Picture this: you’re standing in your kitchen surrounded by a pile of dirty dishes, numerous kitchen utensils and equipment crowding the worktops, cleaning products spilling out of the cupboard under the sink and empty carrier bags peaking out from one of the overstuffed drawers – a drawer that’s full of bits and bobs you haven’t used in months. You might not even know what some of the items are.
It’s chaos.
On top of the microwave there is a plate of chocolate cookies, and with a sigh, you reach out and start munching on one. There goes the diet, but you feel overwhelmed and it’s a little bit of pleasure to take your mind off the mess around you. You need chocolate to deal with the stress, or so you convince yourself.
Now picture another, different scenario: you’ve just spent an hour or two decluttering and cleaning your kitchen. It’s gleaming, with not a speck of dirt or a crumb in sight, there’s ample worktop space to prepare food, and every single item has a place and a purpose. You feel in control, like you’ve achieved something, and you look over at the plate of cookies. It’s tempting, but you’re so proud of yourself for finally tackling the mess in the kitchen, that you might as well pass on that success to your diet, too. You reach for a carrot, instead.
This isn’t a hypothetical situation.
It was actually part of mental health study on the effects of clutter, whereby groups of female participants were asked to stand in either a cluttered or uncluttered kitchen, with plates of cookies and carrots nearby. Those who were surrounded by chaos were far more likely, by as much as 75% in some instances, to overeat on the cookies. Why?
Because they felt a lack of control. If everything else is a mess, they thought, why bother with the diet?
It’s just one example of how clutter negatively affects us.
Let’s look in more detail at a few of the other ways in which clutter can get the best of us, and how tidying up and getting organised can improve our health and wellbeing far more than you ever thought possible.
Today we’ll look at what clutter does to our mental health, and in part two of this series, we’ll look at ways to combat this.
This essentially means that we (and when I say we, clutter has a much greater adverse effect on women than men) suffer from more stress when in a cluttered environment. Cortisol is a steroid hormone that manages certain processes within our bodies. It affects our metabolism as well as our immune system, and most relevantly here, it aids in our ability to deal with stress – as long as that stress goes away at some point, and our cortisol levels remain at a healthy level. However, if we live in clutter day in and day out, and don’t deal with it, this can cause prolonged stress.
Our bodies are clever. They have a built-in fight or flight mode to help us survive in times of perceived danger, which essentially means minimising the bodily functions which aren’t at that point needed and making the most of the functions that will help us survive. Most other times, when we are not feeling stressed, all our systems are in balance for optimal health and wellbeing.
Being in a constant fight or flight mode, or feeling extreme stress for prolonged periods, is not sustainable. It’s like putting your phone into battery saver mode – it works fine temporarily, but it’s only meant to be temporary. Increased cortisol levels, for an extended period, can lead to a whole array of problems such as anxiety, depression, weight gain, fatigue, headaches, irritability, intestinal problems, and even low sex drive.
It’s not an ideal way to live!
What’s more – when we are in a state of chronic stress and there’s no let up, our perception of everything around us is slightly altered to the negative so that our brains support our point of view.
In other words, even if things aren’t so bad, we see them as worse than they actually are!
Problems are almost never as bad as we make them out to be. It’s all about how we react and what we do about that problem that matters, which we’ll talk more about in part two.
‘I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.’
How often have we all said that, whilst finishing another episode of that series on Netflix? We always seem to ‘get around’ to watching our favourite tv shows though, don’t we? Things that we don’t enjoy never seem to get the same attention.
Procrastination means deliberately delaying certain tasks even while knowing there are negative consequences in doing so. We all do it, but some people are worse than others.
The crazy part is that the feelings of guilt we get from putting off essential tasks are usually much worse than the feelings we get from doing things we don’t want to do – in other words, you might as well just get it done!
Too much procrastination leads to clutter, but too much clutter can actually perpetuate procrastination. Why?
Because procrastination is closely tied in with perfectionism. Most of us think that we need to do everything all at once and have it perfect – the all or nothing approach. The more delayed a seemingly “mammoth” task is (note: nothing is ever mammoth, that’s just your perception of it) the more we seem to want to get it perfect first time around.
We think we need to spend the whole weekend cooped up in the house decluttering every single room until it’s done, but in reality, we’re making this activity so unappealing that it’s almost guaranteed that we’ll never actually do it. The guilt then builds up over time and manifests itself as anxiety and stress.
The solution to all this?
Well, as a well-known brand once said…
“Distractions in our physical environment can impede our brains’ ability to function.”
This was the finding from a study by Princeton University. Sabine Kastner has studied attention (and lack thereof) for over 20 years and finds that visual clutter gets in the way of our focus and concentration.
Our eyes are drawn to physical things that are out of place, and our minds lose focus. It’s like one big ‘to do’ list that never gets done, and it niggles away at us, distracting us from the task at hand.
How often do you sit down at a disorganised desk and think I need to sort all this out before I start any work? Or perhaps you’re a procrastinator and decide to leave it to later, struggling on with your tasks despite the chaos around you.
Chances are, you’ll be far less productive than if you’d just set aside one hour to tidy up your desk. This involves a method known as ‘time blocking’, and we’ll delve more into this in part two of our clutter series.
Kastner found that having more objects in your visual field hinders the brain’s ability to filter them out, which is what we need to do in order to focus on one thing. When we’re crossing a road, for example, our vision focuses on the cars coming our way and blocks everything else out so we can walk across safely.
The key point here is that there is a difference between objects that constitute clutter and objects that are meant to be there. For example, when you’re in a park and all around you are benches with families and dogs and picnics and trees, maybe a pond and some bushes, balls being thrown, and litter bins lined along the paths – do you feel that it’s clutter? No, it’s all meant to be there, so your brain computes this as normal.
However, when you’re surrounded in items that are out of place, never get used, gather dust, and don’t have a function (clutter), our brains have trouble filtering them out so we can turn our attention to more important things.
Over time, our brain begins to tire from the strains on our attention and its ability to function lessens, thereby affecting our overall cognition. In simpler terms – too much clutter destroys our ability to think properly!
So, how convinced are you yet that your clutter has simply got to be handled?
Living a de-cluttered life isn’t something for more organised people who have more time and energy – it’s something that everyone can (and should) adopt along with exercise, healthy eating, and anything else that has a profoundly positive effect on our mental and physical health, and general wellbeing.
So, now we know what the connection is to clutter and the mind, what exactly can we do about it?
In part two of this blog series, we list the ways in which you can effectively start decluttering your home (and your mind), with tried and tested methods that actually work.
And once you’ve seen and felt the results, you’ll never want to go back to the way it was before!
How would you feel if you could hire an expert to come into your home and help you declutter? Someone with years of experience, who knows all the tricks and can transform the environment around you in just a short time?
If that sounds like something you’d love, then give us a call at 0141 374 0373 or visit www.allaboutthemove.co.uk and have a chat with us. You’d be surprised at just what we can do. 😊