Working with organizers and talking with my clients I find that one’s environment keeps coming up. Is the environment you are living in supportive of your overall living? I used to live in a terrible mess. I had too much stuff, stuff everywhere to the point you couldn’t see the floor in some rooms. This was a long time ago but I remember the overwhelm of living that way. Not surprisingly, it was also a time of great depression for me that I am sure contributed to my environment being what it was.
I have learned through my own experience and experiences my clients have communicated to me that living in a cluttered environment can affect you negatively. I believe it can diminish your energy. An environment of clutter is decisions not made. Decisions not made weigh on you. They clutter the back of your mind.
Having just moved I am experiencing this again because my bedroom has yet to be totally put away. I do the administration of my coaching business in my bedroom so I have a lot of stuff packed in. In addition to the usual bedroom furniture and items such as clothes, I have files, computer, printer, copier and office supplies in my bedroom. It is a lot of stuff for one room. Right now I have yet to find a home for everything so the room is definitely cluttered. That is a distraction and it leaches energy that could better be put to other useful things.
You probably have noticed if you have lived in a cluttered environment that there is often an intermittent dialogue going on in your brain of what you should be doing to fix the situation. Usually you do nothing and things continue to pile up and often get worse. The worse it gets the more you avoid doing something about it. The whole thing seems too stressful and overwhelming to deal with.
An answer is not to tackle the whole thing at once but to break it down into small chunks. Pick a place to start that is the least intimidating and involves the least decision-making, that may be a corner of the room or one type of object such as your files. Forget about the rest of the mess. You need to start somewhere. It is like eating a large pizza. You don’t lift up the whole thing up to eat. Instead you cut the pizza into slices and you eat a slice at a time. It doesn’t really matter which slice you start with just that you start with one slice. Eat until you are satisfied and put the rest of the pizza away for another time when you want more.
You can deal with clutter in the same way. Just do a chunk at a time. Complete the chunk and come back another day to do another chunk. The more that gets put away the more relaxing it will be in that environment. It helps you to focus on what you truly wish to focus on (which is already hard for us) without the distraction of a lot of clutter.
Once the clutter is under control you can better make your environment pleasing. A pleasing environment becomes a refuge, a refuge that feeds you energy rather than one that drains your energy.