How to Start Decluttering: Understanding The Science and Sentimentality
Deluttering your home can be one of the greatest stress relievers. Everyone has some amount of clutter in their home; it’s almost inevitable. Some artists feel like more clutter results in greater creativity, which may be true, but it also increases feelings of stress and anxiety. Clutter manifests in many different ways, each one created through memories and mental hurdles many of us would rather avoid. However, overcoming clutter and beginning a full decluttering of your home leads to a happier, healthier life.
What is Clutter and Decluttering?
Clutter is defined as items that are scattered or disorganized enough to impede movement or effectiveness. Think of a child’s playroom. Oftentimes, children will play for hours before it’s time to eat, sleep, or do another activity. If they don’t clean up after themselves, we are left with what looks like the aftermath of a storm. Toys strewn about and left where they lie, to the point that walking through the room without stepping on something is nearly impossible. This is clutter, but it doesn’t always take the form of children’s toys.
Clutter can be anything, from books to clothing, and it doesn’t always have to be a physical impediment. Sometimes it’s an emotional or mental roadblock holding us back and we may not even realize it. That section of clothes in your closet that you are saving for a rainy day but still haven’t worn in years is clutter. That box of books your grandparents gave you ages ago that still haven’t been unpacked is clutter. Even the pictures on your phone and computer that you don’t remember taking but are a glimpse into a moment of the past are considered clutter. They take up space in your mind that can impact your mood and outlook on life.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, decluttering is the act of removing items you no longer need to make space and make the room or yourself feel more comfortable and pleasant. You may have already felt these effects in the past. Cleaning dishes is a pain, but once you’ve finished and packed them away, the kitchen looks much nicer than before. Folding and putting away laundry is time-consuming, but it leads to a cleaner, more organized home. Decluttering may sound like cleaning, but it’s much more than that.
The Science of Decluttering - The Five Forms of Clutter
Before touching on the importance of decluttering, it’s important to highlight what clutter looks like in your home or your life. Clutter takes many forms, and not all of them are physical. Each type of clutter exists for reasons beyond laziness, which is what led to them becoming clutter in the first place. It’s important to understand what clutter looks like so you can identify it in your home and then begin taking steps to correct it.
Emotional Clutter
Emotional clutter is sentimental items around your home that take up space or hold cherished memories. That bag of coins from the arcade you visited with your friends years ago, the movie tickets from the first few dates with your significant other, or even the baseball you found in the woods could all be considered clutter. Alone, they don’t pose much of a threat to the cleanliness of your home. They’re just a small token to remind you of times past that meant something to you.
However, over time you’ll find that you begin collecting more of these items and that they are taking up more space in your home or life. You’ll walk past a shelf packed with memorabilia and feel a brief sense of happiness at the memories contained within, but it’s often fleeting. You continue about your day without those items impacting you much more than a quick smile, and your home slowly fills with more clutter.
Paper Decluttering
Paper decluttering has become a very common and necessary practice. Everyone has some form of paper clutter in their home; it’s practically inevitable. It becomes a problem when it begins to impact your mind and your mood. Books laying around the house, most half-read. Newspapers open or folded on the dining room table, partially read and mostly forgotten. Mail stacked on the counter, some past due and others you aren’t even sure why they’re still around.
Whatever the case, paper clutter exists because we have a hard time letting go or storing items that could be useful at some point in the future. What if you decide to finally read that book? What if that mail is actually important and you need it at a later date? You’ll wish you had kept it if the situation arises in the future where it’s needed. When paper decluttering, these thoughts may overtake your mind, and while yes, it is possible you may need that document in the future, the likelihood is low. They’re also taking up precious space that you need to function. Clutter doesn’t just impact your house, it impacts your mind as well.
Digital Decluttering
Digital decluttering is an often overlooked task, that should be a much more common practice. With the capabilities of our phones and computers, digital clutter is easy to accumulate and difficult to spot. Photos on your phone, games on your computer, and emails in your inbox are all forms of digital clutter. Photos are essential to preserving memories, but you may often store duplicates or forget to trim out the less flattering ones because of the memories associated. You may keep games installed on your computer that you want to play eventually, but you’re busy playing something else at the moment. Those emails at the bottom of your inbox could have important information in them, so you leave them sitting around “just in case.”
