Our busy days turn into busy weeks, and organizing our homes often gets pushed to the back burner. It can be difficult to determine where to start decluttering – especially if organizing and getting rid of unused items causes additional stress and anxiety.
What if I told you that chaotic environments have negative effects on our mental state? And science can prove it.
Clutter contributes to unhealthy decisions, distraction, cognitive overload, stress, and anxiety.
Research shows that the inability to ignore distractions causes us to have less working memory capacity. (1) Lower working memory makes it more challenging to process reasoning and guide decision making. When our environments are filled with visual clutter, the number of distractions drastically increases, causing our brains to work much harder to focus on the task at hand.
Stress and anxiety require a massive amount of cognitive resources. This drain of resources puts an additional strain on working memory (2), attention, emotional reactivity, informational processing, and other brain functions. (3)
By creating an organized and less cluttered environment, we reduce cognitive strain on our brains and allow ourselves to attain the lives we want to live more easily.
The mental resources that we were once using to ignore messy pots and pans, wade through clothes to decide what to wear, or search our homes for lost keys – can now be used to tackle relevant problems, plan vacations or build an online business.
Gabriela Michel, the founder of Simplify and Bloom, is a professional organizer. She is passionate about making others’ lives easier and less stressful by creating organized systems and simplifying once complex homes and workspaces.
“I firmly believe with the right systems and compassionate guidance, even the busiest of households can enjoy peace and simplicity.”
Gabriela Michel, founder of Simplify and Bloom
She exclaims, “I firmly believe with the right systems and compassionate guidance, even the busiest of households can enjoy peace and simplicity.”
Here, Gabriela is dishing all the need-to-know info of why we get stuck in clutter, where to start decluttering our homes, exactly how to declutter and all the benefits we will experience once we do.
Why we get stuck in stressful clutter and what life looks like without it.
According to Gabriela, people tend to end up messy and cluttered for three main reasons – lack of time, minimal organizational systems, and personal attachment to material items.
Busy schedules lead to less attention on a tidy home. Clutter becomes a stressor. If things don’t have a specific place to be put away, many people choose to avoid clean up altogether. When it comes to getting rid of too much stuff, items seen as sentimental or valuable are the most difficult to let go of.
A study completed in 2011 shows that decluttering our homes positively affects focus and productivity. (4) Research also shows that clutter increases our likelihood to make poor food decisions as a coping mechanism (5), and have difficulty distinguishing positive facial expressions from negative ones (6).
“Our environment has a profound effect on our well being. When our surroundings are cluttered, our minds are cluttered and we ultimately have difficulty living the type of life we envisioned for ourselves.”
Gabriela Michel, founder of Simplify and Bloom
Gabriela really hits home, commenting, “Our environment has a profound effect on our well being. When our surroundings are cluttered, our minds are cluttered and we ultimately have difficulty living the type of life we envisioned for ourselves.”
Being organized ultimately allows you to have more time doing the things you love. Organizing and cleaning are not the same things.
As Gabriela explains, “The ‘organizing’ part mostly consists of putting things away where they belong. Just imagine if everything you own has a home – AND you continually put it back after using it. Come Saturday, your place is still organized and you can spend the day doing what you and your family want.”
Not only does organizing give us our time back, but it also gives us our money back. Gabriela often finds clients buying items they already have in their homes simply because they cannot locate them. If each item has a dedicated home, there will be no more of these costly duplicate purchases and wasted time from searching for misplaced items.
Benefits of Decluttering at a Glance
- Less mental clutter.
- More time doing things you love.
- Less time cleaning and organizing on the weekends.
- Save money from buying things you already have
- Save stress from searching for things you temporarily misplaced.
Where to start decluttering.
The idea of organizing an entire home is bewildering, at best. Learning where to start decluttering can make all the difference.
Gabriela reminds us that, “The key is not to get overwhelmed when attempting to organize any space and just to start.” And when she says start…she means to start small.
First, she finds an area of the home to start with and then breaks it down even further.
There are three main areas that Gabriela finds are often the most disorganized and stressful, here’s what she has to say.
- Closets. In reality, most people only wear a small percentage of the clothes that they own. Closets become filled with clothes we hope to wear, a style we used to adore, or jeans we wish to fit into again one day.
Many people tend to continuously shop without getting rid of old items and eventually causing closets to be overflowing. This not only creates visual clutter but causes decision making to be much more taxing when getting dressed. Closet clutter increases cognitive burden, anxiety triggers, and overall stress. - Pantries. Pantries sometimes become catch-all areas – cooking supplies, ingredients, spices, paper towels, teas and coffees, canned goods and longterm storage.
Not to mention it is one of the most used areas of the home, which makes it a prime candidate for getting cluttered quickly and often. - Paper. Household paper and files are a major pressure point for many. With a constant influx of paper and no set filing system for longterm storage – paper begins to stack up over time.
Disorganized papers make finding important information overwhelming and frustrating.
All or none of these areas may be a sticking point for clutter in your home. Select what makes the most sense for you.
How to declutter your home to increase wellbeing.
Start small – select an area then select a specific region.
Gabriela explains, “Maybe just start with your t-shirt drawer or one pantry shelf. As you soon become more accustomed to organizing periodically, you can begin to tackle larger spaces.”
Outlined below is the exclusive six-step process Gabriela uses for clients that will get you organized and keep you organized – reducing your overall stress levels and increasing everyday wellbeing!
- Take everything out of the selected location. Place it all together in a different area to begin working through the clutter.
- Create 3 categories – items to toss, items to donate and items to keep.
- Begin separating each type of item into the above categories, one at a time. For instance, if you are reorganizing a closet – start with dresses, then pants, then shirts, and so on.
- Now asses the number of items you will be keeping and measure the drawer, shelf or area you are reorganizing.
- Purchase containers (or use containers you already have in your home) to house each separate group of items and be sure they will fit in the measured area.
- After locating or purchasing containers, place each group of items in a specific container and organize the containers intuitively in the selected space.
Identifying a specific location for each item will help you better store, locate and recall items when you need them the most.
Gabriela emphasizes, “I want to voice how critical containment is when it comes to long-term success. Even if you’re not a fan of labels, creating a zone for each category will help guarantee that you will be able to maintain organization in the long run.”
When it’s all said and done.
Organizing does not come easily to all but it greatly affects how we feel. With an easy step by step process to determine where to start decluttering and how, we can all learn to make our lives a little easier, so we can focus on the things that really matter.
If you are interested in having a professional organizer help you at your home, find Gabriela’s services here and information below for a free consultation specific to your needs and lifestyle.
About Gabriela Michel
Gabriela has spent many years working closely with families and children, further expanding her awareness about how vital organized systems can be and how they can improve our daily lives. Many of these skills were developed while working as a Teacher’s Assistant, as a Behavioral Interventionist for children diagnosed with ASD disorders and while receiving a B.A. in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley.
Gabriela’s passion for organizing became a career after organizing the closet of a family she was Nannying for. She realized organized systems didn’t come naturally to all and the family was overjoyed when they saw her completed project. She firmly believes with the right systems and compassionate guidance, even the busiest of households can enjoy peace and simplicity. Her company offers all-inclusive luxury services for homes and businesses to make organizing stress-free with a complimentary consultation, customized layouts, product sourcing, implementation and plan trash/donation drop off.
You can find her on her website www.simplifyandbloom.com or on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram @simplifyandbloom.
Love this. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed when it comes to organizing your space once you’ve let it get too far. My closet is needing some TLC. Definitely giving the 6 step process a try! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you! So happy that the process is helpful for you to organize spaces in your home!!