Psychological Effects of Clutter

Nobody has to sell you on how clutter makes you feel, right? You just feel it. It's like that classic movie scenario where the kids have completely destroyed the house and the mom is just standing there open mouthed in horror. I mean, those scenes exist for a reason and it's because we can all empathize with just feeling defeated by mounds of clutter. So if you're ready to find out exactly how clutter does impact your mind and your psychology, then go ahead and click the thumbs up button and let's dive in. Movie drama aside, there's also a certain peace that comes from just letting things go. When you release painful or stressful things from your environment, it just makes you feel better. It's like it optimizes your space and it optimizes your mood at the same time. Author Tisha Morris describes clutter as being stagnant energy. So she says, where there's clutter in your home, there will be clutter in you, either physically, mentally, or emotionally. Just as like a small example, I recently decluttered my closet. I removed everything that I just legitimately was not wearing. So no matter how pristine it looked hanging there on its shelf or on its hanger, how much I wish that I was the type of person who would wear that type of thing, even though I wasn't, if it wasn't making its way onto my body, then it was being relocated to a local donation center. Now, when I look at my closet, I actually smile. Sometimes I even leave my closet door open on purpose. It's weird, I know. But just knowing that everything in there looks streamlined, that I love the clothes that actually exist in there, and that honestly, my closet looks kind of nice, makes me happy. And I've also found that having fewer options makes it easier for me to find something quickly to wear in the morning, and I'm making my way out of my trusty PJs a whole lot more often. I mean, you know, I'm still a PJs gal, but I'm making my way into actual clothes a lot more often because it's so much easier to just find something that I know I'm gonna enjoy wearing. It turns out there is scientific evidence to support the negative feelings that we get when we're surrounded by clutter, and the positive feelings that we get in the process of decluttering or making space. Psychology says I'm not that weird after all. At the end of the day, our homes are just a reflection of our minds. Our environment is always a reflection of our minds. In fact, that's the path to which our environments are created. You know, you have a thought that starts in your mind that leads to an emotion, you know, a feeling that you have. Maybe that's excitement or concern or worry, and that emotion leads to an action or a behavior, and a lot of times those actions or behaviors are just made to happen on repeat because you make them so frequently, and then they become a habit, and then those actions or behaviors result directly into your environment. So it always is a reflection of your mind, and our environments have big mouths, meaning they say a lot about us. For example, if most of your clutter belongs to somebody else, well, that could be an indication that you have trouble setting boundaries. Maybe that's an area you could be working on. If your clutter consists of unused items that you're holding onto for the future, that could indicate, you know, a fear or distrust in the future. You feel like you need to hoard like a squirrel does with nuts for the winter, you know, like stack up just in case, just as like a buffer of security for the future. If you're holding onto a bunch of stuff that you don't use anymore, like your kid's old toys or their old clothes or things from college or high school, that could indicate that you have trouble letting things go or that there's a part of your past that you haven't worked through or that you feel like your best years are behind you. You know, it can indicate a whole lot of different things about your past depending on why you're holding onto them. And if you're holding onto a bunch of stuff that you really like but would never use, that could probably indicate that you have this ideal version of yourself, which we all do. Not all of us are actually gonna wear skinny jeans and pumps even if we think that it looks totally cute. If you buy it, it's just gonna sit in your closet, right? So we all have things like that that are like these ideal versions of ourselves. So what exactly are the psychological effects of clutter? Well, the first one is pretty obvious and that's stress and increased cortisol levels. In fact, there was a study done by UCLA that maybe you've heard of that studied 32 American families in Los Angeles. And using saliva tests, they found that all of the mother's stress hormones spiked during times of dealing with their belongings. In case you're wondering, the stress hormone I'm speaking about is cortisol. So how much impact does this have on our daily lives? Well, Dr. Rick Hansen, author of Hardwiring Happiness, explains how cortisol can actually alter the structure of your brain, making you more sensitive to stress and giving you chronic stress as a result. He explains that