Whose House Is This?

Why Clutter Makes You So Anxious, and the Ten Minutes That Move It

I asked a room of women to describe their lives one year from now. Anything they wanted. No reasonable version required.

Not one of them started with a job. Not a relationship or a bank balance. Every one of them started with her home.

One was mid-renovation and couldn't put anything away. One had her adult daughter's things piled across three rooms, plus a year of boxes from an office that closed. One had lived in the same apartment for years without painting a single wall, and said she wanted color back.

None of them were talking about housekeeping.

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Why does clutter make you so anxious when nothing is actually wrong?

Because your body has been keeping score, and it started a while ago.

Researchers at UCLA spent four years inside the homes of 32 dual-income families. They recorded husbands and wives giving tours of their own houses, then measured cortisol, the stress hormone, across the days that followed. The women who used words like "mess" and "chaotic" about their homes had a flatter daily cortisol curve, the pattern linked to worse health outcomes. Their mood dropped as the day went on. The men's results didn't follow the same pattern.

The researchers' read on it: the person who feels responsible for the clutter is the person it costs.

A second study, of 1,400 adults with a median age of 54, found where the damage actually lands. Clutter wore away at something the researchers named psychological home — the felt sense that your space belongs to you — and well-being went down with it.

You can live in a house for thirteen years and still feel like a guest in it. There's no way to say that at dinner without sounding ungrateful, so most women don't say it.

And the pile doesn't wait politely for a free Saturday. Princeton neuroscientists have shown that when several things sit in your visual field at once, they compete for a brain with a hard limit on what it can process. Every trip down that hallway takes something.

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Most of it was never yours

In almost every one of these conversations, the same thing surfaces.

The boxes from a semester that ended in December, the paperwork from a parent who can't manage her own anymore, the leftover monitors from an office that closed a year ago, the previous owners' taste still sitting in your kitchen, the furniture you bought for a smaller version of your life.

You're the storage unit. For everyone's unfinished business, and for some of your own.

Then when you finally notice it, the voice arrives right on time. Other people have real problems. You have a house. Be grateful. That voice has been running the show a lot longer than the clutter has, and it's worth learning her name.

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The Ten-Minute Eviction

Four moves, all small on purpose.

Pick the one you walk past. Not the worst room in the house. The thing in your daily path — the chair, the stairs, the counter, the passenger seat. Whatever you've stepped around so many times you stopped seeing it and started feeling it instead.

Ask whose it is. Not "do I need this." Ask "did I choose this, or did it just arrive?" What arrived is usually the easiest thing to move and the hardest thing to look at. It's also where you'll find the things you're keeping because you should.

Set a timer for ten minutes. Not the weekend, and not the block of time you keep waiting for. That block isn't coming, and ten minutes is enough to change how a room feels.

Give the rest a date. Some of it can't move this week — the room you were told not to push on, the parent's house four hours away, the job you can't leave yet. In a 2011 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people carrying unfinished goals had those goals intrude on completely unrelated tasks, and did worse at them. When they wrote out a specific plan, with a when and a how, the interference disappeared. Writing the plan was enough. Your mind will put a thing down if you tell it when you're coming back for it.

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What ten minutes did

I had a ridiculous pile of mail on my desk for weeks. Every time I walked past it, I felt a little more stuck. I finally gave it ten minutes, and almost all of it was junk. I felt like a different person that afternoon.

Here's what I hate admitting. I avoided those ten minutes like the plague, and told myself I was protecting my real work.

One of the women in that room said out loud that she'd let her house go over a busy summer and her plants had died. She made no plan and wrote no checklist. Within a few days she found herself pulling into a garden center on the way home, then buying flowers at the grocery store, then throwing out the dead ones. She called it a very minor thing. She also said she's happy now every time she walks through that room.

It doesn't always go that fast. Sometimes naming it is the only thing that happens for a few weeks, and that still counts.

You're allowed to want your house back. Your calendar and your head, too.

If the clutter in your head feels heavier than anything on your floor, that's where I'd start. My free workbook, Escaping the Bermuda Triangle of Overwhelm, walks you through clearing the mental clutter first, then naming the one small step that gets you moving. You can grab it here.

Want to be part of an amazing group of women figuring it out together? Join us this Fall. Two groups-- one starting Sept. 16 and one beginning Sept. 22. Click here for more information.