The Challenge of Clutter in Modern Life
In today’s fast-paced world, buying has become incredibly convenient. We can add items to our cart and make purchases on our phone while waiting for our coffee order. We can buy new bath towels between meetings or a jacket during an Uber ride. With social media feeds and sales notifications constantly vying for our attention, the temptation to keep buying more is ever-present.
However, this convenience comes at a cost. It often results in overly stuffed wardrobes, groaning garages, and cluttered cupboards. If you have a few piles—or an entire room—of clutter that you look at and can’t seem to tackle, you are not alone. According to The Australia Institute, 88 per cent of homes have at least one cluttered room—the average is three or more rooms overrun with clutter.
The Volume of Stuff We Own
We have more stuff than humanity has ever had before. A much-touted US-based statistic claims that the average home is weighed down by a whopping 300,000 items. That number includes everything from a couch to a paperclip and is hard to substantiate, but it doesn’t seem impossible. Add to that this sobering number: of all the things we have in our homes, about 80 per cent will never (ever) be used.
That’s a lot of stuff living with us that we don’t really need. And it’s dragging us down, with one in two people feeling overwhelmed by the clutter in their homes. And why not, when another survey said that we spend an average of 153 days (about 3670 hours) over our lifetime looking for lost items. That’s almost half a year of preventable searching.
The average Australian home has three or more rooms overrun with stuff—most of which will never be used.
Even so, most of us (62 per cent, says the 2024 Choosi Clutter 2.0 Report) find it hard to carve out time to get things in order. But we really should because a house filled with unnecessary items can have a direct effect on our mental health and other aspects of our lives.
The Impact of Clutter on Health
Clutter has been said to increase levels of cortisol, which can lead to negative emotions and depression. And it hits women harder.
“Women are not only working longer hours than ever, they continue to unfairly carry the mental load and physical demands of raising a family and running a household,” says Sydney-based clinical psychologist Dr Ingerith Martin, who specialises in women’s mental health and anxiety disorders. “Multitasking in this way is cognitively fatiguing, and negatively impacts our ability to use our cognitive resources in other ways, particularly decision making.”
A house rammed with things is linked to increased anxiety, poorer sleep, poorer food choices and reduced focus. And it can worsen when there are financial concerns, which narrows our mental bandwidth and ramps up fears of future loss. If it gets to hoarding stakes (a disorder that affects about 2.6 per cent of adults worldwide, according to the American Psychiatric Association), it can pose serious health risks.
But we can’t just blame it all on social media and the ease of purchasing. Psychology tells us that why we hold onto things is often linked to issues such as anxiety and stress, financial pressures, being time poor and feeling overworked.
“Sometimes we hold onto items out of the fear we might need them in the future, [which is called] ‘loss aversion’,” says Martin. “This fear might be financially based, especially in times of high cost of living and not wanting to ‘waste’ money on re-purchasing in the future. We can also be emotionally attached to items (such as children’s artworks) and fear feelings of loss and throwing these away. Often, however, it’s simply a reflection of not having the time, energy, mental space or cognitive resources to sort through items to consider whether we need to keep them or not.”
De-cluttering: An Emotional and Economic Process
De-cluttering is not just about the physical, it’s also emotional and economic. We hold onto things that have both perceived value (which is often a lot more than the monetary value) and emotional ties—usually in the form of memories, nostalgia or guilt. That dinner set we don’t use but was passed down to us from our grandmother can be a burden that feels very hard to get out of the house.
Decision fatigue and fear of letting go is not only rendering our garages, spare rooms, wardrobes and cupboards useless, it’s also forcing us to find solutions outside our own walls. In Australia alone, we spend more than $3 billion dollars on self-storage—usually to store things we will never use again. There’s a literal mountain of unnecessary stuff on our proverbial shoulders.
How To Get Started
My own journey to wanting to de-clutter my home started when I was pregnant with my second son six years ago. Our spare room was called the study and, yes, it had a desk in it, but—like many spare rooms—had become a catch-all for the things we didn’t know what to do with. And I, too, was among the 62 per cent of people who found it hard to carve out enough time to really tackle the issue head on. But my son was coming and this was to be his room.
It started with a Pinterest board of what I wanted his room to look like, and then something changed. The feeling of turfing stuff and turning it into my son’s room felt like progress. Not only did I have a room to welcome my baby into, the weight of all those things stuffed into storage boxes and cupboards that we had (literally) shut the door on so many times had lifted. Piles of things went out for good—things I’d once felt were important enough to keep—and I found that I didn’t miss them at all.
Multitasking in this way is cognitively fatiguing, and negatively impacts our ability to use our cognitive resources in other ways, particularly decision making.”
Dr Ingerith Martin
“Clutter can very much influence our mental state,” says Martin. “It can lead to feelings of overwhelm and feelings of being out of control, [which can] lead to higher levels of stress. Reducing clutter and leading a more organised life can reduce feelings of overwhelm and enhance wellbeing.”
I have moved three times since that first overhaul, and in each of those moves I made it my goal to de-clutter further. To rid myself of the things that don’t matter, to reduce distractions in my personal world, feel more intentional in my buying, and only have the things I love around me.
