Have you ever walked around your house and wondered how you happened to collect all that stuff? Or walked into a room and walked right back out? Or scan your desk and think about all those neglected papers and unopened bills lying in a pile? Or looked at your calendar and became overwhelmed by all of the appointments, play dates and PTA meetings? What about your email inbox? Or you’re to do list? All of these things have one thing in common, clutter.
Clutter is not necessarily the amount of stuff you have but rather the amount of space you have for the stuff. If you owned a two bedroom apartment vs a twelve bedroom estate the amount of stuff you have would appear drastically different and would have a much different effect on your physical and emotional to process the “stuff.”
Whether we realize it or not, clutter plays a large role in our ability to function and process things around us. A recent study completed at the University of New Mexico found that clutter compromises an individual’s perception of home and ultimately affected their feelings of satisfaction with life. The study found that people identify so closely with their home environments that clutter can interfere with the pleasure they experience when being in that environment. If we can’t be happy in our own homes, where can we be happy? Our homes should be our retreat from the craziness of the outside world, having to many things in our given space makes our homes feel more like a prison.
In addition to our emotional wellbeing, clutter also affects our ability to visually process our environments and our abilities to think clearly. Think about this; your standing at a busy intersection with earphones on and music playing waiting to cross the street, you see children playing and running around in the school yard beside you, a fire truck with it sirens and lights blazing coming from one direction, and a police car doing the same coming from the other direction with cars quickly trying to get through the intersection ahead of them, did you notice the light changed allowing you to cross the street?
Another example, imagine you around looking at a table, on the table there are twelve objects of various sizes, shapes and colours along with a stack of papers, some bills and an empty take out container, now find your keys, difficult right? Now put that to the scale of your house or office. When there is so much stuff going on around us it becomes difficult to notice things that matter, things that we are looking for, but don’t end up seeing and after a day full of this we become fatigued and overwhelmed by our environments and unable to process our environments affectively .
A study out of the University of Toronto suggests that “mental clutter” is one of the leading causes of age related memory loss. Their research suggests that if you are unable to get through the material clogging up your neural networks, you’ll be slower and less efficient in processing information resulting in an incapacitated state when performing memory tasks.
So next time you are feeling overwhelmed and can’t figure out what is causing it, take a look around your environment, perhaps it’s your clutter that’s causing it. And if it is, give me a call. I’d be happy to help you get started decluttering and organizing your life.
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