Can tidying up your home really tidy up your mind?

Christine Manby explores the latest trend in the wellness world, tidying, and how an orderly home can help soothe a chaotic mind

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Unless you’ve been living under a huge pile of old newspapers, empty fast food cartons and bags of your own waste, you can’t have failed to notice that one of this year’s big wellness trends is all about being clean. Not just in your body but in your home.

Instagram is full of #cleanspo (that’s cleaning inspiration), with a niche neat freak to suit every taste and style. From Japan there’s Marie Kondo, a kawaii manga heroine in neat pastel cardigans, whose Insta feed is minimalist perfection. Kondo’s Netflix show – Tidying Up With Marie Kondo – in which she applied her KonMari method to the homes of some of America’s biggest pack rats, saw charity shop donations in the Washington DC area leap 66% as viewers were inspired to declutter.

Closer to home, there’s Lynsey Crombie, “the queen of clean”, a 40-something mother of three from Peterborough, offers more realistic aspirations for anyone with children and pets. Her Instagram feed, which has 140, 000 followers, is a riot of colour (mostly pink) and offers such gems as “happiness is a freshly cleaned house” and “being an adult is like folding a fitted sheet. No one really knows how”. I suspect Ms Crombie does.