The Effects of Clutter on Your Mental Health

There are some things that we do every day that can be harmful to us subconsciously. One such thing is keeping our homes a cluttered mess. It might not seem like a big deal but living in a disorderly home has many detrimental effects on the mind. In this article, we’ll talk about the effects of clutter on your mental health. Hopefully, seeing how it negatively influences you will make it easier to correct this problem.

Increased Stress

Perhaps the most troubling effect of clutter on your mental health is how much extra stress you put on yourself through it. Your home should be a place where you can relax, but excessive amounts of clutter prevent this from happening, causing you to hold onto stress much longer. Adopting a more minimalist mindset can help alleviate the stress that you bring on yourself through your clutter.

Poor Sleep Quality

We all know how essential good sleep is to a healthy body and mind. Did you know that clutter can adversely affect your sleep quality as well? This happens because your brain doesn’t have time to wind down properly before bed because of all the excess visual stimuli. If you sleep in an overly cluttered room and don’t feel like you get the sleep you need, it might be time to consider a thorough decluttering of your living space.

Cluttered Thoughts

Having cluttered thoughts can be a serious detriment to your mental health. When your brain is busy taking in everything around you, you have more difficulty sorting out your own thoughts. Even interacting with other people becomes more difficult as your brain becomes exhausted trying to parse all the random stimuli around you. A cluttered mind can make you more anxious and even depressed in some cases.

Reduced Focus

With many of us working from home nowadays, we have to find ways to switch our brains from work mode to leisure mode, and vice versa. When you exist in a cluttered space, your brain has too much to think about, and you reduce your ability to focus on one thing at a time. This lack of concentration feeds into the stress you already feel from the cluttered space, creating a vicious cycle that can make you seriously unhappy.

You don’t have to live with these problems, but dealing with them can seem insurmountable at times. Keep in mind that you don’t have to fix this problem overnight. Steadily decluttering over time will help make the transition easier and get you back to a healthier space where you can actually relax.