Allow me, a moderately cluttered person whose Christmas tree may still be up by next Festivus, to espouse the benefits of a reset.

A reset is not a deep clean, not an all-day parade of squeegees. It simply means taking an hour-ish for basic tidying, dishes, laundry, fluffing. It means pulling the home back from the brink of "SEC frat house basement" just in time for Monday to dawn with her vulgar responsibilities.

In 2025, I began to incorporate a Sunday reset into my week. I was influenced by glossy internet videos that are most assuredly lies. If one's reset involves being filmed from desirable angles or recycling a stack of New Yorkers while dusting saffron threads from gleaming quartz countertops, I just know you are hosing us. Please, where is the empty box of Oreos someone put back in the pantry? Where is the mysterious tile stain that could be either raspberry iced tea or blood?

Yet I couldn't help but be tempted to try. As I got in the habit of resetting the house, I realized the act signaled more than rote hygiene. It was a prescribed burn for the mind, a flare-up of potential, however short-lived.

A reset means replacing two-week-old enchiladas with aspirational mixed greens that will liquify in days. It means turning mug handles in the direction of career abundance. Crucially, a reset must end with the ceremonial lighting of a candle and a self-satisfied collapse onto the couch, freshly spritzed with mist that masks the aroma of canine and/or failure.

"Just clean a little every day," you are saying. "Then you'll never have anything to reset." No, but thank you. This will never happen, the same way I will never walk 10,000 steps a day outside when the weather reverts from record lows back into armpit territory. Self-improvement is not about becoming an entirely new person but rather shaving off the lumpier chunks from our personal soap sculptures.

To that end, I've been thinking: What if more of us took this approach in the new year? What if us Type B functional messes who get overwhelmed by piles of socks decline to make sweeping declarations? What if the reset method is the key to avoiding depression next December when we have inevitably not made the Olympic marathon team?

What if we adjusted our expectations week by week, month by month, moment by moment?

Rather than beating ourselves up over not yet completing the great American novel, we can say: This week offers an exciting chance to write one page.

Rather than complaining about the 1980s home blights that sit perpetually unrenovated, we can say: Have you placed a single phone call to anyone who knows how to use a saw?

Rather than reading yet another news story about the rise of certain cancers and spiraling out because death is surely nigh as we pass out clutching a phone alit with Reddit message boards, we can choose a different path. We can sweep up the crumbs of the week, light the ceremonial candle, take the last Oreo out of the box, absent-mindedly slide the empty container back into the cupboard with the cookie between our teeth and say: The colonoscopy hotline number is in the glove compartment, dummy. You got this.

Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephrhayes on Instagram.

Photo credit: Nellie Adamyan at Unsplash