Originally wrote this on my personal space - underthewraps. This blog is the 9th in the series of 10 blogs on Why I Refuse to Westernise My Indian Home in Canada.
My 20s, before adulting hit me with its weird habits, were all about going out to eat and fixing my otherwise cranky mood. Then I moved to a rented apartment and built a space for myself. My new mood fixers were- a clean apartment, deep-cleaned windows, a dust-free house and a home smelling like a garden, at all times. Fast forward to my life in Canada- my earlier days were spent adapting and living as Canadians do. Close windows and the balcony at all times because the AC and heat are running in the summer and winter, respectively.
Here is how I used to reason myself for not cleaning every day: it is cold outside, the apartment looks fine, I am busy, I will do a proper clean on the weekend, and anyway, the weekend came and went, and so did my good intentions.
And then I started feeling… heavy. Not sad, not sick exactly, just a kind of low-grade blah that I blamed on everything except the most obvious suspect. It took me embarrassingly long to connect the feeling to the air I was living inside of, 24-hours a day.
The Indoor Air Problem Nobody Warned You About
Did you know that the air inside your home is, on average, two to five times more polluted than the air outside it?
This is not a fringe wellness claim! It is something environmental researchers have been pointing out for decades, and yet it lands with zero urgency in most people's daily lives.
What is in that indoor air? A genuinely uninviting cocktail of dust mites, volatile organic compounds off-gassing from furniture and paint, cooking residue, pet and human dander, mould spores if you live somewhere with humidity, and the accumulated exhalations of everyone who has ever breathed in your space.
The problem is compounded in urban apartments, especially in climates like Toronto's, where windows stay shut from November through April because opening them means inviting in what feels like a small, hostile arctic expedition. The apartment becomes, without anyone intending it, a sealed box. And in a sealed box, everything circulates. The same air, the same particles, the same stale energy going around and around while you sit in the middle of it, wondering why you feel tired at 2 pm on a Wednesday.
Why I Want You To Open Up The Window?
Yes! Even in winter, maybe, just for an hour or two.
My Indian home never goes a day without cleaning. It could definitely survive a day or two if I don’t clean it. But still, we clean up every day. And our windows and doors that could be opened, stay open from morning till evening. The cross-breeze happens.
I never understood the need and urgency of this. It was just there, a part of routine. Till I realised what happens when you don’t do it. It was not cleaning for the sake of appearance. It was the maintenance of air. It was a deliberate refresh of the environment, a small, daily act that kept the space from going stagnant.
The sweeping and mopping, the opening of windows at dawn, none of it was incidental. All of it was intentional. A clean, aired space does not just look different. It feels different in a way that is harder to dismiss once you have experienced both states back to back.
I Know It Is Tough To Manage A Clean Household With A Full-Time Job
I have one too!
A full morning cleaning routine with five dedicated steps is not the answer I am offering you. If it were, I would not have taken it either.
What actually changed things for me was much more modest. Two things, specifically.
1. The five-minute swipe.
Not clean. A swipe. Every morning, or most mornings, because I am human, I do one quick pass of the kitchen counter and the bathroom sink. That is it. This takes less time than waiting for my coffee to brew. What it does is prevent the quiet accumulation of grime that eventually becomes The Weekend Project. The psychology of a surface that is almost dirty is that it tips into fully dirty very quickly and then feels overwhelming. The swipe breaks that cycle before it starts. I have started thinking of it less as cleaning and more as maintenance, the way you lock the door when you leave, a small action that prevents a much larger problem.
2. The Window
I cannot overstate what a difference this made. Not asking you to buy an air purifier or a particular cleaning product. Just open the window.
Every morning, for at least an hour, minimum. In Toronto winter, yes, even then, with a sweater on and a coffee in hand. The cold air moves through the apartment and takes things with it: the cooking smell from the night before, the carbon dioxide that has been building up overnight, the humidity from sleep. The space resets. The air changes. I stopped feeling like I was living inside a slightly tired version of yesterday.
The Indian instinct to open everything in the morning was not about tradition for tradition's sake. It was about the absolute necessity of air exchange in an enclosed space. The science backs it up completely- ventilation is the single most effective way to improve indoor air quality, and it is also the most consistently ignored one because it requires remembering to do something that costs nothing.
What Changes?
About three weeks after I started doing this consistently, I noticed I had stopped feeling the mid-afternoon slump with the same regularity. My apartment stopped having that particular closed-in smell that I had apparently normalised completely. I started sleeping better, which I initially attributed to other things before realising the most significant change in my environment had been the windows.
So now, when the summers are here, open that window. Run a cloth over the counter. Do it tomorrow too. See what happens in three weeks.
Worst case, your apartment is cleaner. Best case, you stop feeling like you are operating at seventy per cent capacity inside a sealed box.
Either way, it costs you about the same as doing nothing.