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Writer's pictureS. A. Crow

How Physical Clutter Affects Your Mental Health


How physical clutter can affect your mental health.

By Brandy Bullock

Guest Author


Recently I had to take a step back from my writing, creating and even some social events. Not because I was too busy or unable to meet deadlines but because the physical clutter around me was preventing me from working, socializing and even wanting to be at my desk. It wasn’t just my desk that was the problem though. There were things piling up around the house, junk mail, shipping boxes from Amazon orders, clothes that needed to be put away.


All kind of mundane things for some people, simple throw the boxes and the junk mail away and put the laundry away right? I need to make space to do those things, mentally and physically. This is actually very hard for me to write and admit too, don’t get me wrong my house isn’t dirty but it can be very cluttered.


I work outside of the house three days a week, my husband works four days a week at his full time job and then with me on the three days I work. My daughter goes to school and work. We are a busy family. So over time small things that should only take a minute or so sometimes build up.


Now you might be thinking but you are home four days a week. You can’t keep your house clutter free? No, I can’t because I have other health problems that keep me from being able to do those mundane tasks, I have what some people refer to as invisible illnesses. Chronic migraines and body pain, depression and anxiety. They sometimes paralyze me from being able to do something as simple as throwing out the junk mail.


I am not going to beat around the bush here, it is incredibly difficult to rationalize why I can’t throw away junk mail. I know it is junk and that I don’t need it. I know that keeping it means it is just taking up space on the table. But something inside me says “We need to hang onto this”. If someone else picks it up and throws it away I might experience a bit of anxiety, but I know that I really don’t need it.


So picture this, you got a couple orders from Amazon and we all know that some of those boxes are great boxes, so my brain says, we should hang onto those boxes. Even though we don’t need them right now, we might need them in the future. So we set the boxes to the side and the kids move them around, the cats play in them. But we still are not using the boxes. Do you think I get rid of them? Nope. Because my brain says that if we do then we will need them and not have them any longer.


So other than some irrational thought that I might need these items how else do they affect my mental health? The more that things pile up the more my anxiety increases about the amount of clutter, even a small pile of papers on the table. I get cranky about small things, why can’t I just get rid of it, why hasn’t someone else thrown it away? I stop being creative, I don’t even want to be in the space because of a pile of clutter.


It has been a long journey to find away to keep clutter at bay so that I don’t have to go through the binge cycle of cleaning and having long periods of time that I am unable to be creative. I have read dozens of articles and watched videos on how to declutter my space and keep it clutter free. But none of them seem to work long term for the way my brain works, it will help for a week or two but then there is like a short circuit and my brain says, this isn’t working, we are using too much energy trying to do it all.


So I have to decide between burning out trying to keep up with everything or figure out how to ignore the clutter that builds up around me. I don’t feel like there is a grey area to a middle ground. I am frustrated and that rolls over into my relationships, I am cranky and short tempered. I know it isn’t anyone’s fault. I know that this should be a simple remedy but still my brain has me convinced that we can’t keep it up.


I drop all my creative work. I stop engaging with friends, writing groups, I back out of events. But it doesn’t stop there, because I also don’t get anything decluttered, I feel defeated. I feel heavy. I try to ask my family, please help me and they do. I still feel heavy though because I haven’t done it. Now I feel bad for asking someone else to do the thing that I seem unable to do.


I have turned to a habit tracker to try to make sense of patterns of high and low energy. Tracking my days where I have migraines and my blood sugar is high. Those days seem to be the worst if I try to push myself to do even small tasks. I don’t set hard limits on how many days I need to do something, this is just a way for me to see if I can find a pattern in the chaos. So far it is working. I am able to see that on days where I have low energy I can still do some of the mundane things, throw out clutter, load the dishwasher (even if I don’t get it unloaded later). On days where I have migraines or high blood sugar, I allow myself the time to rest and I don’t force myself to do anything but focus on my health. Those days I ask a little more of my family.


Maybe it isn’t perfect, I will probably never have a totally clutter free house, but it makes the heavy feeling ease up, the feelings of needing to pull away from friends ease up and I can engage again. I can function at some level everyday and accomplish tasks. So now it is one day at a time, doing what I can while being aware of my energy level.



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