The Benefits of Decluttering Your Home
Minimalism and the process of cluttering one’s home is big news right now. There are even best -selling books based solely on telling you how to get rid of your stuff, which does seem to defeat the object of living with less somewhat!
If you’re wondering why this might be and why more people are opting to live lives as free of excess as possible, you might be interested to know that decluttering can actually improve your life in a myriad of ways. Here are a few of them:
It Improves Focus and Clarity
If you decide to declutter your home, one of the first things you will notice is that you immediately start to feel better mentally. When you have lots of stuff, it can overwhelm you. You spend all of your time looking at it, thinking about it and trying to keep it in good condition, and when you fail to do this, you feel uncomfortable. You look at the clutter and mess, and it makes you feel anxious. When you take the step to send your stuff to storage units, or even better sell or donate it, you feel like a weight has lifted off your mind and you’re able to live more comfortably in your space. Basically, the less cluttered your home, the better your peace of mind will be.
It Boosts Creativity
There is something of a debate raging around this one because a lot of creative people are pretty messy, but a study conducted by Princeton found that the less cluttered the environment, the more creative the person. It’s easy to see why this would be the case. If for example, you’re distracted by that mountain of laundry or the papers piling up on your desk, you aren’t going to be giving your work your all, and you might not come up with those killer concepts quite so easily.
It Improves Sleep
Do you ever lie in bed at night thinking about that stack of dishes in the kitchen or the clothes strewn all over your closet floor? You’re surely not alone. Clutter makes us anxious and unable to switch off quite so easily at night. By decluttering, we can get more sleep by minimizing the number of worries we have to keep us awake at night.
Decluttering your bedroom, even if you do nothing else, is pretty important, not only because it will help you sleep at night, but also because studies have shown that people who sleep in messy rooms are at greater risk of developing hoarding disorder in the future.
It Enables You to Let Go
If you’re holding on to the stuffed animal your ex won for you at the country fair; you’re going to find it a lot harder to move on than you would if you cut that stuff loose, declutter your home and focus on the present. I’, not saying that you need to get rid of all of your keepsakes, but the fewer things of this kind you have, the better for your emotional health.
Have you decluttered your home? How did it help you with your life?
