5 Surprising Ways Decluttering Can Improve Your Life

This post is all about how decluttering can make you feel better!

Decluttering really can make you feel better! Do you even need convincing? Reimagine the feeling you get whenever you completely clean your room or living space. You feel so much more at ease and less anxious when everything is neat, downsized, and organized.

All of that clutter in your living spaces occupies space in the back of your mind and can create anxiety for you. This anxiety not only ruins your sense of calm and peace but also can hinder your productivity and focus when at home.

Let’s be real clutter and junk around the house or in your living space is a huge burden. Visually clutter can give us distress solely based on the fact that it’s a mess and in our way. On the outside, this clutter seems more like a pain in the you know what rather than something that can affect us deeply on an internal level.

However, if we take a close look, clutter and decluttering can have mental and emotional significance when it comes to our daily lives. There are proven theories that we may have heard of before about hoarders and holding on to clutter emotionally.

Aside from this, how does clutter affect us internally after we’ve already accumulated a large mess in our living space, and more importantly how can decluttering help us alleviate any internal stress and help us to ultimately feel better?

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Table of Contents

1. Decluttering Effects You Internally

Overall, the act of decluttering is a physical thing, but the effect it has is mental and emotional. Your internal world will feel organized when your outer world is clean and organized. When first looking into this and doing research, it kinda seems silly that physical clutter can be so bothersome to our mental well-being.

I mean it’s just stuff, right!?

But as you look closer you can see that this “stuff” really does have an effect on us and that decluttering can have a huge impact on our happiness and how we feel.

Clutter And Your Ability To Sleep

By now everyone knows the supreme importance of sleep.

We also know that our sleep can be disturbed by many different modern factors:

Our electronics
Lack of darkness in our room
Staying up too late (for many reasons)
Inconsistent sleep schedules

Surprisingly enough, clutter can be added to this list. According to NewsGP, one of their clinical articles states that “people attempting to sleep in cluttered rooms have a harder time falling asleep and are overall more disturbed during their sleep time.”

This could be due to the thoughts hovering in the background of our minds about cleaning or possibly just the distress of a disorganized living space.

Clutter Affects Your Productivity & Focus

Clutter can also have a striking effect on your ability to focus and accomplish tasks.

According to the same NewsGP article above, the author sites that:

“Our brains like order, and constant visual reminders of disorganization drain our cognitive resources, reducing our ability to focus. The visual distraction of clutter increases cognitive overload and can reduce our working memory.”

The author continues by stating:

“Neuroscience researchers found that clearing out clutter and disorganization (from home and work environment) allowed for better abilities to focus and increased productivity according to fMRI and other physiological measurements”

In these cases, you can see that clutter has a major unseen effect on us and that decluttering can make you feel better and improve your lives significantly.

2. Decluttering and Wellness

Aside from clutter being a huge distraction, clutter is proven to disrupt areas of our lives as stated above. According to WebMD, there are different characteristics of “clutterers” and what these people struggle with within daily life.

These “clutterer” characteristics include:

Poor time management
Perfectionist tendencies
Easily sidetracked
Like to spend time with people
Often procrastinate and put things off for later

Even though this categorizes people who tend to accumulate more clutter, it shows the kind of effect this clutter can have on general aspects of our daily life. In theory, decluttering can make you feel better and can improve these “clutterer characteristics” in your life.

I know that I fall into more than one of those characteristics and I’m sure many of those reading this will as well. From my experience, when things are cleaner and neat, or “decluttered”, I feel more clear in my mind, and I feel less distracted. This “clear” feeling brings me more sense of peace and thus less anxiety.

3. Decluttering Will Reduce Anxiety

Now when you think of anxiety, disorganized clutter is not at the top of the list in terms of causes.

More common associations with anxiety are:

meeting deadlines
stressful work conditions
school work from high school and college
social interactions

All of these things have another outward component separate from yourself, but the main stressor or cause of anxiety in these cases arises from other people.

In the case of a cluttered living space, there are no other “people” involved (unless of course, you’re stressed about people seeing your mess). There is just you and your clutter. No stressful situation no time crunch, just clutter. It just seems silly that a pile of “things” can bring about anxiety, but it’s true!

So when we declutter we are alleviating that sensory overload that comes with a mess. This allows us to be at ease and our minds can rest. Thus the anxiety related to being overwhelmed will be extremely reduced!

4. Your Stress Levels Will Be Reduced

By now we’ve covered how clutter can affect us on a deeper level. And this includes stress! Not only is there stress from having a mess, (rhyming by accident lol) it’s backed up by research that cluttered and messy environments lead to more stress hormones released in our bodies.

According to NewsGP:

“Clutter can make us feel stressed, anxious, and depressed. Research from the United States in 2009, found that higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, were found in mothers with cluttered homes.”

This clearly shows that one way or another clutter in our space gives us stress. There can be other factors contributing to stress in a person aside from clutter, however, the cluttered and messy environment someone lives in most likely contributes to a large part of that added stress.

5. You Will Experience Less Mental Fatigue

Many of us working full-time understand the demands and stress that come with each week. Once this stress builds up we are faced with the burden of mental fatigue. This mental fatigue can hinder our work and daily life…

Mental fatigue can cause:

Poor decisions
Less productivity
Difficulty focusing
Procrastination
Irritability

However, when we take the time to declutter our space and declutter other areas of our life, we can expect to reduce our mental fatigue significantly or at least reduce the factors that contribute to consistent mental fatigue.

Decluttering can make you feel better because with fewer things and with more organization, we have less to worry about. When things are orderly externally, it allows our inner mind to be more orderly and allows us to think more clearly without sensory overload.

I encourage anyone to give decluttering a try and experience the benefits of a peaceful environment! Try out these productivity planners and keep your next decluttering project simple and organized!