Words Of Advice
To help in my quest, I—like many others—read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo (which has sold more than 14 million copies worldwide), followed by her subsequent book Spark Joy. Kondo is considered the queen of minimalism and her lessons about tidying and de-cluttering helped me make sense of the mess. One of my favourite rules—and the one Kondo is most famed for—is to hold things in your hands to see if they spark joy. I got pretty good at this method and threw out a lot when they gave me nothing.
I’ve also become very good at making trips to charity shops to donate kids’ clothing, kitchen items (do I really need five whisks?), platters, toys and books. I started up a Facebook Marketplace page and sold chairs and chests of drawers. I ordered a council collection and heaped things onto my front lawn more times than I’d like to admit.
When De-Cluttering Stalls
And then I got stuck. Decision fatigue can stall even the most diligent of minimalist-wannabes and there were times when I just didn’t know what move to make. “Do we keep, toss or donate?” asks Martin. “Every time we consider one of these options, we need to make a decision, and when we have to make multiple decisions in a row it becomes exhausting. Pair this with the difficult feelings of loss aversion or anxiety, and it becomes even harder.”
I had to look for other ways to make decisions. One I liked was the $20 in 20 rule: if you can buy it for under $20 in 20 minutes, you can throw it away. This works so well on things that you never use but find hard to toss because your brain says, “But maybe I will need it one day.” As mentioned, a big reason we hold onto things is because we fear regretting giving something away only to need it again later. I think about this a lot. Will my sons need their paint set one day in the future? Even though one of them is in high school and the other does quite enough painting at school. The $20 in 20 rule works well here. I can get a paint set on Amazon delivered tomorrow, or I can pop down to the supermarket and get one now.
I don’t need to have one constantly on hand.
Psychology tells us that why we hold onto things is often linked to issues such as anxiety and stress, financial pressures, being time poor and feeling overworked.
Clothing is a big one here too. What if I feel like wearing that top again some day? Could that jacket come back into style? What if my niece wants this dress one day? A better tool here is the one-year rule. If you haven’t worn it all year, you can feel pretty confident that you will never wear it again. Honestly, I pushed this out to two years to really make sure, and I still managed to get rid of an awful lot of things. Of course, if you love it and it means something to you, you can keep it. I still have my wedding dress for example, even though I am no longer married. It means something to me, so I keep it.
Minimalism, for me anyway, is a process not a destination. I am certainly not a model student all of the time, and there’s always more to do to whittle things down. Still, having minimalism as my North Star has made a huge difference to my life—and my kitchen drawers. And I hold to it.
But I’m also human, and often have to deal with little clutter bonfires that spring up. Bikes and trikes. Kids’ schoolbooks that come home at the end of the year. A stack of art made out of cornflakes boxes. It can all add up quickly. Even Kondo, who wrote both of her bestsellers before she had children, admits that stemming the tide on clutter is made harder with kids around.
Rules To Live By
I do my best to keep calm and carry on. I “Marie Kondo” and see what sparks joy. I also ask my sons what they love or not and we toss most things and keep a little. The contents of your home needs to be kept on a leash or it can quickly run away from you. So, when one thing comes in, I make it a rule to get rid of something else. Two or three things are even better. When you know you have to lose something in order to gain something, it does make you think about whether you really want it in the first place.
Another rule doing the rounds on social media that I’ve found helpful with my buying decisions is the 30/30 rule. It says that if you want to purchase something non-essential over $30, you need to wait at least 30 hours first. The rule compounds to items priced over $100, with it urging you to pause for an entire 30 days before buying. It is tough but it does make you more mindful with your spending.
The pros say that decluttering has the positive effect of reducing our stress levels, making us feel calmer and reducing clutter-related anxiety. It could even make us eat better (high rates of clutter have been linked to poor eating habits and obesity). And those who crunch the numbers say that simplifying our contents at home could reduce our cleaning time by up to 40 per cent.
I now live in an apartment where everything has a place, so I know where things go and where they will likely be when I want them. We are not perfect, but we try to put things back when we are done with them. It feels calm in my home and I have reduced my mental load. Of course, this doesn’t mean that life doesn’t make me feel pressured at times, but at least I know that my kitchen drawers aren’t adding to the overwhelm.
As mundane as it might seem, knowing exactly where everything is—from where the spare batteries are kept to where we hang the car keys—really does spark a lot of joy.
Minimalism 101: Ways To Get There
If you are up to your eyeballs in clutter, here are some ways to approach it, according to clinical psychologist Dr Ingerith Martin.
Start small
“We can improve our motivation to begin the decluttering process by setting small, achievable goals. This helps reduce feelings of overwhelm.”
Section by section
“‘Chunking’ the task into different categories and setting a time in our diaries to dedicate to the task will help to reduce procrastination.”
Lean on friends
“Enlisting a friend or partner for moral and practical support will keep us accountable and also help regulate our emotions.”
See the end goal
“Understanding that decluttering will help [to improve] feelings of anxiety, stress and wellbeing can be motivating.”
Set a diary date
“Inviting some friends over for dinner the following week can also be motivating and keep us accountable.”
