Decluttering for Self Care

As wildly successful organizational gurus demonstrate, the way we feel about our homes is a big deal (and big business). In a survey conducted this June by home warranty provider Cinch Home Services, 70.3% of respondents reported going on a cleaning spree since the beginning of the pandemic, and 62.6% said they were now “very or extremely” committed to keeping their living spaces clean. That said, 45.9% said they still felt embarrassed by the current cleanliness of those spaces. And that feels lousy.

The good news? When you can put a dent in your home’s disorder, you’ll change both it and your mental landscape. Decluttering deserves a priority slot on your to-do list because it removes roadblocks to doing everything else — and we’ve got the science to prove it. Here are 10 ways clutter can steal your thunder (and 10 ways you can expect to get it back).

In a fascinating Dutch study, subjects were assigned to both clutter-free rooms and “disorderly” ones scattered with papers and office items. They were then asked to donate to a charity and choose a snack, and those who had spent time in the more organized spaces made larger donations and chose healthier snacks (that is, an apple versus a chocolate bar) than those who had been in the more chaotic rooms. As the researchers noted, an orderly environment is conducive to “more desirable, normatively good behaviors.”

Research published in Environment & Behavior, in turn, reveals that a disorganized kitchen can have an even more pronounced effect on what we consume. In this study, female undergraduates completed “taste-rating tasks” in kitchens that were either organized or chaotic (with out-of-place furniture, piles of paper and pots and dishes in haphazard places). They were required to try several types of foods, then told that they could continue eating as much as they liked — and some of the subjects in the chaotic kitchen environments consumed more cookies than those in more regulated spaces. The ones who didn’t consume more cookies had been instructed to think about a time when they had felt particularly in control of themselves. Lesson one: Removing distracting clutter from your kitchen can help curtail mindless snacking. Lesson two: In the meantime, having a proactive mind-set can counteract that clutter’s ability to trigger the munchies.

To explore a potential relationship between decluttering and sleep hygiene, researchers from St. Lawrence University in New York studied more than 1,000 subscribers to a housekeeping website. Those who reported they’d developed a weekly habit of tidying and discarding objects in their bedrooms had better sleep quality and fewer sleep-related problems than those who did not — and while those effects were more pronounced early in the study, they were still noticeable three years later. In other words, if you’re having trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, what goes on around your bed could be just as important as what’s going on in your bed.