Stop Letting Clutter Cramp Your Style!
Clutter. We have all accumulated it at one time or another. Buying things and filling our homes with more than we can handle, causing us anxiety and stress. The feeling of being overwhelmed has caused us to repeatedly make resolutions to be more organized. Helpless, we seek out guidance from decluttering experts like Marie Kondo, evidenced by the numerous shows and books that reveal how clutter can immobilize us from doing it ourselves. Clutter is a perpetual eyesore that can negatively impact our lives and our health. We should stop being defeated by this clutter and start being in control of it. Understanding the reasons behind why we do it can hopefully lead us on a path to find ways to avoid it.
Think about how many new things you bring into your home every day: food, receipts, mail, clothes, paperwork, etc. That’s a lot of stuff, especially if accumulated and not managed properly. The balance in your home will always be off if you are not letting things go as you bring new things in. Clutter clogs up valuable space, and if we have to see it all the time, imagine what it does to our mental and physical health. Numerous studies have suggested that it can negatively affect us in the following ways:
It can cause tension in our relationships. One partner can be less happy in the relationship because they assume the responsibility of maintaining a home more so than their partner.
It can cause frustration. Constant visual reminders of clutter everywhere increase cognitive overload, overwhelming us and thus reducing our ability to focus and maintain memory.
It can bring about anxiety and despair. Those living in cluttered environments display increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol; we become emotionally paralyzed when deciding what to keep or not.
Clutter breeds clutter and leads to wasted money. Buying items and not being able to find them causes you to spend more to buy the same thing(s) you already have.
So why do we have clutter and why is it so hard to get rid of things? We live in a consumer society where we are told we need this or that to be happy or healthy or successful. It then becomes easy to accumulate lots of things in a short period of time. The following explain why it’s hard to get rid of them:
Sentimental attachment: the item may hold memories you don’t want to forget
Fear/guilt: fear that we’ll lose our self-worth if we throw away awards and trophies or guilt that we’re being disloyal to the giver of birthday cards and gifts
Hope: hope to lose weight to fit into jeans from years before or hope to catch up on reading those unopened books
Justify the purchase: you don’t want to waste money, so you keep it
Failure: we’ll feel like a failure for tossing out items we never used because we didn’t do anything with it
Distraction and buffer: distraction from tackling deeper issues and serves as a buffer from pain (attic/basement= inability to let go of the past, living room= blockages in social life, bedroom= fears of intimacy, bathroom= body image issues). Cluttering prevents you from clearly observing your surroundings, thus allowing you not to deal with it, which is a way of coping.
How many things do you need to keep before they start to control your life? Constant cluttering will do nothing but keep you entrenched in an endless cycle of remorse as the pile grows bigger and bigger. How can you motivate yourself to declutter and start living the life you’re supposed to live? Follow these disciplines and keep practicing them daily:
Don’t let your stuff cause you stress and take away your precious time. By keeping things around that you do not love and that do not serve you, you are wasting time, energy, and money.
Do not keep things out of guilt (gifts, family items, etc.). It will burden the space in your home as well as the space in your mind.
To finish or not to finish? Half-completed projects only serve as reminders of personal failure. Don’t let the mental anguish linger. Know that the timing wasn’t right. Respect yourself to either toss it or schedule a date to finish it.
Clearing clutter is an ongoing process. It is not a one-time project, but an ongoing process that never ends. Don’t put off dealing with your clutter. There is never a perfect time to start. Start small, with 10 minutes a day. Do it every day for the next year.
Approach decluttering with a feeling of gratitude. Know that you are helping someone by letting them use what didn’t work for you. Photographing the item can help keep the identity and memory intact as you let go of it.
Decluttering is a practice that should be routine to make it easier for us to know what to keep or discard. Clearing the clutter and creating empty spaces in our physical as well as mental environment will give us peace and calm to let our minds rest and inevitably allows growth and change to flourish in our new habitat. So do yourself a favor: make the decision to take action on realizing your new environment and the potential it has in store for you.