“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” Maya Angelou
For many of us, the concept of home is more than simply a residence or the space where the business of daily living is conducted. Home is the place where we feel safe and find refuge from the world and is an important factor in both our overall physical, mental, and emotional health. Studies have found that a strong and positive attachment to the place where we live not only impacts our sense of life satisfaction, but can also change our physiology, exerting strong and subtle influences on our stress levels, weight, sleep, and how we navigate life.
On a physical level, a home is the place where we store the stuff needed for daily living, and how we organize and arrange our belongings is key to how we experience this space. We all need stuff to make it comfortably through our day. The lure of possessions is strong in our consumer culture, and since they are easy to acquire, things can pile up quickly. But tolerance for stuff has a tipping point; our possessions shift from being useful and enjoyable to being a burden when they bring chaos to our living space. Clutter can be more than just an annoyance; it can be a serious threat to our health. Disorganized stuff can close in on us, leading to feelings of stress and overwhelm and creates harmful levels of stress. Clutter erodes our sense of safety, causing us to lose things or forget to pay important bills, and sends us scrambling to hide piles of junk before visitors arrive.
Clutter is in the eye of the beholder and not all of it is harmful. Chronic decluttering comes with its own health hazards which can squeeze the enjoyment out of life, and research suggests that in small doses, some clutter may even make us more creative. Studies have found that people working at desks that were slightly cluttered were more likely to generate novel ideas compared to those at desks that were extremely tidy. It seems a little bit of mess might make us feel more relaxed. Other studies show that environments that are highly organized and exceedingly neat make us more likely to be conformists and follow the rules—the military has known about this for a long time. For creativity and unconventional thinking, a little bit of chaos may be necessary to grow fresh ideas and perspectives.
Creative thinking aside, in general, living and working in a disorganized environment has a cumulative effect on our ability to pay attention. The brain prefers order and looks for patterns in its surroundings. Messiness and clutter create visual distractions that hijack our attention and drain our cognitive resources, making it harder to retain and process information accurately. The distraction of clutter makes it harder for us to make good decisions and can lead to feelings of being overwhelmed. Researchers using MRI scans and other physiological measurements found that the simple act of clearing clutter from one’s surroundings results in significant improvements in attention, information processing, productivity, and, unsurprisingly, leads to an elevation of mood.
Since it impairs our ability to make appropriate choices, clutter can also change how we eat. One study showed that people in messy rooms were more likely to select a chocolate bar for a snack, whereas those in tidy environments preferred an apple. Evidence also shows that we eat more when surrounded by clutter. People sitting in disorganized kitchens tended to eat twice as much snack food than people in a clean and tidy one. Home cooking, which is associated with healthier eating, is much harder to navigate in a messy kitchen. People are more likely to order take out when faced with a messy kitchen or limited counter space, even if they enjoy cooking. We tend to focus on willpower when it comes to improving our eating habits. Tidying up the kitchen may be a simple, but overlooked, step that can make that goal a bit easier to reach.
It's no surprise that clutter can make us feel stressed, anxious, and even depressed. Clutter triggers a low-grade fight or flight response—it is a nagging reminder about the need to attend to an unappealing task. Clutter has a physical presence, greeting us when we wake up in the morning and when we come home at night. Cortisol, the hormone that triggers the stress response, peaks at the start of the day and drops in the evening. The cycling of cortisol is important in providing just the right spark when we need it the most. It is the juice that revs our engines at the start of the day and helps us downshift as daylight subsides. Cortisol becomes problematic when it fails to fluctuate, remaining at consistently high levels throughout the day. Waking up to clutter, working in clutter, or coming home to clutter all shift this natural balance, causing cortisol levels to stay chronically high or fluctuate at inappropriate times of the day. Studies have shown that people who describe their environments as disorganized and cluttered show less variation in cortisol levels throughout the day, especially in the evenings when these levels should be dropping.
The rise and fall of daily cortisol levels play a role in the quality of our sleep. The natural decrease in cortisol levels at the end of the day, a process known as adaptive recovery, creates a shift to the production of hormones that support rest and make us sleepy. Clutter can hijack this natural process. Entering a bedroom with piles of clothes, unfolded laundry, and stacks of unread magazines when our body is winding down will bump up cortisol when it should be falling. Sleep specialists tell us it is significantly harder to fall asleep and stay asleep in a messy room, so a tidy bedroom makes a big difference in the quality of our sleep.
Those who have experienced a typical teenager’s bedroom may wonder how they can sleep soundly for hours in a room that nips at the edges of squalor. Tolerance of clutter is age related; frustration with disorganization in our surroundings increases as we get older. Clutter need not be at the level of hoarding for us to feel it’s effects; the piles of stuff here and there throughout our home that start out as an annoyance can, over time, eat away at our enjoyment of life. Even moderate levels of chronic disorganization can erode our sense of life satisfaction, and the longer a person lives with clutter, the more negatively they describe their current situation and prospects for the future. Much of the research related to clutter serves to reinforce what most of us know intuitively—life is harder when our surroundings are chaotic. A messy home can throw us off balance and interfere with our feelings of safety and refuge. Sorting through stuff and deciding what to throw away is a tedious and onerous task most find unpleasant. As clutter accumulates, it can turn our home into an endless “to do” list, rather than a place for recovery and rest.
Viewed more broadly, clutter shines a light on the strong but frequently underappreciated pull environments have on our health. There is a good deal of research showing how small changes in our living space impact our physiology and behavior, from the number of trashcans on a city street to the cleanliness of a kitchen counter. Most of us navigate different environments throughout the day, all of which shift our physiology in different ways. My work takes me to a number of different locations, each with varying levels of organization. With each shift in location, my energy level, attention, and ability to make decisions changes. From exceedingly tidy studios to filthy, unorganized gyms, I have become aware of how my surroundings shift my attention, ability to make decisions, and my mood. Awareness allows me to respond rather than react to these environments, enabling me to use resources that keep me balanced. I am reminded that we tend to look for the big obstacles that stress us out when frequently it is the mundane that, like clutter, can throw us off center and even make us miserable.
We can’t control the conditions of all the various environments we are exposed to but we can notice how each of them changes us. As we move through the day it is easy to get focused on the business of living and fail to notice our surroundings. Finding balance starts with the simple step of bringing our attention into the present moment and simply noticing. What impact do your immediate surroundings have on your mood, attention, mental acuity, and decision-making abilities? Sometimes just gaining awareness of how we react to different places is enough to keep us balanced.
We do, however, have some level of control over our home environment, and that is the place that has the greatest impact on our mental health. The stress of clutter can prevent a home from being a refuge where one’s well-being is nurtured and supported. Although we may fantasize about scooping up all our junk and tossing it into a big dumpster, clutter always grows back; clearing it away is part of the daily grind of attending to life. Whether it be from a lack of space, procrastination, or an inability to let go of what we no longer need, stuff piles up when we aren’t paying attention to what is important in life. The stress of clutter diminishes only when we tap into what we value, separating our needs from wants, and taking action to create a home environment that reflects what is important to us.
Take a moment this week to broaden your attention to the place you call home. Does it support you? What does your clutter say about what you are you attending to and what are you avoiding? How can you bring balance into this important space? The daily ritual of sorting through our stuff can be mundane and tedious, but it is a simple step that goes a long way in creating that safe and restorative place where we can, as Maya Angelou describes it, “go as we are and not be questioned.”
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