Ways To De-clutter Your Home
If you’re fighting the urge to be a pack rat, getting ready for a move, or just looking for ways to make your living space cleaner and more conducive to focus and relaxation, the name of the game is ‘declutter your home!’ Maybe you have attempted this in the past only to find that you just didn’t have the heart to get rid of all those sentimental trinkets and “potentially useful – maybe – one-day“ items that never seem to have an organized place to fit?
Fear not, for some brilliant minds who study in the field of psychology have figured out what drives the hoarder’s mentality and how to rework your thoughts of ‘needing all of this stuff.’ Soon you’ll be enjoying your minimalistic, clean and organized house while never missing any of that old stuff that once had you crammed into your tiny living space with no elbow room to think straight.
The Psychology Behind It
Okay, so maybe I am pointing out a more extreme case of the matter while your deal is not quite that bad. But still seeking a little motivation, in either case, to best understand how to motivate yourself to get rid of cluttered items is to first understand some of the more extreme examples of what motivates you to keep it in the first place.
We humans, while pridefully toting our unusually enlarged cerebral cortexes, still share many similarities with our little brothers of the animal kingdom when it comes to the rest of our brains and physical being. In alignment with that fact, we, like animals, navigate and function through large portions of our daily lives reacting to things and making decisions – not based on thought or logic, but on sheer impulses.
So you may say, “That’s great and all, but what does this have to do with decluttering your home?” Well, I’m glad you asked! This information is important for dealing with clutter because these very same impulses are what affect your decision to put that old shirt that your ex got you back in the storage box instead of just getting rid of it.
Getting Started
The beliefs and impulses that you currently have likely came from some story that you were told or have lived through. Even if you have lived through that story, as you recall it from your distant past, at this point, it too is nothing but a story that you repeat to yourself, which would vanish from the known universe just like closing a story book if you somehow lost the memory of it.
As you go through your old junk, you pick up some old relic of your past that you hadn’t seen in years. The truth is, you hadn’t even thought of it. You’d all but forgotten that you even still had it. At that crucial moment, resist the urge to get nostalgic over that item.
If that item had been stolen, you would not have even known. If it’s with some kind of obscure value, then keeping it buried away in a deep corner of your closet where it will sit and do nothing but crowd your space, is even worse than wasting it. Even by throwing it in the trash, there’s a chance of it being useful to someone somewhere, then as it sits forgotten in your cluttery mess. Give it away!
Photography
If you develop sentimental attachments to things, take pictures of those objects, file them in a scrap book or on a hard drive and give the item away or simply throw it out. You retain the memories and nostalgia at the storage weight of one book.
Philanthropy
Give stuff away! You don’t need it! Find things you own that are cool but you don’t use. Give them to someone who will! Find reasons that speak to your impulses to get rid of things. Tell yourself whatever story you need to hear to convince you that throwing it away is the right thing to do.
The problem of clutter may seem like a physical matter, but it stems from thoughts. Research the methods to retrain your thoughts and patterns and you can apply it not only to decluttering your house but in any aspect of life which you feel you need to improve upon. A clean living space starts with a clean mind, and a clean mind is most clean in a clean living space.
