Why Clutter Makes You Anxious—and How to Break Free

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast. This is episode number 267. This episode is all about clutter, but it's also all about stress, because clutter equals stress. I'm going to share with you in this episode four ways that clutter creates stress zones in our homes. And also I'm going to help you get over whatever emotional situation you're in currently about your clutter so that you can finally break free of not only the clutter, but also the stress. I'm really hoping that you feel supported and seen by this episode and that because of the content in today's episode, you will be able to leapfrog over any resistance you have to to finally taking care of the clutter in your home. Let's go listen to this episode together now.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:03]:
Hi, I'm Dr. Christine Li and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped thousands of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they could begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn powerful strategies for getting your mind, body and energy to work together so that you can focus on what's really important and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast. Hi my friends.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:47]:
I am going to spend this episode talking about clutter, decluttering and stress. The longer I work with people on the symptom and the situation that clutter brings us, the more I understand at such deep levels how clutter represents stress for the adult woman. And I think because stress is toxic, clutter therefore is toxic. And my intention with this episode is to help you to see that, but to not back away from it. My goal is to help you find ways to gently release your clutter so that the stress dissolves rather than maybe disappears overnight. Our intention is to handle the difficulty in our lives so that we can make space for ease, so that we can make space for space. Space that we're really going to value and protect. So let's go.

Dr. Christine Li [00:02:56]:
The first thing I would like to talk about is that clutter is anything but neutral. It basically is a visual reminder of stress. It is something that can actually trap people into a stressed state in their own homes. I see this every day in the comments that I'm getting on Instagram and TikTok. If you're not following me, please follow me at Procrastination Coach on both platforms. And I have hundreds of comments about women who feel that they're not able to express their true vitality because of the clutter that they're surrounded by and submerged in. And the more I read the comments, the more I sympathize and the more I feel compelled to do these kinds of episodes where we're really just getting our own power back so that we can take steps to release and remove the clutter. The truth is, when your space in your home is crowded, your nervous system is always on alert because your clutter is basically feeding you information, like, you got to do something about me.

Dr. Christine Li [00:04:21]:
You got to fix me. You got to clean me up. You're behind on the things that are in this pile. And that constant feedback from the clutter, that noise really steals your attention, your clarity, your focus, your calm, and your creativity. And those are, I'm going to say, among your highest skills of. The highest skills that you possess are being compromised by the clutter. I'm saying this plainly, but I have a feeling if you're a woman in a home with clutter, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You know that it's taking your time.

Dr. Christine Li [00:05:02]:
You know that it's sapping your energy, and you know you'd like something different. Now I'd like to explain why clutter feels so hard. I've spoken about this in other avenues and probably on this podcast before, but I put it together in a different way for this particular episode. Clutter is giving us multiple messages all the time because we have different types of clutter. If you're like me, you've had clutter in the form of clothing, old clothing. You've had clutter in the form of paper, disorganized paper. You have clutter in the form of unused items like appliances in your kitchen. It's all the things around you in your precious emotional space of your home.

Dr. Christine Li [00:05:51]:
But all the stuff is sending you different signals and triggering different emotions. So the first emotion that I want to describe might be the most intense one. And those are safety fears. And by safety, I mean the throngs of people who make comments of. I worry about letting this particular item go because I'm afraid I'm going to need it later. So people are afraid of loss, they're afraid of being stuck, and then they're afraid of needing to spend money again. So those are multiple safety fears all piled onto one, let's say, unused appliance. And that's just a lot.

