglected it so bad, and it was to the point where it was affecting me so greatly. If you don’t keep things clean, it affects your mental health. But at the same time, if you’re experiencing poor mental health, it’s very hard to keep your environment clean.
“It’s just a vicious, nonstop cycle,” she adds. “I needed to learn ways that I could change my relationship with cleaning, and I learned things that worked for me.”
But it’s not just hoarders she’s out to help. Wherever you are in your relationship to cleaning, Ingram has tips to get your home — and your mental health — in better shape.
Start small
Cleaning is not something you can do in one quick session, according to Ingram. “Don’t try to clean the whole house at once,” she says. “Don’t even try to clean a whole room at once.” Instead, she recommends choosing one corner or surface in the room.
“It sounds silly, but I say just pick one, like, two- to threesquare-foot space and just clean that,” Ingram adds. Habit formation starts small, and once you can keep a tiny space clean, it will become easier to keep larger areas in the house tidy.
“It’s about not having insurmountable, unrealistic expectations about getting the whole house clean,” she says. “People get stuck because they see a huge task they don’t want to do or don’t feel like they can complete, so they just don’t.”
Stick to a schedule
Having a schedule for cleaning can help reduce the overwhelmed feelings. If you’re just starting out, set a timer for just a few minutes a day.
“You do your five minutes, and all of a sudden you have motivation,” Ingram says. “It’s crazy how it happens. You get a little shot of, ‘Okay, I completed something!’ And you feel like, ‘Well, maybe I can do something else.’ It snowballs.”
Sticking to your schedule also means only cleaning for a set amount of time each day and trying not to overdo it. “If you’re spending hours or a whole day doing something, chances are you’re just adding to the negative relationship with cleaning and subconsciously making yourself dread doing it again,” Ingram says.
Schedules are a very personalized thing. Ingram cleans her home for 30 minutes each day, focusing on a different room. Then, for eight weeks twice a year, she adds a few more intense tasks to her daily schedule for each room — things like scrubbing walls and baseboards or cleaning behind the refrigerator — for a deeper cleaning.
“There’s not one schedule that’s going to be for everybody, because our houses are different, and our energy levels are different,” she says. “I always tell people to just think about your life, write down all the rooms in your home, and then just make little bullet points underneath each room of things that you could do in each one daily or weekly, not to deep clean it, but just keep it tidy.”