Are You a Clean Freak? It Might Be Ataxaphobia

Hi. Have any of you seen the new Sparking Joy series by Marie Kondo? And the second question that I have is anybody else like me? And when they see these shows, it's like, addictive. But the more you watch it, the more anxious and stressed out it makes you. I'm going to talk with you today about a really undiscussed cause of anxiety that may be getting worse as a result of watching these amazing HGTV fixer upper shows. And I actually just got published in Salon about this topic, and so I'll be sure to include the link about that. And so the article is about something called ataxophobia, and that's a T, A X, O P, H O, B I, A. And so ataxophobia is where somebody has extreme amounts of anxiety and maybe even panic when they're in the presence of a mess or in disorder. And so I've had patients who've come to me and they're like, when I have a panic attack, I can't hold still. And I look around my house and I see every single mess, I see every dirty spot. And it makes me more and more panicky. And I end up having to clean the house. Or when I get really angry, I just have to go and wash the dishes. Or sometimes we can feel incredibly anxious and stressed out, but we don't have the motivation or the ability to do anything about it. It just spirals us worse and worse out of control. And so what a taxaphobia is, is it's a phobia where somebody had a negative experience that was really stressful or scary or traumatic or overwhelming to the nervous system that was paired with a disordered or messy environment. And it doesn't have to be that you grew up in a household of hoarders. It doesn't have to be that there was abject chaos. It could be a small amount of disorder. But for the person, for the ataxophobic, there's a pairing of the two stimuli. The feelings of being afraid or out of control, which could be due to other circumstances paired with being in a messy environment. And so ataxophobics will oftentimes turn to shows like Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo or Hoarders or any other HGTV home renovation show. And what's really interesting is that we crave that partly because we have mirror neurons in our brains. Mirror neurons in your brains are interesting because what they do is when you look at something, your brain will actually believe that it's happening to you or you'll feel that way. For example, somebody who has a mirror neuron disease, they may look at a light post, and the light post is nice and tall and narrow, and then they see that their body posture will change, so it's nice and long and narrow, and they actually can feel like they're a lamp post in mirror neuron disease. And so, in a normal example, a more common example is you may look at somebody and they're sad, and you may feel empathy. You may feel sad. Your mirror neurons do that. And so similarly, when you watch these home improvement shows, you. Your brain actually feels like your home is undergoing the transformation, and then you get dopamine and you feel better. But what actually happens is that can backfire. And it backfires in a couple of ways. One is because once the show is over, we get a dopamine crash, and so we lose that feel good neurotransmitter. And the second thing is that it creates unrealistic expectations of what is accomplishable in what amount of time and in what budget. And so what I noticed in my experience is I grew up in a house that wasn't very tidy. It was a very stressful house. And when I moved out and I became my own autonomous adult, I started to become more and more fastidious, and messes made me anxious. If there were dishes left in the sink, it would stress me out. If there was dog hair on the floor, it would gross me out. It would create a lot of stress. And the more anxious I got, the more I noticed messes. And so I would turn to these shows and get all inspired and excited while watching the show. But then I'd also find myself looking around and being like, oh, my gosh, like, look at this beautiful minimalist house. And then I have this over here and that over there, and it would just create this comparison trap. So I turn the show off, I get on Pinterest, I'd start coming up with ideas for organization. And then it wasn't something that I was able to achieve in the same way as perhaps Marie Kondo did, or maybe even McGee. Right? And then I would feel more depressed and more anxious. And so if you resonate with this, you might be struggling with ataxophobia. And there's a couple things that we need to do, and one is we have to get to the root cause of why you developed ataxophobia. We have to get to the root cause of that pairing of a stressful event or overwhelmed feelings or trauma or anxiety or whatever those feelings are. And the pairing with the environment. So we have two variables that need to be addressed because just watching HGTV is a band aid and ultimately you're going to feel more stressed and worse in the end. But instead if we go underneath and try to identify why you feel, feel that way and do the inner work, it can help make a huge difference. And really interestingly, there's this study that was published in Harvard Business and it said that approximately 25% of divorces were due to discrepancy in household chores. So not only can ataxophobia create stress in you, but it could also create stress in your relationships. And that's part of my story. And what actually opened my eyes to needing to do the work on this specific issue is I'm married to Paul and Paul grew up in a motel and so he was constantly helping clean the motel, making beds, vacuuming floors, wiping down surfaces, all of the things, right? And so when he went to school and he became an adult, got a job, he promised himself, he said, I'm never going to make a bed as long as I live. And I could live with that. But he was an artist and he's also a little bit add, right? And so there's post it notes everywhere, there's dishes on countertops and just differing arrays of cleanliness. Maybe some are washed and being dried, others haven't been touched in a month and they have new biohazards on them, whatever, right? And so I told Paul, I'm like, okay, no more dirty dishes all over the place. That's where I draw the line. Get rid of the post it notes that are covering your walls and I can make the bed, don't worry about that. That's not a non negotiable. And so then we're engaged, he's coming back from a trip, he had been out of town for a week. And so I go to his townhouse to greet him upon his return. And I get there first and I walk in the door and I look into the kitchen and there are dirty dishes soaking in stagnant water and they've been there for a week. And I had panic. I had this like well of panic, this well of anger and this panic and rage mixed together all exploded all over Paul when he got home. And I felt like he was disgusting and I felt like he was negligent and I felt like he didn't have any cleanliness standards. And I felt like I was being pulled back into this situation from childhood that I'd worked so hard to Escape. And so I had a fit. And with, like, tears and screaming, I drove away. And Paul's in my rearview mirror, and he's like, what just happened? And then, of course, he goes and does his dishes and gets rid of the biohazard he'd created in the sink. And so I knew I had to do the inner work because we'd hit kind of this fork in the road of I can't live like this, and he doesn't deserve to have me melting down on him, and he really needs to get his act together. And so we both did the work. And so those two things, part of taxophobia, part of the work is to work on the trauma that's underneath of it, that's creating the panic, anxiety, powerless, all of those feelings underneath of it. And then to work on the pairing of the messy environment. So I did a lot of inner work. And the way that I did the inner work is I went beyond cognitive behavioral therapy. I went beyond CBT and dbt. I went beyond the logic, and we went deeper. I did EMDR and ego state work, which is a therapeutic process. It's one of the number one forms of therapy for traumas and phobias. And so I did that work. And then Paul and I also went to marriage counseling. And together, those helped me to realize why I felt the way I felt. I cleared a lot of that trauma. And it also helped me have radical empathy for Paul that he was busy and distracted and not a disgusting, slovenly person who didn't care. So I was able to release that. And in the marriage therapy, Paul realized why it was so important for me for him to give special attention to tidying up and doing the dishes. Right. And so we had greater empathy for each other. He was a little bit more tidy in that way. I was a little bit more forgiving in certain ways. And I was able to actually leave dishes and in the sink before going to bed. And so those therapy types that I talked about, the inner work is emdr, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy. Insurance covers it. And the second is ego state, which is out of EMDR internal family systems, ego state work. And I really like that, because EMDR can take you so far as a linguistic bridge will allow. So EMDR will take you places where you can talk about it. And then sometimes it could be harder to do work that may be just without language. Like, have you ever felt a certain way and you just can't explain it? There's no words ego state really shines in those parts of our experience. And so those are the types of therapy that I did that were really helpful for me. And then again, doing the work with Paul because it wasn't all me and it wasn't all him. So today we've been talking about ataxophobia, which is a fascinating way that we may experience stress or anxiety that's paired with a messy environment. We talked about how maybe dialing back on the tidying up shows might be helpful. I have this article just got featured. It was a cover story in Salon.