Health
Cleaning Up Your Life: How Clutter Can Affect Your Health
Guest Blogger: Dixie Somers
It starts out slowly. You hang on to something that you no longer use for sentimental reasons. You keep the kids’ things after they leave for college “just in case”. You buy new gadgets and gizmos because they are supposed to help make your life easier, but they just end up taking up more space on the counter. One day you look around and you’re surrounded by clutter. It may seem like just an inconvenience, but that clutter affects you in more ways than you know.
Physical Effects
All that stuff lying around doesn’t just look messy. It makes a room hard to clean. It collects dust and dander. And that can lead to upper respiratory problems, especially if someone in your household is prone to allergies. If the clutter is in your bedroom, it may be keeping you from getting a good night’s sleep. When your room is cluttered, so is your mind. It is hard to relax in a cluttered room and if you aren’t relaxed, you won’t be able to fall asleep. Clutter may even be impacting how much you exercise. If you have to spend 10 minutes looking for your running shoes before heading out for a jog, you’re a lot less likely to go.
Emotional Effects
Clutter affects your mood as much as it does your body. A cluttered home leads to stress and an inability to concentrate. Scientists have shown that when a room is cluttered, you experience a kind of visual overload. Your mind has a hard time deciding what to concentrate on, so it doesn’t concentrate on anything fully. You wind up feeling unfocused and unproductive. You may also end up feeling depressed with the mess and your inability to keep your home clean.
Effects on Relationships
All that clutter doesn’t just affect you; it affects your relationships with others. You’re feeling tired from lack of sleep. You’re feeling stressed and unfocused and your self-esteem is dropping. How easy-going are you going to be with your spouse, friends, or kids? Clutter can also be isolating if you are hesitant to invite people over because of the mess.
Cleaning Up
The first step is to start small. Don’t plan to clean out an entire room in one afternoon. Work for 20 minutes cleaning up a small area, then quit until tomorrow. Everything you touch should either have a place to go or go to the garbage. You could also sell some of the things you don’t want to keep on eBay or Craigslist, but don’t use that as an excuse to start another pile. Be efficient! For those items you just can’t part with, consider renting a storage unit, like North Brunswick NJ storage units.
Devote a little time every day to taking control of the clutter. Before long you’ll be clutter-free!
About the Author
This article was written by Dixie Somers on behalf of extraspace.com. For more information on storage units in North Brunswick, NJ, visit their website.
