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Isn’t it fascinating how clutter can effortlessly capture our attention? Picture this: a chaotic scene straight out of a family movie, where mischievous kids have turned the entire house into a disaster zone, leaving the mother utterly speechless. Those cinematic moments resonate with us because we’ve all experienced that overwhelming feeling when faced with a mountain of mess.
Beyond the realm of movies, there’s an incredible sense of tranquility that comes with letting go. By eliminating the uncomfortable and stressful items from our surroundings, we open ourselves up to a refreshing opportunity to start anew.
And here’s the truly mind-boggling part: scientific research backs it all up. Yes, you heard it right. A cluttered space can genuinely wreak havoc on your mental well-being.
In this age of increasing conversations about mental health, we’re constantly seeking answers to various questions. What factors influence our mood? Is it work-related stress or conflicts at home? While many potential causes exist, there’s one that often goes unnoticed—the amount of clutter in our homes.
You might raise an eyebrow in surprise or even alarm, but the truth is, it’s all too real. Haven’t we all heard someone mention how cleaning their house brings them a sense of satisfaction? Now you know why!
Granted, no home is entirely devoid of some level of disorder. However, when it spirals out of control, it can lead to significant problems. If you work from home, excessive clutter can hinder your focus and diminish your productivity. In certain situations, it can even leave you feeling inexplicably downcast.
So, let’s delve deeper into the detrimental effects of clutter
What IS Clutter?
When most people think of clutter, they envision the inside of a hoarder’s home. However, cluttering can simply be defined as having more belongings than can comfortably fit in a given space. Imagine a 25-room mansion filled with a lifetime’s worth of artifacts meticulously arranged on shelves and tables. Now, imagine the same quantity of belongings crammed into a two-bedroom apartment. It’s a whole different story, isn’t it?
A recent study on environmental perceptions and well-being looked at the set of correlations between clutter in the home and subjective well-being. Catherine Roster and colleagues (2016) from the University of New Mexico looked at how clutter affects a person’s sense of home and, as a result, their feelings of happiness and fulfillment. The study’s fundamental concept was that because many people identify so strongly with their homes, the degree to which they are cluttered can interfere with the enjoyment they derive from being in them.
Through The Institute for Challenging Disorganization”(ICD), a non-profit organization dedicated to assisting persons who are, as you might expect, organizationally challenged, Roster and her colleagues identified a group of adults with mild to moderate cluttering issues. Participants in the sample of nearly 1,500 adults aged 18 and older rated the extent to which they felt attached to their homes, saw their possessions as an extension of themselves, and felt their home gave them psychological comfort, in addition to rating their own clutter-related behaviors (such as not being able to find things due to clutter).
The two components of attachment to house and possession self-extension both predicted a person’s perception of the home’s psychological safety. Clutter, on the other hand, was linked to a poor psychological sense of home and, as a result, to happiness. “Clutter is an insidious and seemingly harmless outgrowth of people’s natural desire to appropriate their personal spaces with possessions… when [clutter] becomes excessive, it can threaten to physically and psychologically entrap a person in dysfunctional home environments, contributing to personal distress and feelings of displacement and alienation,” the authors concluded
Getting rid of clutter in your home, with or without the assistance of other non-organizationally challenged folks, – home organization professionals like me – appears to be a vital aspect in your happiness that you may not have known about. This process may be uncomfortable at first, but it should help you overcome this significant stumbling block to your health. Here are some compelling, science backed reasons to begin simplifying your life right now:
A sense of dissatisfaction with one’s own life.
Clutter makes it difficult to identify with your home, which should be a refuge from the outside world and a source of pride. Having too many items in too little a space, as the University of New Mexico study shows, will make you feel like your home environment is your enemy, not your friend.
Unhealthy eating habits
People will consume more cookies and snacks if the environment in which they are presented a choice of foods is chaotic, and they are made to feel anxious, according to a study conducted by Lenny Vartarian et al. (2017) in Australia and the United States.
Students in the Cornell University lab ate twice as many cookies as those in a conventional, non-chaotic kitchen when the experimental kitchen was disorganized and untidy. When you’re feeling out of control, you’ll grab for the sweets more in a cluttered environment.
A decline in mental health
Paul Bliese and colleagues from the University of South Carolina examined a century of research on stress and well-being and found that, in some of the first studies of stress and the workplace, a comfortable setting was recognized as crucial to “mental hygiene.” Although recent study has focused on mental rather than physical comfort, there is a case to be made for the office being as clutter-free as the home, as we know from Roster’s research.
Other research on workplace satisfaction has pointed to the benefits of employees being able to personalize their surroundings, although this should have diminishing returns as those surroundings get congested. As you can probably witness from your own experience, being worried by a packed inbox is enough to cause anyone’s mental health to worsen.
Ineffective thinking
Mental clutter is a state of mind in which you can’t stop yourself from thinking about things that aren’t important to you. Lynn Hasher of the University of Toronto argued a few years ago that mental clutter is one of the leading causes of age-related memory loss. Her current research (Amer et al. 2016) continues to back up that claim.
According to the hypothesis, if you can’t get through the material that’s clogging up your neural networks, you’ll be slower and less efficient at processing information. As a result, you’ll be unable to perform short-term memory tasks, as well as longer-range mental exercises requiring you to recall information you should know, such as names of people, which you can no longer locate inside your jumbled knowledge store.
Simplification and decluttering appear to have benefits not only as a housekeeping tool, but also as a necessary procedure for preserving your happiness at home and at work. The bottom line? Cutting through the clutter can be beneficial to your physical and mental health.
Ready to start the decluttering process in your home? Just Organized by Taya is here to help. Get started right away by booking an appointment here.
Working with Taya and her team is easy. You can book an appointment easily on her website, or contact her directly at 832-271-7608
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