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 said, “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 said. “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. I needed to learn ways that I could change my relationship with cleaning, and I learned things that worked for me.”

Ingram kept things under control for a number of years, she said, by developing a cleaning schedule and finding methods to overcome her struggles with procrastination and motivation.

During the pandemic, though, when she was at home with her husband and three kids, tidying started to feel overwhelming again. This time, Ingram shared her struggles on social media.

“It blew up with the first video of me sharing my ADHD-friendly cleaning schedule,” she said. “It went viral overnight and never stopped after that.”

Followers started to send requests for help cleaning their homes, and Ingram tried to connect them with professional cleaners. The first time, she said, it went “swimmingly.” She raised money from followers and paid a crew to clean the home of a single mom of five. But that success proved hard to repeat. When the pros quoted prices in the tens of thousands, or told her they couldn’t help because the homes were too hazardous, she took matters into her own hands.

Now, she spends her weekends and a few evenings a week doing free cleanings. Most of the time she cleans within driving distance of her home in Halifax, but she travels for cleanings, too, often with Scrub Daddy footing the bill for flights and accommodations. Her husband’s flexible job and an “awesome best friend who watches my kids all the time” both allow Ingram to keep taking on free cleanings. Though the messes are sometimes a bit intense and require her to have “an iron stomach,” Ingram said the work is rewarding and impactful.

“A few days of my time changes the entire course of their life,” she said. “They go from having no hope at all, and living like that for years, to a clean slate without that constant stress and overwhelm.”

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 said. “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, 2- to 3-square-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 said. “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 said. “It’s crazy how it happens. You get a little shot of, ‘OK, 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 said.

Schedules are a 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 said. “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.”

Don’t go it alone

It’s common to think about everyday clutter as a shameful thing, Ingram says. People get stressed about cleaning before company arrives and feel a need to apologize for even the most minor messes. None of that is helpful. Instead, Ingram said, people need to recognize that most everyone has some version of the same struggles, and teamwork can help.

“Body doubling” is another common technique used by people with ADHD. Essentially, it means doing potentially frustrating tasks in the company of another person, whose presence can help reduce distraction and procrastination.

“Over the years, especially when I had small children, I had friends that came over and helped me clean, or they’d come over and sit on the couch for hours and talk to me while I did all of my laundry,” Ingram said.

Ultimately, Ingram said, her best advice when it comes to cleaning is to let go of the idea of a perfect, spotless home. While it’s easy to be fooled by things like social media, she said, few people live that way.

“We’ve just become so accustomed to thinking everything has to be perfect and being ashamed and feeling judged if it’s not,” she said. “It’s just not realistic.”