cortisol goes into the brain and stimulates the alarm center, the amygdala, and kills neurons in the hippocampus, which besides doing visual and spatial memory, also calms down the amygdala and calms down stress altogether. So this mental experience of stress, especially if it's chronic and severe, gradually changes the structure of the brain. So we become aggressively more sensitive to stress. The mind can change, the brain can change the mind. That's insane. Being stressed can actually change the structure of your brain to make you more stressed. So keep that in mind if you're already feeling pretty chronically stressed. Number two, clutter influences how you feel and think about yourself. Having your home all together generally correlates to you having it all together, especially for women. So cluttered environments can result in feelings of low self-worth and have even been linked to depression. And this all stems from a deeper level because remember earlier I said that your environment is basically just a reflection of your mind? Well, it's also a feedback loop, meaning that your environment is then influencing your mind. It's influencing your thoughts because you're surrounded by it every single day. And what you surround yourself with reinforces thoughts and beliefs you already have about whether or not you have it all together. And it indicates like what you're willing to tolerate inside of your own life, what you feel like you're worth, what you feel like you're worth surrounding yourself with, what you feel worthy of experiencing. Number three, clutter distracts you from focus. Shocker alert, right? Clutter is distracting. It causes our brains to try to shift into this multitasking mode, which here's a hint, multitasking isn't a real thing. Our brains aren't physically capable of focusing on more than one thing at a time. So what it's actually doing is jumping back and forth from thought to thought or distraction to distraction. So this greatly distracts you from any kind of thing that you're trying to focus on, and it's incompatible with focus and productivity. So I know, especially in today's age, multitasking and juggling a million different things and thoughts sounds impressive, but in reality, it's decreasing your efficiency and it's decreasing the effectiveness of anything that you're trying to do. It really runs you into the ground in both time and energy. Princeton University found scientific evidence in a study that showed multiple stimuli present in the visual field at the same time compete for neural representation by mutually suppressing their evoked activity throughout visual cortex, providing a neural correlate for the limited processing capacity of the visual system. In layman's terms, clutter insight competes for your brain's resources, decreases focus, and limits processing power. Number four, clutter impacts behavior. It's bad enough the psychological effects of clutter on your own sanity, but it turns out if you have kids, they're not unaffected either. In fact, a study published by the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology shows that noisy, crowded homes characterized by lack of routines may undermine children's ability to regulate emotions and behavior and may provide children with opportunities to act out. But let's be real, clutter not only impacts our kids' behaviors, it affects ours too. We derive our energy from our environments. Think about it, you wouldn't feel rejuvenated and rested in a haunted house, right? And alternatively, you can just walk into a day spa and just the act of being in that environment makes you feel calm, it makes you feel relaxed, it releases anxieties, it physically loosens your muscles and releases them down your back and down your neck. It gives you emotional, physical, and mood sensations just by changing your environment. There are very few things out there that are that immediately impactful. And think about how that affects your behavior in response. You know, like sterile environments can make you feel uptight and a little bit on edge. Well, chaotic and cluttered environments tend to bring on behaviors of just being defeated or feeling defeated, you know? Like it's not even worth messing with. It's just gonna look the same way that it did before if I even try to fix it. And so instead, I'm gonna watch Netflix and eat Cheetos on the couch. So if you're wanting to create something or uplevel your life in any way, the first place that you should start should be your home space or your habitat. Make sure that your environment is supporting the energy and the changes that you're wanting to see and that you're trying to make. So our environment is a feedback loop and we build our clutter around some psychological component, impulses, sentiment, memories, fear, guilt, or an ideal version of ourselves. Then the clutter itself results in negative psychological effects of stress, feeling bad about yourself, crappy attention span and focus, and undesired behaviors. So do you wanna know why you have so much clutter? Click this video to find out and grab your four-step checklist down in the description to get started.