Dr. Christine Li [00:06:38]:
That's a lot of emotional energy. To be spent and devoted and focused on something that you're not even making proper use of. So think about these things when you feel in your own home some twinge of, oh, I might need that. Next time you go through that, really challenge that and say to yourself, I'm actually safe. I want to see myself as safe. I want to enjoy the actual safety that I have. And instead of going through this every time I look at the blender, I'm going to give away the blender, I'm going to donate the blender, I'm going to retire the blender, because I don't blend things anymore. That's just an example, of course, but.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:25]:
You know what I mean.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:27]:
Don't waste your emotional energy on unused appliances. Release them. That's my recommendation. The second category of emotional confusion that clutter tends to give us is guilt about money. Guilt about the value of the item that you are thinking of disposing, discarding, or releasing. Because you, at a certain point in.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:55]:
Your life, spent money on that item.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:58]:
And why this is so hard is people feel that they are spending money again somehow in some way, they're. They're kind of devaluing their own financial resources by letting go of the item that they once paid for. And I want to explain how this works. That is a story. It's purely a story, because the money that you spent is already gone. The money you spent leaves as soon as you purchase the item. It doesn't maintain itself that value, that financial value does not maintain itself when the item is sitting in your home. It's actually depreciating.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:40]:
And it depreciates pretty much as soon as you walk out of the store.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:44]:
Once you hand over the money, you.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:46]:
Know, you realize, oh, maybe I didn't really need that top. Maybe I don't. Didn't really need that blender after all. And that's okay. We do this all the time. We purchase things and then we use.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:56]:
Them, and we don't use others.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:58]:
We don't have to criticize ourselves for the things that we don't use. But we can do ourselves the favor of releasing the things that we don't use so that we can have space, so that we don't spend our mental space thinking about these things over and over again. And so we bless someone else's life with blenders and tops that are really cute that we don't need and that.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:24]:
We don't like anymore.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:25]:
It's totally fine to do this. You're going to find actually that not only does it make sense for the.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:32]:
Energy in your home.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:33]:
It's going to make sense in every other way as well. But you do need to get yourself to that point of release, and that's where people really get stuck. Now, this third area where clutter gets us emotionally hung up, is basically the definition of getting stuck. It is the emotional ties that are associated with things like old photographs, like memorabilia that is inherited or left to us from relatives who have passed on. Many of us have been in this kind of situation, and all of us have emotional ties to people we're not actually living with. So I think you understand what I'm getting at when I say that this kind of clutter is. Can really be difficult to make decisions on. And therefore, that kind of clutter, this sentimental clutter, the old photos, the old documents, the old trophies, the old photo albums, all of that, it's a lot.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:42]:
It's heavy. It's physically heavy. It takes up a lot of space. I've been hearing lately that people don't even recognize the people in the photo albums.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:51]:
Like, these are people you've never even.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:52]:
Known in your lifetime. And you're stuck because you feel like you're not allowed to release it. And I'm here to tell you, you're allowed to do anything that you feel would be good for you. Let that be the decision line, the decision vehicle for you to say, is this really helping me to keep this here? If the answer is no, consider that your own permission to yourself. It's not from me, it's actually from you that it's safe and fine and.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:29]:
Just to release it. No longer are we going to use.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:34]:
Our precious limited lives to put ourselves.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:38]:
Through the wringer of emotional guilt about.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:41]:
Stuff that we don't actually care much about. It is okay to be real with.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:47]:
Ourselves at this stage in our lives. Let's go.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:51]:
The last area of emotional stuff that.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:56]:
Clutter brings up is exhaustion. It's actually physical, energetic exhaustion because clutter contains energy. And I'll explain that a little bit, because it may not make sense. You might say, well, clutter is inanimate. It doesn't. It's not alive. But we all know that clutter can make us feel things, and it has energetic power because literally everything is made up of material, and material has energy. Everything is made up of energy is the short way of teaching you about this.

Dr. Christine Li [00:12:32]:
So know that nothing is neutral in that regard. Everything has power to affect you in that way. And if you're feeling that, the stuff in your home, some of the stuff in Your home is draining your energy. Go target that stuff. Because why would we spend another day, another month, another year sitting and looking at clutter that is actually draining our energy, is actually stealing our joy from within our home? When we have options, when we have people we can donate to, when we can just tidy up and take care of these things that are quite easy to take care of, when you've solved all the emotional entanglements, when we get over the safety fears, when we realize that money is spent, when we purchase the object, when we understand that our deceased relatives would not want us to spend our lifetimes suffering over their stuff, and when we really, really value our current energy, our life energy, so much so that we wouldn't allow anything inanimate or animate to threaten the vibrancy that we have, that we're allowed to have, we should feel every single day. So let's not feel stuck, ashamed and overwhelmed in our own homes. That is my goal. My goal is to help you to turn your home into a space of peace, a sanctuary of sorts, where you feel calm, refreshed, restored, clear, and like.