Digital decluttering doesn’t have to be hard. Each of these cases is easily remedied, it just takes a bit of time. Cleaning your email inbox and sorting or deleting old emails is a chore, but it helps you organize your emails by importance. Deleting games may be a pain, but you can always redownload them later. The photos you have stored could be archived, organized, and stored on an external hard drive for future use. There’s always a way to make digital decluttering a habit.
Organizing Gifts
Organizing gifts can feel like taking something fun and making it a chore. Everyone has gifts lurking somewhere in their home. Either you have presents from a white elephant gift exchange from years ago or a collection of gifting ideas you got online that are patiently waiting in one of your closets to be given, even if it’s been a few years. You may have unwanted gifts that you seemingly can’t part with because the gift giver is someone you care for and you would hate to be found out. Organizing gifts you want and discarding the ones you don’t can feel like a betrayal to the gift giver, but look deeper at these scenarios.
Each of these scenarios results in clutter around your home. Those white elephant gifts are simply taking up space now, those gift ideas haven’t left the closet in years, and those unwanted gifts could be better used by someone else. It’s time to start decluttering your gifts.
Physical Clutter: Getting Rid of Clutter in Your Life
Getting rid of clutter in your life can be difficult, especially when the clutter doesn’t fall into a neat category or reason. If it doesn’t fit into the other categories, it must be physical clutter. This can be anything from toys or yard tools to food and wrappers. This form of clutter can be caused by any number of reasons, from laziness to depression. However, you may not realize that it’s actually making these symptoms worse. While staying in our proven process is easy and makes us comfortable, it’s scientifically proven that cleaning up and reorganizing our homes or lives results in healthier living conditions and a more positive outlook on life. Not only does getting rid of clutter in your life improve your mood at home, but it will help you be more productive in life.
Decluttering Your Mind
Decluttering your mind is a truly freeing and beneficial process. Clutter has a nasty habit of sticking around, both physically and mentally. At first, it’s collections of items that have use to you, but over time many of these items are either unused or unnecessary. Some hold lingering sentimental value from shared memories, while others sit around until they are needed, though that time will likely never come.
Clutter sticks around for many reasons, but it also has a negative effect on those living with it daily. Decluttering your mind doesn’t mean you have to be on hoarder levels of magnitude to have an adverse effect on our psyche.
Elevating Your Depression - Why Decluttering your Home Matters
There are many factors that contribute to depression, but clutter is one of the prime suspects. A cluttered home may be associated with creativity for some, but it also tends to lead to stress and anxiety. If you’ve ever struggled to find your car keys because of how many objects you have on the counter or you dig through a pile of clothes to find a clean shirt, you know what clutter feels like and how it affects your mood.
You may tell yourself that you’ll declutter at some point, but time goes on and it keeps piling up. The more clutter in your home, the more hopeless you feel. The effort that you would have to put in to clean everything up would be astronomical at this point, but it’s getting to the point that you feel trapped under the weight of your clutter and the depression sets in.
Clutter and Increased Stress and Anxiety
Home is where the heart is, and also where many of us go to relax. Clutter makes it difficult for you to rest, though, something that has been documented in the past. Essentially, your cortisol levels, the hormone that dictates stress levels, are elevated in messy environments. The more clutter, the more anxious you feel. A cluttered home leads to negative emotions, which can spill over into poor parenting practices, lost focus, and other forms of household chaos.
Decluttering Procrastination and the Struggle to Focus
Clutter is distracting and decluttering must be intentional. You may feel like you’re so used to clutter that it isn’t registering, but subconsciously, your brain takes note of where it is and why it’s there. Our brains are only capable of focusing on a limited amount of stimuli at a time, so the more clutter surrounding us, the harder it is to think clearly.
This results in procrastination, as important tasks begin to pile up, but the willingness to complete them wanes. There are so many clothes in the pile that washing and folding them would take too long. The dishes are piling over the sink, so you would have to relocate the dishes just to begin washing them. That stack of bills is too tall, so finding the one I need would take too long. Basic tasks become much more difficult to overcome or even start because of how much effort they would require, on top of all the other clutter that needs to be cleaned.
