Seven Ways Clutter Affects Our Well-Being

While “getting organized” is one of the top New Year’s resolutions, it is difficult to find the time and motivation to declutter. A September 2021 study showed that “lack of time was an almost universally endorsed reason for clutter” from the research participants. The task is often overwhelming, even with the huge amount of books and online resources available on the subject (8,000 books on Amazon alone).

Like any other behavioral change, getting clear on why you aren’t going to settle for the status quo anymore is a critical first step. If your health, relationships, career, or finances are being negatively impacted by your current behavior, it may be enough to push you to change. Sometimes, however, additional evidence outside of our own experience can also help.

In that vein, here are seven findings from scientific research about clutter that may surprise or even shock you enough to take clutter’s impact on your well-being seriously enough to take action.

1. Clutter increases stress, depressed mood, and negatively impacts women more than men.

This 2010 study followed 30 dual-income heterosexual couples as they recorded tours of their home and looked at the frequency of words used to describe clutter, the unfinished state of their homes, and whether they thought of their home as a restorative place. Four times a day for a week, the couples provided saliva samples to measure cortisol, a stress hormone. They also filled out reports about their moods. The researchers found:

• Women who described their homes as messy, cluttered, disorganized, unfinished, or with similar terms “had flatter diurnal slopes of cortisol, a profile associated with adverse health outcomes”, whereas women who described their home in more restorative terms (relaxing, calming, quiet, homey, etc.) had steeper cortisol slopes, an indicator of greater psychological and physical well-being.
• Women who described their home in more negative terms also “tended to show greater increases in depressed mood across the day, consistent with greater fatigue in the evening and a more difficult transition from work to home.”
• Men did not experience the same negative associations as the women. The researchers note, “Our largely null results for husbands, contrasted with significant results for wives, suggest that women may be more sensitive to the home environment or may feel a greater sense of responsibility for the home (for example, feeling guilty about clutter); this finding would be consistent with other research suggesting that the home is traditionally perceived as women’s domain and ultimate responsibility, even in couples where both partners are employed.”

You’re not dreaming it- clutter is literally stressing you out, depressing you, and likely putting a strain on your relationship.

2. Clutter impacts whether you feel “at home” in your home.

The concept of “psychological home” includes feelings of safety, security, and protection that allow you to find refuge from the outside world. Your personal possessions can also strengthen your feeling of being “at home” in your home. But there is a “dark side of home” which, as Dr. Catherine A. Roster and her colleagues found in a 2016 study “is created when the experiential quality of home is compromised by clutter.”

The study included almost 1500 adults with mild to severe issues with clutter, and found that “clutter has a strong negative impact on feelings of security, safety and other positive emotional benefits derived from a sense of psychological home, including subjective well-being.” Clutter affects well-being in many ways, including but not limited to “tension between family members, social isolation, depression, and safety hazards.”

As we have spent more time at home than ever due to the global pandemic, a cluttered home robs us of the restful, restorative refuge that our home was designed to be.

3. A cluttered bedroom can negatively affect the quality of your sleep.

Research presented at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC in 2015 found that those who are at risk for hoarding disorder, including people with extremely cluttered or unusable bedrooms, have higher risk of sleep disturbances and low sleep quality. Your bedroom is designed to be restful, but if clutter is the first thing you see when you wake up and the last thing you see before you go to sleep, it’s not surprising that your sleep could be compromised.

4. Clutter can cause you to overeat, especially on sweets.

In this fascinating study conducted in 2016, 98 women were brought into a tidy kitchen as well as a chaotic, messy one. They were asked to write about times they felt in control and out of control, and were also given the option to eat as many cookies, crackers, or carrots as they liked. The participants in the messy kitchens in the “out of control mindset” ate roughly double the number of cookies than those in the same mindset in the tidy kitchen. The researchers noted that, “The notion that places — such as cluttered offices or disorganized homes — can be modified to help us control our food intake is becoming an important solution in helping us become more ‘slim by design.'”

Another study focused on hoarding disorder, a clinical condition where an individual has “persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions because of a perceived need to save them.” It found a direct connection between those with hoarding disorder having a higher body mass index (BMI) and symptoms of binge eating.

