When you declutter your home, you put your thoughts in order too. Don’t believe me? In fact, there is scientific evidence that a messy house is bad for your mental state.
Take a good, hard look around your home. Is it clean and tidy? Or is it, like many modern homes, piled high with bits of paperwork, miscellaneous tech devices, chargers, laundry, ironing, school books, and a million other items? If you fall into the latter category, you need to declutter your home as living in a perpetual state of disarray is bad for your mental health.
1. Take Care of Your Mental Health
People who live in a disorganized, cluttered home are more likely to be depressed, anxious, and stressed. It stands to reason really. If you have had a tough day at work, the last thing you need is to come home and be faced with a messy kitchen that needs cleaning before you can prepare food.
Imagine, too, being exhausted, but your bed is piled high with dirty laundry that must be moved before you can climb under the covers.
When you declutter your home, you actually help yourself live better. It’s a domino effect. The tidier your kitchen is, the easier it will be to cook healthy, nutritious meals. The tidier your bedroom is, the better you will sleep.
We don’t always take good care of ourselves, but this is one thing you can do to look after your mental health. And the good news is that you can tackle it one room at a time.
Pick a day or a weekend when you have plenty of time and declutter your home. Ask your partner or a friend to help, so you aren’t tempted to keep items you don’t need.
2. Keep, Sell, Donate, Trash
Working on one room at a time, bring everything out and put it in four piles: keep, sell, donate to a good cause, or throw in the trash. The idea is to be ruthless. Don’t hang on to items ‘just in case’ you might need them next year. Seriously, you won’t need them.
Anything with a residual value can be sold online or via a garage sale, and anything that might be useful to someone else can be donated.
One of the great things that happen when you declutter your home is that it can earn you some extra pocket money. One man’s rubbish is another man’s gold. Just because you can’t stand that set of floral bedding, it doesn’t mean that someone else won’t love it.
Clothing, tools, games, books, and DVDs are all prime examples of items that have value. Garage sales are useful if you have a ton of clutter such as old tools and gardening equipment, as people will often browse and buy when they wander past.
More valuable items will likely to do better on Internet auction sites such as eBay or Facebook buy/sell groups.
3. Recycling Unwanted Items
Broken or useless junk can be trashed, but where possible, keep this pile as small as you can to avoid sending anything useful to a landfill. Plastic is a huge environmental problem in the world today, so try not to add to it.
Don’t forget that many old items, in particular metal, wood, and fabric, can be recycled, so bear this in mind before you throw something in the bin.
Speaking of trash, it might be an idea to look into skip hire. That way, you can discard large volumes of junk and sleep easy knowing that the skip hire company will sort it all out and recycle anything that can be recycled.
4. Take it Slowly
Sorting through years’ worth of junk can be an emotional process, especially if you are dealing with family mementos, old photographs, and keepsakes. Be prepared for the job to take longer than you anticipated and don’t be disheartened if progress is painfully slow.
Once you reach the end of your decluttering challenge, it will feel as if a huge weight has been lifted from your shoulders. Your home will be tidy and sparkling clean. You might even be able to put off a move to a larger property now that you have so much extra room!
If you are really struggling when trying to declutter your home, consider hiring a professional decluttering assistant.
They don’t have the same emotional connection to your junk as you do, so it will be much easier for them to be ruthless and throw out the things you really don’t need anymore.
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