Strip it back and it's very simple: spiritual hygiene is the practice of maintaining your inner world the way you maintain your outer one.
Nobody finds the outer version strange. You wash, you tidy, you put the bins out. None of it is interesting and all of it is the reason the house is liveable. The inner version is the same idea applied to the part of you that nobody can see, and the only reason it sounds exotic is that nobody taught it to us.
The inner world accumulates. Other people's energy, their urgency, their anxiety, their unspoken things, lands on you throughout the day. If you don't clear it, it stays. This is not metaphor. If you've ever walked into a room and felt the weight of it before anyone said a word, you already know this.
And it is worth being specific about what accumulating looks like, because it rarely announces itself. You come off a call and you are suddenly irritable with somebody who was not on the call. You get in from a day of being capable and you cannot speak for 20 minutes. You read 1 message before bed and lie there composing a reply you will never send.
None of that is your own material. It arrived in the course of the day, the way dust does, and it is being carried because nothing put it down.
The sceptic's version of all this is entirely available, by the way, and loses nothing. You do not have to believe anything is being transferred between people. You only have to notice that your state at 6 in the evening is not the state you woke up in, and that nothing in your day was designed to reset it.
What spiritual hygiene looks like depends entirely on you. For some women it's a morning ritual. For others it's the Palo Santo they light before a difficult conversation. For others it's the crystal they pick up when they notice they've drifted.
What tends not to work is the elaborate version. A 45 minute morning sequence is wonderful on the 4 days you manage it, and it quietly becomes 1 more thing you are failing at. The practices that last are the ones small enough to survive a bad week.
It also helps to know that the useful moments are not evenly spread through the day. There are 3 that matter more than the rest.
The threshold, first. The moment you come in through your own front door. Almost everybody walks straight from one world into the other with nothing in between, which is how the day gets carried into the kitchen. 2 minutes in the hall before you say anything to anybody is the highest value thing on this list.
Then immediately after something difficult. A conversation that went badly, a meeting that took more than it should, 10 minutes with somebody who is frightened. That is the moment the thing attaches, and it is also the easiest moment to interrupt.
And then before something that matters, which is the one most people get right by instinct. You already do a version of this. The deep breath outside the room. That is the practice, performed without the vocabulary.
As for what to actually do in those moments, the options are duller than the subject suggests. Washing your hands and your face. Changing out of the clothes you worked in. Opening a window, even in February. A walk round the block between finishing and arriving home, which is the single most effective thing I know and requires nothing at all. Palo Santo, if the smell helps you mark a line. A stone in your hand for a minute.
Pick 1. Not 6. 1 thing, attached to 1 of those moments, done often enough that you stop deciding about it.
The measure of a good spiritual hygiene practice isn't whether it looks impressive on Instagram. It's whether, when you do it, something in your body settles. Find those things. Do them consistently.
That test is more precise than it sounds, and it is worth actually running. Do the thing, then check: shoulders, jaw, the breath. Did anything let go, even slightly. If nothing did, the practice is not yours, however well it works for somebody else, and you are allowed to put it down without a verdict on yourself.
And when you drop it, which you will, there is nothing to make up. This is maintenance, not a streak. You do not owe the bins 3 extra trips because you missed a week.
Not as a performance of spiritual practice. As actual maintenance of your actual self.
More like this
What spiritual hygiene actually is, and why it changes everything.
How to start working with crystals, without it feeling strange.
Building a daily practice that you'll actually do, including the times you won't.
If you would like help working out what yours should be, email me at anna@annalouoflondon.com or message me on WhatsApp at https://wa.me/447738470156.