Piles and piles of stuff covering your home are rarely something that makes you excited, and yet it is so easy to just let clutter build up until it begins to take over your life. Sure, when you look at each individual thing and ask yourself if you need it, then you might talk yourself into keeping some things, but the reality is that you can probably spare to lose a lot of the things that are cluttering up your home. This isn’t just a way to get more organized! There are plenty of reasons why reducing the clutter in your home will lead to aspects of a better life. Here are some reasons to remove the clutter in your home…
It makes moving easier.
Moving is something that is going to be stressful in the best of times, even if everything is going smoothly. However, the headaches begin to expand and multiply when you own mountains and mountains of stuff that you need to pack and take care of. For this reason, several months before a move is going to be coming up, take some time to gather up your belongings and decide what you really could spare to lose. After all, if you pack up all of your clutter and bring it into your new home, then it’s going to feel like you’ve just taken all of your problems with you.
Minimizing your stuff saves money.
You may not realize it, but having a lot of clutter is actually one of the many things that are wasting you lots of money. When you have clutter in your home, it gets easy to allow things to just slip away from you, such as unpaid bills. This causes you to fall behind on finances and forces you to pay exorbitant late fees. In addition to this, cluttered homes are harder to search through, which means that you are liable to end up buying something that you already know because you don’t even know that you have it, or at least you can’t find it. Lastly, having lots of stuff requires having the square footage to put all of that stuff, which means that you may be paying for more home than you actually need.
Clutter impacts mental health.
Not only is clutter a pain to live in, practically, but it actually has a profound impact on your mental health, as well. A study at UCLA showed that there was a direct correlation between high-stress levels (in the form of cortisol) and the amount of density in the items that were owned in a household. There may be a variety of reasons for this. Maybe that lack of open space and flow makes it hard to get into a clear mindset, or perhaps messiness feels like a personal shortcoming that continues to weigh on them, over time. Either way, the fact remains that clutter actually has a negative impact on your mental health, which is why you should try to mitigate it.
Getting rid of clutter makes a better home layout.
It’s difficult to create any sort of flow to your home’s layout when it is full of clutter. Open space is essential for allowing space to feel homey, rather than like a cave. Consider this: trying to furnish your home when you already have it cluttered with so many other things that you don’t really need is quite the chore, and it begins to become challenging to furnish your home in a way that doesn’t make it feel like you are adding clutter to an already cluttered area.
Pests love clutter.
Lastly, if you know anything about any kind of pest, you should know that they almost all thrive in dark, damp, and tight spaces. Clutter is the type of thing that fosters the creation of environments where pests can thrive become a real problem. If this happens, not only will you have a bunch of annoying clutter, but that clutter will literally be filled with tiny monsters that eat your food, bite you, and spread diseases.
