Introduction
A cluttered home can affect your life and your health in many ways. For starters, it keeps your home dirty and inhospitable. That leads to a dusty and unhygienic environment. If you don’t have the time to declutter your home, search for “cleaning services near me” and hire a cleaning company near you. Most people often forget how clutter affects your physical health and even your emotional health. Let’s check out how those two are connected:
The Details
- Lower well-being – When you live in clutter, your home isn’t a safe refuge in your life. Your home is usually a safe and cozy place where you can come, relax and unwind after all the chaos outside. Your home is also a place of pride. When you buy a home, you decorate it according to your needs and style and it becomes a form of self-expression. However, all of this doesn’t happen when your home is cluttered.
When there are too many things in one place your home isn’t a place of pride and self-esteem anymore. It’s not a place of safe refuge. You consider your home as your “enemy” instead of your “friend”. The cozy environment you spend so much money and time on molding to your style seems alien and it can have an adverse effect on your mental health.
- Stress eating – Lenny Vartanian conducted an Australian-US study where he offered cookies and snacks to groups of people in a clean and healthy environment and chaotic cluttered environments. In a cluttered environment, people felt more stressed and consumed more food.
When you’re in a cluttered environment, you tend to have low self-control. For instance, look at your messy kitchen right now. Such an environment makes you feel messy and disorganized and that makes you lose the self-control mindset. You feel stressed and more out of control of your life.
Stress eating is a closely linked mental health issue that can manifest severe health problems if not reigned in. It can lead to obesity and other health problems that affect your mental health and create a vicious cycle.
- Less effective visual processing – When your environment is filled with clutter, reading people’s emotions becomes difficult. Everything around you acts as a stimulus and when there’s random visual stimulus all around you, your emotional quotient takes a hit.
For instance, researchers at Cornell University showed movie clips to test subjects. In the study, participants had a hard time interpreting the emotional expressions of the characters in scenes with abundant background clutter. You’ll have a hard time paying attention to the people around you when you live in a cluttered environment. That makes you unable to properly interpret and react to what people around you are feeling and can strain your relationships.
- More stress – Life isn’t easy and from juggling tasks for career growth to taking care of your kids there are several factors that add stress to your life. You don’t want the same from your home. Studies have shown that people with a cluttered home have high levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. On the other hand, people who are more organized have low levels of stress.
Stress may seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but it affects every part of your life. It makes you less patient, reduces your cognitive abilities, and can also cause sleep deprivation. You feel less energized when you’re stressed and that affects your physical and emotional health. You also tend to eat more unhealthy take-out food in a cluttered environment.
- More irritation and anger – As mentioned above, stress can lead to many problems. One of them is that it makes you more irritable and impatient. In a cluttered home, you can’t find your keys when in a hurry, you rarely eat a proper meal since the kitchen is dirty, and your work is messed up when you can’t find a sheet of paper in a pile of junk.
All those factors add to irritability and make you angrier. You always have a bad mood and can’t interact with your family or coworkers properly. Both your personal and professional relationships get strained when you become more irritable.
- Your love life is jeopardized – If the clutter is due to a hoarding problem, it’s going to strain your love life. When you attach value to everything and can’t get rid of the unnecessary stuff it affects your marriage. Studies show that hoarders have a higher rate of divorce and have a hard time with their partners.
Even if the clutter is not due to hoarding, it can affect your marriage. Both you and your spouse would be bothered by the clutter and the chaotic environment. When things get heated up in an argument you make severe misjudgments and say the most hurtful things to each other even if you don’t mean it. You call each other names, bring up the past and throw negative comments at each other.
- Social isolation – A cluttered environment also makes you lonely. Surveys conducted by Russell Research show that people with messy homes are less likely to invite guests over. When you have an unclean home, you’re embarrassed about it and don’t want your friends or colleagues to see you live in such a state. You can’t invite your coworkers to strengthen cooperation at the workplace and you can’t invite friends or new people.
That leaves you more isolated each day. You‘re isolated both at work and on the weekends, you may not have anyone to hang out with. Prolonged isolation can have many consequences. It includes depression, higher anxiety levels, poor sleep, poor social understanding, and even endangers your cardiovascular health and immunity.
Conclusion
As you see, a cluttered home can mess up your home and your well-being. It can lead to depression, anxiety and form cracks in relationships with your kids, partner, friends, and family. To get rid of the clutter, search for “cleaning services near me” and leave the job to a professional.