How does clutter affect your health? Has this question ever crossed your mind? Please welcome our guest, Julie Barton, author of the book, The Clutter-Health Connection, as she unravels the impact clutter could be having on your physical and mental well-being.
It’s not just about wanting your house to look beautiful so you can have people over. It’s about being healthy in your space. Feeling like you can do what you need to do without feeling the oppression or claustrophobia that can come with having too much stuff in your space.
Clutter in your home is an ongoing stressor that you can’t escape. When we are under a lot of stress, our cortisol levels rise. When these levels stay high for an extended period of time, we are going to start having physical health issues. The clutter can also affect your mental health as well. It may be causing you embarrassment or shame. It may be causing you to lose sleep, feel depressed, or over-eat. It can cause fogginess in your mind. There are countless health effects both mentally and physically that this clutter could be having on you.
If you don’t think your clutter is causing you stress, find a cluttered area in your home and stare at it for 5 minutes. Write down how you feel. Then clean up that same area and organize it, remove the excess, and put everything in its home. Now be in the space for 5 minutes and write down how you feel.
Clutter is a huge energy drain. It is a never-ending narrative in your mind telling you, you should do this or, you should do that. You feel exhausted in your own space. Your clutter is telling you that you don’t follow through on things, you don’t complete tasks. Over time you start believing this. You start to feel like a failure.
Even though it is so hard at times, it is worth putting in the effort to feel the healthful benefits; being able to breathe, and not having your stuff be another thing on your list to manage and take care of. And when we are constantly letting stuff dictate how we feel every day and dictate our thoughts and energy level, we have very little to put into our everyday life. We are not being intentional. We are being a slave to our stuff and that is not any way to live.
So what is enough? This may be different for each person, but when we have enough, our environment shouldn’t distract or overwhelm us. We should be able to keep up with the maintenance of the area in a reasonable amount of time. Deciding, even with the small things, what is enough, then you are not wading through the things you don’t need. You should feel in balance with your surroundings emotionally.
When you have enough, you are not worried about acquiring because you know you have what is needed. You are not worried about moving things out of the way that you don’t need to get to the things that you do. You are at peace. Instead of focusing on the stuff, you can focus on the people in your life that you want to spend time with or doing the activities that fill your soul.
Your home should be a haven of refreshment where you can relax. You should not be on guard or stressed out in your own home. You should feel healthy in your space. The constant consumption of things, and having more, will not make you happy. It will actually have the opposite effect and take its toll on you over time.
About Guest Julie Barton
Julie is a wife and mother, a retired Professional Organizer, a current writer, author, and an ongoing organizing enthusiast. When she’s not writing, she enjoys reading, meditating, walking, going on family bike rides, and, of course, decluttering/organizing her home.
She is a native of Missouri, currently residing in Iowa, with her husband, college-age daughter, and their sweet boxer mix dog, Piper.
After hearing from and witnessing the emotional and mental impact of clutter on her clients, prior to COVID-19, she didn’t want to waste the pandemic time. She committed to emerging with helpful information for the general public to be healthier in their living environments as they worked, recovered, healed, and looked toward moving forward after the pandemic.
She wrote The Clutter-Health Connection to raise awareness and focus on the relationship between our physical environment/ home surroundings and its long-term impact on our overall health.
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