Clutter and Mental Health are integrally connected. It’s hard to maintain a clean home when your mental health is suffering. At the same time, clutter is bad for your brain—causing cognitive overload and worsening memory. This may exacerbate the stress and anxiety you are feeling.

Taking the first step toward decluttering your home is always the hardest. But, once you get started, you may find it incrementally easier to live in a clean, clutter-free home that supports your mental health and overall well-being.

Mental health and cluttered spaces

The last few years have been tough on everyone’s mental health. COVID-19, global conflict and economic uncertainty have caused many people to feel increased stress and anxiety about the future. Fortunately, hard-working therapists and psychiatrists have made it easier to talk about mental health stigmas so you can better understand the way your brain works.

Anxiety

Everyone experiences some amount of anxiety. Feeling a little anxious about the cleanliness of your space may even be a good thing. Mild, adaptive anxiety can be helpful, as it pushes you to complete healthy behaviours like getting vaccinated and cleaning up your space regularly.

However, as Emily O’Bryan (a postdoctoral fellow at the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut) explains, “worry can become excessive,” and “have costs, including distracting people from what they value and unnecessarily increasing distress.”

If you feel anxious about your cluttered space but feel unable to do anything about it, you may be suffering from excessive anxiety and be at risk of slipping into a mental tornado. This can lead to a spiral of overwhelming negative thoughts and behaviours that won’t improve the cleanliness of your space or your overall mental health.

Depression

Messy spaces and depression can also worsen one another. When you live in a home that is disorganized and overflowing with stuff, you’re more likely to feel fatigued and easily overwhelmed by even the smallest of challenges. That’s because highly cluttered spaces cause your body to release the stress hormone known as cortisol, which causes a continual “fight-or-flight” response in your already-tired body. 

Messy spaces can also cause a deep sense of shame that increases symptoms of your depression. As a result, you’ll be less likely to invite people over and may find that your social life starts to suffer, too.

How decluttering can help

Decluttering isn’t a silver bullet that will instantly solve all your mental health issues, but it can be a positive step towards living a healthier, less-stressed life. That’s because clean homes may invoke feelings of calm and help you feel a heightened sense of responsibility for your space and mental well-being.

Living in a cleaner space can also improve your physical health. Dusty, unkempt spaces can exacerbate conditions like allergies and dry eye. By cleaning out your home, you’ll whisk away excess dust and may even reduce some irritating symptoms at the same time.

It’s easy to become more anxious and overwhelmed when you are experiencing physical irritants. Furthermore, without physical irritants, you will feel healthier and more easily able to work on mental health issues by engaging in physical activity.

Decluttering practices for mental health

Decluttering your space to improve your mental health might sound good, but actually getting out the feather dusters and bin bags can feel like a tall order.

Start by choosing one area of your home to focus on. You don’t need to clean your whole house in one go, and doing so will only deepen the negative associations you have between cleaning and hard work. Instead, tidy your desk or clean the floor space in your bedroom. You can even set a 10-minute timer to ensure that you don’t overwork yourself.

As you get better at keeping small spaces clean, try to build momentum and keep larger areas of your house tidy, too. You can make this process more efficient by focusing on the larger day-to-day tasks that have to be done to keep your space looking good. For example, if you drink a lot of tea or coffee, create a habit of washing up your cups rather than leaving them lying around all day.

Every so often, you’ll need to complete a deep clean of your home to get rid of excess dirt and dust that hides in hard-to-reach corners. You don’t need to deep clean every day or even every week. You may even find that a longer cleaning session every few months is sufficient.

Try to plan these deep cleaning days well in advance and get everyone on board. This will create a “can-do” mindset in your house, and extra hands will make the process that much quicker.

Small changes can make a big difference

Decluttering can improve your mental health and help you escape negative thought spirals. Start by cleaning a single space in your house and work from there. Even small changes—like cleaning your dishes as soon as you use them—can make a big difference to the overall cleanliness of your home. Just be sure to get everyone on board, as this will speed up the process and help you avoid conflict.

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image 1 Marjan from Pixabay 2 Photo by Sarah Brown on Unsplash 3 Photo by Daniel Chen on Unsplash

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