For many, attaining good health and wellness is not a difficult process as they have mastered the art of using simple things of life and specific habits to make life easier and maintain a sound mental health.
One of the little ways of ensuring sound mental and emotional wellness is the art of decluttering; this is the process of putting things in their place to improve your mood and state of mind as it has been proved to put people at ease and can be an important part of self-care.
This is a time when the average individual feel overloaded with stress and sometimes anxiety because of the period we are living in. But many are yet to realise how personal habits may be contributing to our angst and anxiety.
Clutter and untidy environments can cause distress, decluttering seems a way out; it not only makes it easier to find what you’re looking for, but it can also improve your mood and state of mind in many ways. It gives people a renewed sense of control over their environment and gives a sense of freedom and liberation.
Despite the benefits of decluttering, it’s easy to procrastinate when it comes to tasks that seem overwhelming or stressful like tackling your overflowing junk drawer or sorting through the huge pile of clothes that you haven’t reached for months.
Does clutter affect our wellbeing?
Clutter affects our emotional and physical wellbeing in numerous ways; clutter in the office can make us less productive and more burnt out by compromising attention, concentration and focus as well as draining cognitive resources. Clutter reflects an overabundance of possessions that collectively create chaotic and disorderly living spaces. Also, it’s not just work performance that’s impacted by clutter, job satisfaction is also affected.
Clutter at home may lower happiness and make us feel less secure. When there is lot of clutter, you lose control over your physical environment, which is very defeating and can bring on stress, depression, or anxiety.
Clutter can also be a safety hazard if there are items or wires on the floor that someone can trip over, or a health hazard if your piles of stuff have become magnets for dust or bugs. In addition, clutter can become a source of tension or friction between people in the same household, especially if they have different ideas about what’s acceptable when it comes to tidiness.
Even your social life can be affected, if it gets to the point of embarrassment where you won’t have people over. Also, being in a cluttered space could affect your eating habits.
Can decluttering help?
If clutter contributes to stress, can decluttering and organising the environment around you relieve that stress and improve your sense of wellbeing? Yes, but in varying degrees. Clutter is ‘in the eye of the beholder so it disturbs individuals in varying degrees. What disturbs one person can be normal to another; some people with extreme amounts of clutter may think they don’t have a problem with it at all, while others can be quite distressed by it when there really isn’t much there.
Making an effort to declutter can make you feel as if a weight has been lifted. No matter what you physically count as clutter, whatever is there is a constant visual reminder of things that need to be done, and decluttering allows you to cross things off the to-do list, which gives you a sense of accomplishment.
Paring down and getting organised also promotes greater productivity, a sense of order, and feelings of self-efficacy, as well as improving your mood. Tidying up, putting things away and getting rid of piles of unnecessary stuff is a way of managing symbolic pollution. But, if decluttering becomes an obsession or you become super strict about having everything in a specific place, you can go overboard. If decluttering is keeping you from turning your attention to other things in your life, that’s not helpful or adaptive. However, decluttering can be good for your mental and emotional well-being in many ways.
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