Alice.com Blog – Unique Finds & Practical Advice for your Life & Home

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Wisebread recently posted a great guide to how to reduce your allergies by cleaning… not the simplest of solutions and it’s certainly not always the most fun to spend a morning cleaning. But if it’ll help reduce the rampant sneezing and itchy eyes, it’s probably worth it, right?

Here are our favorite tips from their room-by-room cleaning plan to control allergies:

- Besides cleaning regularly, the author suggests that you wear a mask to protect yourself during the scrub-down.

- Keep your home free of clutter.

- Wash your sheets each week in hot water.

- Service your air and heating ducts and change filters as recommended by the manufacturer.

- Vacuum your mattress and box spring every six months. Use an anti-allergen mattress cover to prevent allergens and make for easier cleaning and maintenance.

- Wash bath mats and towels often. Do not let wet towels lay around.

- Remove carpeting and select hardwood or linoleum flooring.

- Invest in a bag-less vacuum cleaner developed to combat allergens.

- Dust the furniture and vacuum the floor weekly.

- If you have a fireplace, keep it clean and store wood outside to prevent mold.

How do you combat and control allergies?

“For years, both in popular imagination and in scientific circles, it has been a given that exercise enhances mood,” the New York Times reports. And for years, cleaning my home has been the best exercise I’ve been able to fit in every week. I’ve found that not only does it get me up and moving, but I’m much more relaxed and de-stressed afterwords. No doubt due,  not only to the exercise portion of cleaning, but also to the de-cluttering and organizing bit as well.

Scientists are closer to beginning to see how this actually does affect the brain, specifically “how exercise remodels the brain, making it more resistant to stress,” the Times reports. “Anxiety in rodents and people has been linked with excessive oxidative stress, which can lead to cell death, including in the brain. Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress.”

The positive stress of exercise “prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

Just another reason to make sure everything is in it’s place… including those running shoes which belong on your feet, not the back of the closet. Let the exercise begin!

Do you feel de-stressed after exercising? What about cleaning? Do you feel the same affects or does a good run outweigh the benefits of a clean house?  How do you keep stressful situations to a minimum during this busy time?

Now here’s some good news for couples everywhere. According to the Wall Street Journal, a study of nearly 7,000 husbands and wives found that couples who vacuum together spend more time in the bedroom together.

“The study is actually just the latest of several on the link between scrubbing and shagging, but it’s the first to find that wives really, really dig it when their husbands help mop the floors, take out the garbage, pay the bills, iron laundry or drive the kids around town,” Reveries reports.

While some spouses were surprised by the results, other spouses said the results make sense: “Housework can be a proxy for one’s commitment to shared marital endeavors, several said. Also, the rewards of housework – a clean, calm home that is running smoothly – feed a sense of well-being and can help you enjoy your partner more. But this is true only to a point: When housework takes over the evening, even the most dedicated spouses risk letting their relationships slide, these spouses say,” the WSJ reports.

What do you think of this work hard, play hard theory? Does doing the housework together show that you’re functioning well in other areas?