Do you wish your home was clutter-free, but just thinking about addressing the clutter makes you feel anxious and overwhelmed?
You’re in the same boat as many people who read this blog!
It’s so normal to feel overwhelmed at the prospect of decluttering your living space, so don’t feel like a freak about it. Let’s talk about WHY decluttering causes anxiety, why you should declutter anyway, and a powerful tool that guarantees your success moving forward.
6 Reasons You Have Decluttering Anxiety
Here are six major reasons that decluttering can make you feel even more anxious than a messy house itself.
1. Emotional processing
With decluttering comes heightened emotional interactions. We’re often moving through memories, trauma, and sentimentality. It’s a lot of emotional work, which can be exhausting and intimidating. Just thinking about interacting with those items or making decisions on them is enough to stoke up some anxious thoughts and feelings.
2. Cognitive overload
Decision fatigue is REAL. The mental load of decluttering can sometimes feel impossible. Asking our brain to make so many calls and take in so much information in rapid succession is a lot. We often become mentally exhausted before we’ve even made it through a preliminary declutter of one room.
Our brains evolved to avoid pain and stress. Decluttering brings pain and stress, so if your brain’s default stress defense is to become anxious, you will become anxious. Your body is just trying to keep you safe, so you can train yourself to thank it for the good intentions and move through those feelings. More on that later.
3. Mess makes for more stress and anxiety
We know that clutter affects our stress hormones significantly. When we try to actually address that clutter, we become more aware of it, creating more stress hormones and spiking an anxiety response.
Decluttering can make you feel more anxious just because it puts you right in the middle of the mess, so it becomes impossible to ignore.
4. It’s hard to get rid of sentimental things
Sentimental items are particularly hard to deal with. Sometimes decluttering means going through our whole life in objects, and that can require moving through grief, guilt, trauma, and more. No wonder we feel overwhelmed and anxious about it!
5. Clutter (and decluttering) can make you feel guilty
Many of us hold onto things out of obligation, guilt, or shame. Someone gifted it to you, or you’ll feel ungrateful to get rid of something expensive you bought and never used, it once belonged to a past loved one, etc.
Those complicated emotions are an invitation for stress and anxiety to enter the conversation.
6. Future worries, i.e., What if I need this later?
Confronting decisions on what to get rid of can trigger feelings of future apprehension and anxiety.
If I get rid of this, what happens if I need it?
What if I can’t find another solution?
What if I can’t afford to replace it?
What if there’s a belt-related emergency and now I only have 10 belts instead of my original 400?
Then we’re stressed out just thinking about it!
A cluttered environment makes your mental health worse.
We have a ton of studies to show that a cluttered environment has a supremely negative effect on our mental health. We feel overwhelmed by too much stuff, the visual input is tough to process, we feel anxious just thinking about all of those decisions…
A messy house increases our mental load. Each undone task is a little blinking red light in our periphery to make us feel like we’re always falling behind.
So when it comes to taking care of ourselves, decluttering can be a solid step forward.
How to create an environment that supports mental wellness.
But don’t worry–I’m not going to dump all this information on you without offering a real solution!
Home Heal: De-Stress Your Space is a 30-day process that takes you through the whole house with specific steps and tools to help you find success. And we’re so sure it works that if, at the end of your 30 days, you’re not totally satisfied with the results, we’ll give you 100% of your money back and a hand-written apology note for wasting your time.
Home Heal is not a stand-in for professional medical advice or mental health treatment. If you need professional mental health support, please pursue it.