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:21]:
You can be your best self.

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:23]:
I think that's my wish for you, and let's do this together, why don't we? What I'm hearing from women is that there are lots of reasons that they don't start on the decluttering journey. I hear that they're. They're kind of upset with their partners for being the cause of the clutter. They are feeling exhausted and thinking that their bodies aren't the same as they used to be. Many people have chronic illnesses or injuries, or they're recovering from something, and that's all real, absolutely real. And others are in grief. They are. Have recently lost someone, or maybe it's been several years, but the grief is still feeling very heavy.

Dr. Christine Li [00:15:09]:
Others are struggling with a hoarding tendency or a family legacy of hoarding.

Dr. Christine Li [00:15:15]:
All of these things are really, really heavy.

Dr. Christine Li [00:15:19]:
And it is understandable, really understandable, that you wouldn't want to deal with things as a result. It makes sense. Your brain is probably shouting, don't go there. Don't do that. Don't touch that stuff. It's too heavy, it's too weighty, it's too upsetting.

Dr. Christine Li [00:15:39]:
But I'm here to tell you that.

Dr. Christine Li [00:15:42]:
Step by step, you actually can face anything, literally anything, if you do it step by step. And you understand that your nervous system can tolerate small steps. It can tolerate you taking small steps for your benefit. That's like the perfect situation where you're not overwhelming yourself. But your body sees that you care about having a clear, uncluttered space. You care about restoring your energy. You care about having your home be a certain way energetically and it is going to support you. Once it knows your goal and intention, your body will play along.

Dr. Christine Li [00:16:27]:
So don't fool yourself anymore into thinking that you're stuck, that the clutter is going to be there forever. Because that's just a belief, fortunately. Remember, your nervous system is the system that is really going to benefit from your progress. With your clutter. Your nervous system is then going to feed you back from your efforts to take back your space. You're going to get a calmed nervous system as a reward. So I want you to see from this that decluttering is not just about being more tidy. It is about getting your life and your energy back.

Dr. Christine Li [00:17:07]:
Nothing more important than that, I would say love, energy, life, these are the things that are important. And no item of clutter can compete with that. Literally none. That's my position and I'm going to stick with it. So my promise is go slowly, go intentionally, go with your goals and you're going to get your clarity, focus and creativity back. It's going to be supercharged, actually, with once you do the decluttering work, when you change your space, you change the story you tell about yourself and you get to live a fuller story indeed. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode on clutter and stress. I really hope I've driven home my point.

Dr. Christine Li [00:17:55]:
I think I have, but I have more for you than that. I want to invite you to declutter with me and several hundred other women and a few men. We are going to be doing the re energize your home 5 day challenge soon after this episode is published. We're going to start Monday, January 26th. And what will happen is every day I will do a 15 minute lesson on decluttering and or energy and what you need to know about energy to declutter more quickly and easily. And, and this whole challenge is designed.

Dr. Christine Li [00:18:35]:
To help you get started, to help.

Dr. Christine Li [00:18:37]:
You physically touch your clutter so that it doesn't keep draining your focus and energy so that you actually know what to do from here on out. It is my pleasure to host these challenges periodically throughout the years. This will be our 12th episode of the challenge, our 12th iteration and, and it's going to be fantastic. Again, we start January 26th and you are absolutely welcome to join us and it's absolutely free to do so. You can sign up for this event by going to maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/january again it's maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/january and I'm sure I will see some of you inside the challenge.

Dr. Christine Li [00:19:25]:
I look forward to that and-

Dr. Christine Li [00:19:27]:
Thank you all again for considering changing your life for the better. It's really going to be worth it. I will see you next week when the next episode drops. Take care. Bye.

Dr. Christine Li [00:19:39]:
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success Podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com for past episodes, show notes, and all the resources we mention on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name Procrastination Coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to. And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making Time for Success.

Dr. Christine Li [00:20:19]:
Talk to you soon.