A cluttered home has many negative psychological and physical health effects. It can negatively impact your concentration and heighten your stress levels. It can also have various physical effects that can impact your safety. These are ways that a cluttered home can affect you over time. Hopefully, this list will inspire you to do some spring cleaning.
Psychological Effects
A cluttered home can negatively impact you psychologically. Visual reminders of the disorder can drain you and make you depressed. Your brain loves order.
Visual distraction increases cognitive overload when one receives too much information or too many tasks at once. Cognitive overload leads to the inability to process and perform the tasks you face. This can make you feel less capable and unable to handle situations. Feeling more capable and able to tackle your day is a major psychological benefit of decluttering your space.
Plus, if you have children, they will follow your example. So having a messy home can cause them to take less care of themselves and their space, decreasing productivity. Living in a cluttered home can make it difficult to get things done due to cognitive overload.
Physical Effects
Disorganized people tend to have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol than people who describe their house as “clean” and “uncluttered.” It can also trigger issues with breathing, especially since cluttered homes tend to be dusty. It can threaten your safety if there’s too much dust.
Laundry baskets in front of doors and windows, socks on the floor that you can slip on, and toys on the floor can be safety hazards.
It also encourages bad spending habits. Unfortunately, if you can’t find something, you’ll likely have to buy it again, even if it’s under a blanket somewhere. This is one of the major benefits of decluttering your home. You’ll be able to find everything you need and spend less money.
What Can Be Done?
Now that you see how clutter can affect you over time, you can develop solutions. Cleaning your house can feel overwhelming, but there’s a lot you can do. Knock out a room a day and organize the list of things you want to clean at night. Start small and work your way up. In a week or so, you’ll have made so much progress that you’ll want to keep going.
While cleaning your home can seem daunting with so much clutter, the research indicates that you’ll be better off “eating the frog” and decluttering. Disorganization and clutter are bad for your health, and decluttering can be a boon.