A new study in the journal of Current Biology establishes a link between temporary anxiety and -- wait for it -- obsessive cleaning. It turns out that being in an anxious state may in fact make people tidy up.  Researchers primed a group of college students into freaking out over a public speaking task. They were presented with a shiny statue and asked to prepare a speech about it in front of a panel of experts. Following the speech, they were told to clean the object. (In addition, there was a control group comprised of students who were not required to give a speech.) Those who had to give the anxiety-inducing speech were more repetitive in how they cleaned. The amount of anxiety the students reported feeling over the task predicted how many repeated movements they made while cleaning, as well as how long they cleaned the object before they deemed it reasonably clean. In times of stress, people might turn to repetitive behavior like cleaning because it gives the...

There's a well-known adage that variety is the spice of life. This is far from a tired cliché; it's the truth. The only way to ensure that our lives don't get stuck in a repetitive rut is to keep them fresh and exciting. We do this by infusing them with new experiences. That can be anything from traveling the world to taking a different route to and from work each day. We are creatures of habit who tend to get stuck in our comfort zone, conditioning us to live each day in "rinse and repeat" fashion. While a little routine is to be expected, we shouldn't feel as if each day is a rehash of the prior one. If, at the end of the week, you can't remember a single thing that distinguished one day of that week from the other -- if the entire week seems like a big blur -- that's a telltale sign you may need to spruce things up a bit. And no one says injecting some spontaneity into your life has to be expensive. The key is to do a few little things ...