Puttering around: Why small tasks feel so therapeutic

Especially when you’ve got a lot on, tiny household tasks can be soothing. Why do pleasant distractions feel oddly good?

Tidying your desk, watering your plants or folding laundry – these household chores are hardly the height of hedonism. Yet I often find myself seeking pleasure and comfort in small repetitive tasks.

If I’m waiting for an important telephone call, or stuck in writer’s block with a looming deadline, I’ll inevitably rearrange my record collection or clear up the papers dotted around my office – and it’s sometimes the most relaxed I feel all day.

I’m not alone in this. As we faced the stresses of the pandemic, many people reported finding renewed interest in looking after their homes as a way of coping with the uncertainty. On YouTube, there’s even a huge audience for videos of other people going about their chores, with millions of views for some of the most popular clips.

Psychologists suggest there are many potential mechanisms that might explain the perfect pleasure of puttering – and they may well encourage you to engage in it more often.

Pleasant distractions

At the most superficial level, puttering may be useful because it occupies the mind, so that we devote fewer resources to the things that are worrying us. Even if we struggle with structured forms of meditation, for instance, we may find household tasks can anchor us in the here and now. But that will depend on where we place our focus.

In one of the few studies to examine the mental health benefits of washing the dishes, researchers at Florida State University divided 51 participants into two groups. Half read a text that encouraged them to focus their thoughts to the sensations evoked by the activity. “While washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes,” they were told. The rest read factual instructions on how to do washing up without explicitly encouraging them to focus their awareness on the sensations it produces.

Afterwards, the participants were asked to take a questionnaire about their feelings. Those who had fully engaged with the sensory experience reported a significantly better mood. This included reduced nervousness and even a sense of “inspiration”, as if the immersion in the simple activity had refreshed their minds.

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Perceived control

Unlike other distracting activities – such as playing computer games or watching trashy TV – puttering also has the advantage of being proactive and useful, increasing our “perceived control”.

When we feel anxious, a sense of helplessness can heighten the physiological stress response, increasing levels of hormones such as cortisol. Over the long term, the sense of helplessness can even harm the function of the immune system.

Ideally, we would deal directly with the upsetting situation itself. But research suggests we can gain a perception of control from activities that may have little effect on the situation that’s bothering us.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to align with actual control, as long as we believe, or feel, we have control,” says Stacey Bedwell, a psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London. Simply being able to change our environment can create a feeling of agency that is beneficial, she says – which may explain why cleaning and organising our homes can feel so therapeutic.

Some of the most intriguing evidence comes from studies of older people. Just consider a classic paper by professor Ellen Langer at Harvard University and professor Judith Rodin at Yale University. The study took place at a nursing home, where participants were divided into two groups. The first were allowed to make their room their own: they were allowed to arrange the furniture however they liked, and they were given a plant that they had to care for themselves. The second group, meanwhile, were told that the staff could take care of everything; they did not even have to water their plant. Over the following 18 months, the residents who were encouraged to take responsibility for their room enjoyed better physical health and were less likely to die.

It is possible that these participants were enjoying a tiny bit more exercise than the others. Given the research on the negative effects of helplessness, however, Langer and Rodin argued that the benefit was primarily psychological in origin, coming from their increased sense of control over their lives.

Tidy room, focused mind

The benefits do not end there. If your puttering takes the form of organising and decluttering, you may find that the tidier environment is itself a form of solace.

As the University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross writes in his book Chatter: The Voice in Our Heads and How to Harness It: “We’re embedded in our physical spaces, and different features of these spaces activate psychological forces inside us, which affect how we think and feel.” If we see order outside, it helps us to feel a bit less chaotic inside, he writes. “[It] is comforting because it makes life easier to navigate and more predictable.” 

Bedwell points out that this may be evident in your ability to focus. “If you are sitting at your kitchen table with your laptop surrounded by clutter, that’s a lot of visual stimuli that your brain is continuously having to process while you simultaneously try to concentrate on the task at hand,” she says. “Take away the visual clutter and you can focus much more easily.”

Brain imaging studies support this view. In general, you see much greater brain activity as you increase the number of distracting objects within a scene – with each object vying for our attention. This may lead your brain to tire so that it struggles to maintain its focus over long periods of concentration.

Importantly, you don’t necessarily have to remove the clutter to prevent this from occurring – simply rearranging it will do. Organising objects into groups – by colour, for example – may provide the brain with more obvious cues for navigating the chaos. This reduces some of that neural confusion – and may improve our focus as a result.

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Pleasant associations

By reducing anxiety, soothing stress responses, increasing focus and triggering the release of endorphins, it’s little wonder so many of us take to household chores as soon as we are faced with uncertainty.

Like all activities, the extent of these benefits will be influenced by your personal tastes and the associations that you link with the tasks. We know, for example, that the effects of exercises like running can be moderated by people’s mindsets; those who expect to have a clear mind afterwards are the most likely to return home with a clear head. Tidying, cleaning, sorting and decluttering will be no different.

If you are housework-averse, and will only pick up a duster under duress, the pleasures of puttering may be forever elusive. But for the homebodies among us, we can now understand why our fruitful fidgeting can be such a salve for the restless mind.

David Robson is a science writer and author of The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life, published by Canongate (UK) and Henry Holt (USA) in early 2022. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.