“That’s all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? Everybody’s got a little place for their stuff. That’s all your house is — a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.”
— George Carlin
Generally speaking, the older you get, the more “stuff” you accumulate. For many there comes a day when you sigh and realize you have amassed too much stuff. This can be especially true if you’re thinking about Downsizing and will have less room for stuff. Or maybe your house is just too crowded and disorderly with stuff. You might feel Anxiety about all the stuff. Perhaps you’ve read about research that says clutter can make you less focused in various aspects of your life, and can even negatively impact your Health. You know it’s time to declutter, but the very word intimidates you. How will you do it? Where do you start? How long will it take?
There are many people offering many tips on the best way to go about decluttering. What works for one person may not work as well for another. But there do seem to be a few consistencies in the wide-ranging advice. Among the more common tips are the following, suggested by AARP, an AgeWise Colorado Provider:
TIME Magazine briefly tapped the brains of a few successful declutterers for some of their advice. One was a Houston therapist named KC Davis. She once found the task too intimidating but then happened upon an incremental approach that worked for her. It worked so well she actually wrote a book about it titled How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing. Among her suggestions: Sort items into five categories: trash, dishes, laundry, items that have a definite place (like books that belong on the shelf), and miscellany that don’t. Bag the trash; wash and organize the dishes; pick up, sort and do the laundry; put proper things in proper places; and find a home for random objects.
Matt Paxton, a PBS show host and author of Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff, advises what he calls “automatically editing” your wardrobe. Do this by developing a system to identify which clothes you actually wore in a given time period, such as six months or a year, and donate or otherwise dispose of what wasn’t worn. One strategy is to turn the hanger of each clothing item around after wearing it. Then down the road in time, you can assume unturned hanger items are no longer worth keeping.
Davis says if it helps, alter your environment to improve organized neatness. For example, if randomly scattered piles of laundry are a messiness issue for you, put a laundry basket in each room to collect it in a neater fashion.
What about all the old photos you’ve accumulated? Paxton says get rid of the negatives, any duplicate pics, overly generic scenic shots, and pictures of people “you don’t know or don’t like.” Then scan the remaining photos via computer or phone and store them digitally, such as in a cloud-based photo library. If you wish to be more elaborate, you might combine certain significant photos with a relevant bit of video for a more complete archive record.
Like many other advisors on the subject, Paxton recommends donating as you declutter Things you no longer have personal use for may be valuable to someone else. Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and Habitat for Humanity are long-standing users of donated goods. He also mentions more targeted organizations such as Dress for Success that provides used professional attire to low-income women, One Warm Coat that provides free coats to people in need, and Soles4Souls that distributes footwear to the needy.
Goodwill, by the way, offers a service called “Things Forgotten Not Gone,” which can create a decluttering plan for you in at least two ways: 1) Helping you decide which possessions to keep and which ones to sell, donate, or give to Family and friends; and 2) Giving you access to their consignment service to help you sell items on their E-Commerce platform, in which you receive a portion of the sales revenue.
Paxton also suggests making sentiment work for you. It can be emotionally challenging to part with items that may have sentimental value. Consider inviting family members into a conversation of why an item is uniquely treasured. This can constitute a fitting “memorial” for the item. By also recording the family conversation, you can both preserve a piece of family history and also create an addition to that history with the sentiments that are expressed. He says it’s a way of preserving the past for the future, and can be liberating. As he put it, “If you tell the stories, then you can let go of the items.”
The above are just a few examples of ideas that might ease the challenge of decluttering. An online search of the phrase “how to declutter” will bring up scores of additional tips. The common keys appear to be finding a way to declutter in an organized, manageable way and making a commitment to staying on the task with some regularity.
For a small segment of the population — about 2.5% — the accumulating of stuff is not just a benign habit that they want to reverse by reducing what they’ve accumulated. This population segment meets the diagnostic criteria for “hoarding disorder,” which the American Psychological Association (APA) says is a complex and difficult-to-treat condition. The APA says hoarding disorder is marked by three major characteristics: 1) Difficulty letting go of material possessions. 2) Excessive or compulsive acquisition of new items (affects most but not all hoarders). 3) Disorganization and an inability to prevent clutter. Hoarding disorder obviously magnifies the challenge of decluttering. So if you or a loved one should find decluttering to be nearly impossible to do and it is causing excessive anxiety, hoarding disorder may exist. Treatments are available for it. (For more on the topic, go here, or if you live in Colorado, go here for local options.)
This story is from SuperAging News Network partner, AgeWise Colorado, the trusted go-to online hub/connector for older Coloradans and their families to become informed about and find the services and products they need to thrive as they age.
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