One of my biggest anxiety triggers is cleaning my house. It’s hard to explain, but I’m hoping someone might be able to relate. I am unable to clean just one thing in a room. For example: If I clean the toilet, then I have to clean the shower and counters. If I do that, then I’d have to clean every bathroom in the house immediately after. At that point, I would need to clean the kitchen, and so on. Essentially, I can’t clean without cleaning my whole house in full. 

My anxiety leads me to either spending my entire Saturday cleaning (which is my only free time,) or avoiding cleaning altogether. We had a cleaning service come for a while, and that helped a lot. Having someone clean the whole house at the same time, allowed me to stop spiraling. Unfortunately, we have had to stop that service due to a new financial situation. 

One of the most difficult aspects of this is having to navigate through it with my husband, even though he is very much aware of my anxiety disorder. There have been several times throughout our relationship where he would clean the house to either surprise me or simply help out. Even though I was thankful for his help and hard work, I would immediately panic about how he cleaned some things but not everything. Then I would have to immediately clean the things he “missed.” Today it happened again and I feel incredibly guilty. I appreciated his hard work, but I immediately had an anxiety attack. I tried to explain that I was grateful, and that it was my issue rather than his. He said that it was okay and that he is “used to it by now.” I imagine that he sees it as nothing he could do would be good enough with regards to cleaning. Is there anyone who can relate or share some advice?