Over at Study Finds, Dr. Faith Coleman helpfully distills significant scientific research linking physical clutter to poor mental health, while supporting the idea of decluttering as a boost for numerous measures of quality of life.
Some of this is based on a fascinating study from The Journal of Environmental Psychology that evaluates what’s deemed as a person’s “sense of psychological home.”
Home, at its core, isn’t a place for us to sleep and live. It’s a place for us to feel safe and secure.
Hence, we’re fond of saying, “I’m at home in the coffee shop.” The smell, the way you’re with your favorite book or friend in a way you can’t be anywhere else, and the stakes aren’t too big and the price is small, and you feel the bustle of the crowd secures you without stifling you.
That kind of thing.
Well, it turns out that’s the way our real home should feel. The one we live in. It should be both the place we sleep and the place we feel we sleep best.
What threatens that? Well, loads of things.
But one is “possession clutter.”
“Possession clutter,” it turns out, is a great enemy of our sense of psychological home and perceived well-being, and loads of research has linked it to feelings of disconnectedness, a sense of powerlessness, and a failure to nurture a productive sense of self.
None of that is too surprising.
We all have our thresholds, of course. What’s cluttered to you might not be cluttered to me, but there’s a way to resolve that ambiguity.
And here it is – what’s the point at which your psychological sense of security within your home is threatened by clutter?
A good question to think about.
Now, I know it almost seems silly to call clutter “threatening” to our sense of security in our home, because so many things that happen at home hurt our psychological sense of security in far more profound ways, but clutter seems a much easier thing (maybe?) to address than, “Can we pay the rent this month?”
Dr. Faith Coleman then lists some of the positive benefits of decluttering for your mental health.
Among these: boosting mood by relaxing your mind, improving your physical health (a cluttered house makes us more likely to eat poorly), focusing our mind so we get stuff done (mood boost!), improving sleep, and improving relationships.
So how do we get to that? (I really want to know, because right now there are things in our house that I’m not sure can be identified. We have have two young kids, and sometimes (daily) you find something in the corner and wonder: “Was that food, at some point in its life (a disintegrating blueberry), or is it just a part of a toy?” You think about it, then decide that if it’s a crucial component of a toy, your kid will randomly — after six months — ask for that toy, and you’ll realize you just threw away, without his consent, the thing that will throw away his day. So you leave it there for your spouse to hopefully decide).
Well, Dr. Coleman has some ideas for how to actually declutter: set aside a time for it, sort items into categories, digitally declutter by getting rid of stuff like spam emails (for some reason, I get daily offers for burial insurance), and here’s a biggie.
I’m going to repeat this: Here’s a biggie. “DO NOT TOUCH EVERY ITEM, CONTEMPLATING ITS FATE.” Because it increases attachment.
I love articles like this because they’re very practical and make sense, but I also want to say that I know depression is much deeper than clutter.
It’s almost laughable, if it weren’t so sad, to reduce it to that.
In fact, when I’m depressed, I’m more likely to live a cluttered life because picking up things is too overwhelming.
So I’m sure there’s research out there showing some kind of two-way relationship, wherein clutter can contribute to worsening mental health, and worsening mental health can contribute to clutter.
And there are also scores of tidy people who are as depressed and prone to neurological mood disorders as someone who keeps plastic bags and receipts for three months because. Just because.
So I don’t want to come close to reducing our mental health to clutter. It’s something a non-depressed person might do that would dehumanize our struggle.
“You might want to clean up a little.”
“Cleanliness is next to godliness.”
“Just tidy up and you’ll feel better in no time!”
But I do appreciate tips that can, perhaps, maybe, for some of us, some of the time, help at the margins.
And here’s where I’m going rogue without scientific backing to say this – I do think that things like decluttering might act as some restraint, however small, from our depression taking hold.
I’d be interested to see some kind of study measuring it as a preventative, of some kind.
Regardless, I’m going to try to pick up a few things today.
And I really do think we should nurture and think more of this “psychological sense of of home.”
Of course, it’s much more expansive than clutter, and far more transcendent than an earthly yearning, but as we know, a “psychological sense of home” brings us back to the idea that Christ’s peace provides a sense of home that nothing else can and when we’re missing it, it feels as though we’re abandoned.
“My God, why are you so far from me?” David wrote. His despair, at some level, came from the sense that God was no longer there. It felt God had left David’s home, therefore, depriving him of his psychological sense of home.
Then, on a more hopeful note, there’s Christ’s promise of the moment when we’ll feel forever at home, because we’ll finally be home.
There’s Jesus’ promise that the Father is creating a place for us, surrounded by an eternally warm love. Like when you take the perfect nap, with the windows open on a perfect day, and a light fan is blowing in your face and you have nowhere to be when you wake up, except possibility.
You’ve got your own idea of what an eternal rest might be like.
So think about your home, on the most practical level today, but more importantly, your “psychological sense of home” and see what you find.
If you’re depressed, or struggle with any aspect of mental health…
For readers from the United States….
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
For readers, internationally, seek help from a local resource.
For those without Christ, he’s a prayer away.
[Photo: Pexels, free stock photography. As a P.S., I think some clutter (for example, on a city street or in an artist’s studio, or even a forgotten elderly man’s one bedroom apartment) can be both visually arresting, mystical and mysterious. And again, clutter itself is not a bad thing because who can really define what’s “cluttered?” That’s why the conceptualizing of clutter as something that diminishes our sense of psychological home is so important. It graciously accounts for our different thresholds and preferences].