Clutter and Relationship Troubles
Research suggests that more clutter in your home makes it harder to identify the emotions expressed on the faces of movie characters or significant others. Clutter places a strain on your relationship for many reasons, from the mess and annoyance associated with it, to poor communication and misunderstandings stemming from the inability to understand facial expressions.
Decluttering’s Effects on Impulse Control and Quality of Life
Decluttering isn’t a cure all, but clutter surely does not speak to a healthy mindset. An uncontrolled mindset leads to negative side effects like unhealthy eating habits and difficulty controlling your impulses. A chaotic environment leads to a chaotic mind. Clutter also leads to frustration and a sense of defeat, which can build up over time and result in difficulty to perform self-care, relax, or enjoy time with loved ones. When everything is piling up, taking time to shower feels like it’s much further down on your list of needs.
What Leads to Clutter? Causes of Hoarding and Cluttering
There are many different causes of hoarding and cluttering and while these are two different conditions, their root causes are quite similar. While it may seem like laziness initially, disorganization comes from many different avenues.
Overwhelming Clutter: The task at hand of getting rid of unwanted items or putting things back where they belong is daunting, both physically and mentally. It would be easier for things to stay as they are.
Important Clutter: You may keep clothes around that don’t fit in the hopes of losing weight and wearing them again in the future. You have ads for a shop down the street because you want to buy something there eventually, even though the event advertised is over. Objects that remind you of a goal don’t bring you closer to achieving it, they simply take up space.
Sentimental Clutter: As mentioned before, people keep items that remind them of times in the past that have a deep meaning to them. Things that remind us of a lost loved one are important, but too many items can begin to take up space that could be used for new memories.
Fearful Clutter: People often feel guilty about throwing away items, especially those with sentimental value. What if you need it? You’ll be sorry you didn’t save it. However, this clutter compounds on itself and often has little use in the future.
Comfort Clutter: Everything you have had or has some benefit. It’s hard to throw something away that serves a purpose and brings you a sense of security.
Beginning the Decluttering Process
It’s hard to create a positive pattern when you are stuck in your current flow, even if that flow is negative. However, making small changes can go a long way in clearing away the clutter and leading a happier, healthier home.
Dedicate Time
Home decluttering starts with small steps. It seems daunting to remove your clutter and freshen up your space. It can get easier if you break up your decluttering efforts into time blocks. Instead of tackling the clutter across your home in one attempt, you can choose sections and set timelines. Setting aside one hour a week to declutter a section of your home is more manageable than trying to clean everything at once. If you have friends or family willing to help, you could invite trusted loved ones to help.
Reduce Items
Make a pile of similar things, like books. Then divide that pile into three new ones: one for items to keep, one for items to give away or donate, and one for items to throw away. If you’re having trouble deciding where some items go, you can create a fourth for undecided items.
It’s easiest to start with items that can be thrown away, like broken toys, ripped books, or expired food. There may be recycling centers near you capable of disposing of some of these items.
Check to see if there are any organizations that accept donations. Sometimes it helps when parting with possessions to know they are going to a good cause. It lessens the anxiety knowing someone will get more value out of them than you currently do.
If your items are in good condition, you could also sell them. Try having a yard sale, selling them online, or taking anything unused to a pawn or thrift store. The extra money may be a motivator to continue your decluttering efforts.
Reorganizing Your Space
Try organizing items based on what you use every day. Make the most commonly-used items easily accessible and in their own space, away from the clutter. Not only does this help you find what you need quickly, but you can distinguish between essentials and clutter easier, which helps when you begin your cleaning efforts.
Professional Decluttering Services with Tranquil Transitions
When your clutter becomes overwhelming, it can be hard to take those first few steps to reorganize your space. Your mind is actively working against you to maintain the comfortable status quo you’ve had up to this point, so starting your decluttering efforts feels like an uphill battle. If you aren’t sure where to start or need help sorting your clutter, Tranquil Transitions can assist.
Tranquil Transitions offers decluttering services to help you reorganize your space and give you a healthier, happier environment. Whether you need a second opinion on where to start, what to keep, or aren’t sure where to take your clutter, our team can find you the optimal solution. If you’re ready to take back your life and reduce the clutter across your home, contact Tranquil Transitions today.
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