What Actually Matters in Decluttering for Mental Health

Your peace is the product.

Most of us have a pile with a promise attached: the mail we will sort this weekend, the books we will get to someday. We walk past it every day and quietly add it to the list of things to deal with. It is a small thing, and it is also somewhere your attention goes a little each time. Researchers have been asking why, and what we make of their answers is the reason we think a gentle start is worth trying.

A crowded room asks more of you than it seems

The starting point is how the brain handles what it sees. Princeton neuroscientists Stephanie McMains and Sabine Kastner found that when several visual stimuli appear at once, they compete for representation in the visual cortex, and attention can tilt that competition (McMains & Kastner, 2011). That was a lab study of images, but it gives a plain way to picture a counter covered in mail, keys and half-finished projects: many small things asking to be noticed at once.

Studies of real homes point the same direction. At UCLA, Darby Saxbe and Rena Repetti followed 30 dual-income couples, and the wives who described their homes as cluttered or unfinished showed flatter daily cortisol patterns and more low mood through the day (Saxbe & Repetti, 2010). A survey of about 1,400 people with clutter problems, led by Catherine Roster, tied clutter to a weaker sense of home and lower well-being (Roster, Ferrari & Jurkat, 2016). Experiments add that a messy room may also shape what we do in it. People in cluttered rooms said they were more likely to buy things and did worse on tasks that needed more advanced thinking (Chae & Zhu, 2014), and a conference study by Pamela Thacher reported more trouble sleeping as clutter went up (WTOP, 2015).

Put together, we read these findings as a picture of attention being spent. The home people describe and the way they feel in it seem to travel together, and the rooms we use most are where that spending adds up.

Mess is not the villain of the story, though. In a Minnesota experiment, people in a tidy room donated more and more often chose an apple over a chocolate bar, while people in a messy room came up with ideas that judges rated as more creative (Vohs, Redden & Rahinel, 2013). Our takeaway is that order and looseness each suit different moments. A desk in the middle of a project can look chaotic and work well. The spaces where you eat, sleep and unwind are the ones we would want to feel calm.

Why we would start small

Less research follows people while they actually tidy. One interview study by Hsin-Hsuan Meg Lee, with 11 women who had used the KonMari method, found that all of them came to enjoy tidying more, and that many found letting go easier than keeping things in order afterward (Journalist’s Resource summary). That matches what we would expect. The sorting can feel good in the moment, and the upkeep is the part that asks for a plan. So we would start with something small enough to keep up, and let the result tell you whether it helps.

How we would begin

Choose one surface you pass every day, such as the kitchen counter or the nightstand. Set a timer for fifteen minutes and sort what is there into three piles: keep here, keep somewhere else, and let go. Anything you cannot decide about goes into one box with a date on it, and you look again when the date comes.

Keep what you use or love. A bedside stack of books you have not read yet can still be a pleasure, and the Roster team noted that a manageable collection can be healthy. The goal is a space you can live with, and a perfect one is not required. When something does go, let it go close to home. Donate or pass on what is still usable, and put items in the recycling bin only when you know your local program accepts them, as the EPA advises (EPA, Frequent Questions about Recycling). We would hold off on buying storage until the sorting is done, because bins hold what you keep and it helps to see how much that is first.

A tidy shelf is a pleasant thing, but it is not a treatment. If low mood, anxiety or poor sleep are affecting your days, a doctor or mental health professional can help in ways a clear counter cannot.

The bottom line

If it costs your calm, let it go. That applies to the clutter and to the pressure to clear all of it. One surface, one week, your pace.