5. Clutter and procrastination have a direct relationship, and can be cause for concern if left unchecked.

Dr. Joseph R. Ferrari has written extensively about chronic procrastination, which impacts as many as 20-25% of global citizens. He defines chronic procrastination as a “needless delay of relevant and timely tasks across situations and settings.” His 2018 study found that those who are chronic procrastinators “report excessive clutter and they find their overabundance of possessions negatively impacting on their identity.”

Another one of Dr. Ferrari’s 2018 studies, completed with Dr. Catherine Roster (see #2 above), looked at generational differences in clutter and procrastination. They found that older adults (average age of this cohort was 54) were more likely to procrastinate and identify with statements that clutter caused negative consequences in their life and well-being.

The connection between clutter and procrastination is troublesome, since “because disposal decisions can be stressful, especially for individuals who form close attachments to their possessions, indecisives may avoid disposition tasks because they are afraid of making the wrong decision or regretting their actions later. On the other hand, individuals who chronically put off organizing and purging tasks may find that their failure to do has created a situation so out of control that they cannot bear the time and effort needed to start the process.”

Procrastination can cause us to delay the often painful process of decluttering, and clutter can cause us to procrastinate because it makes us feel overwhelmed. It’s a vicious cycle that is hard to break, especially for those who procrastinate frequently or have close attachments to their possessions.

6. Clutter is a form of visual distraction, which can cause cognitive overload and a subsequent decrease in focus and working memory.

When we think of clutter as visual distraction, it’s easy to understand how it can be a type of stimulus overload which can tax our brain. Specifically, the visual cortex is responsible for processing visual stimuli and visual working memory. A 2016 study found that “consuming capacity of (visual working memory) with task-irrelevant information effectively reduces storage capacity for task-relevant items.” In other words, if you are surrounded by clutter that is not relevant to what you are trying to do, your working memory is negatively impacted.

In addition, visual clutter can make it difficult for your brain to focus, due to the fact that the stimuli are competing for representation in the visual cortex. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a 2011 study confirmed that multiple visual stimuli negatively impacted the subjects’ ability to focus on a specific task.

7. Work clutter can make a stressful job more stressful, and affect how co-workers perceive your abilities.

Most research about clutter and hoarding disorder has focused on the home environment where individuals have more control over the amount and type of personal belongings that they keep. It is important, however, to recognize that a cluttered work environment can also negatively impact well-being. Work clutter can be a combination of personal and work items that cause a chaotic and disorganized workspace. Whereas previous studies have focused on the impact of environmental aspects such as noise, lighting, air quality, and privacy on an individual’s ability to work effectively, clutter is another major contributing factor.

A 2019 study, again by the clutter “dream team” of Dr. Catherine A. Roster and Dr. Joseph R. Ferrari, surveyed 290 individuals and asked them questions surrounding workload stress, emotional exhaustion, decisional procrastination, and the clutter issues they experienced within their workspace. Workload stress, emotional exhaustion, and decisional procrastination were all positively correlated with office clutter problems.

As Roster and Ferrari explain, “We tested the hypothesis that workload stress relates to increased problems with office clutter through two consecutive mediating steps, specifically via emotional exhaustion that, in turn, leads to decisional procrastination. Results of our study provide support for our hypothesized model.” In other words, stress at work causes exhaustion which leads to procrastinating on decisions related to what to get rid of or keep. This, in turn, causes clutter which causes even more stress and the cycle continues to worsen.

In addition to the stress and exhaustion which is exacerbated by a cluttered workspace, there is recent evidence to suggest that having a cluttered and disorganized workspace may cause co-workers to have negative impressions of an employee’s personality traits including neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. These impressions can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as co-author Sarah Dyszlewski explains. “Once trait information about a target becomes activated in perceivers’ minds, either consciously or unconsciously, that information can subsequently affect how they process information about, the types of questions they ask of, and how they behave toward the target, possibly bringing out the very trait information that they expected to see from the target in the first place.”

Don’t ignore it – clutter is a major contributor to your well-being.

Well-being includes a variety of factors, including physical, emotional, psychological, social, and economic, as well as satisfaction in life and work. We often think of physical activity, a healthy diet, adequate sleep, strong relationships, a spiritual practice, and stress reduction techniques as major contributing factors. But as we see in recent scientific literature, clutter has a major impact on our ability to live a fulfilling life and can actually derail many of the foundational aspects of well-being such as diet, sleep, relationships, and stress management.

Don’t ignore your clutter. Your health and happiness may depend on it.