Ep #77: The Power of Decluttering to Reduce Overwhelm
episode summary
Have you ever walked into your home and immediately felt stressed by the clutter around you? What if a few small changes could transform that feeling into calm and peace?
Clutter affects our mental well-being, probably even more than we realize. Studies show clutter can increase stress, making it harder to relax or focus. This episode dives into the science behind how clutter affects your brain and offers quick, actionable tips to start decluttering—without feeling overwhelmed.
By tuning in, you'll learn:
How decluttering even small spaces can immediately improve your mental clarity and reduce stress.
Why clutter affects women differently and how to stop feeling ashamed or isolated because of it.
Simple strategies to start decluttering today, in less than 20 minutes.
Start creating your clutter-free, calming space today by listening to this episode—get ready to feel lighter in both mind and home!
Featured on the podcast:
Get on my email list to join the Decluttering Challenge!
Ep #8| Clear the Clutter
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For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.
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Discover practical strategies to overcome imposter syndrome, manage time effectively, and cultivate a calm and positive mindset while setting boundaries and combating negative self-talk in high-stress jobs, all while learning how to say no and prioritize self-care on the 'Overwhelmed Working Woman' podcast.
Music Used: Pop Guitar Intro 01 by TaigaSoundProd, Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-licen
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CHAPTERS:
2:27 - Clutter vs. Calm
7:24 - The Science of Clutter
9:15 - What Not to Do
12:04 - What to Declutter
13:05 - How to Declutter
16:07 - Do Less for More Success Tip
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Imagine walking into your home after a day of work, whether you're walking from your office in the other room or coming in from the garage and your entire kitchen and the whole landing area where you set your stuff down is completely clean and decluttered. You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less. I'm your host, michelle Gothier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach. On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences, and in each episode you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life. Hey friend, thanks for joining me today. Today we are talking about one of my favorite topics, which is clutter, or rather decluttering and the effect that it has on our brain. Per science - I'm not just making this stuff up! And what to do about it for you, specifically. So sometimes studies have shown that women will feel shame and overwhelm about their clutter, which just makes it harder to attack that and try to solve the problem. So we're going to talk about what to do about it specifically for you and then I'm going to give you some quick tips where you can just start making progress towards your goal of having a decluttered home and life.
Michelle Gauthier:1:28
One thing to do for sure this week is to join my email list. This challenge is going to be so fun. I'm going to be sending out an email every morning. I will give you some instructions and some thoughts on decluttering, and then I'm going to ask you a specific question. And when you reply to my email with your answer to that question, you will get entered in the drawing. And at the end of the week I'm going to draw for three prizes. Two of them are gift cards to the container store, which is the coolest store of all time. I would spend all of the money that I have in that store. My dad always teases me that I have containers for my containers, and he's not wrong. It's the best store ever if you're trying to get decluttered and organized. And then the grand prize is a coaching session with me, which normally is $250. And so we can talk about decluttering your space, we can talk about the effect that has on your mind, or we can talk about anything else that you want to talk to me about. So be sure and join my email list so that you can be part of this quick and simple declutter challenge this week.
Michelle Gauthier:2:27
Okay, I want you to visualize a room. Just close your eyes, unless you're driving, and visualize a room that makes you feel calm when you're in it. It could be at your house or someone else's house - the first thing that comes to my mind is this beautiful hotel that I love - and just take a second to bring to mind a space that makes you feel calm. Okay, got it. Got that picture in your mind. Now visualize a room that makes you feel stressed out just from being in there. And again, this could be at your home, your office, your parents' house, anywhere. Got that one?
Michelle Gauthier:3:08
What's the difference between these two rooms? How much stuff does the calm room have in it? Is it cluttered? And what about the room that makes you feel stressed? Don't tell my son, but I'm picturing his room for the stressed room. He loves to work on and build things and take things apart, so there are always like tools and pieces and then his clothes and cups and plates, and I try not even to walk in there. Even when I wake him up in the morning, I kind of stand at the doorframe and just yell his name until he wakes up.
Michelle Gauthier:3:38
If I ever had to like, do a work meeting in that room, or record a podcast or something in that room, I seriously don't think I could do it if my life depended on it. I have to close my eyes. So today we're going to talk a little bit more about this phenomenon. And when I'm picturing the room that makes me feel calm, for me, and this is going to be different for everyone, but for me none of the vertical - no, not vertical - horizontal spaces have stuff on them. It's very decluttered and very peaceful feeling. For me, the hotel that I love has rooms that are done by color, so you can request, like a green room or a blue room or a red room, and I love the green room and it even has green ceilings, green walls, so it's very colorful, like the color is very intense, which also makes me feel calm. So you might have a totally different opinion, but I think it's important to recognize that normally, a space that makes us feel calm is not a space with a lot of crap in it.
Michelle Gauthier:4:41
I felt the urge to focus on clutter and to do this Declutter Week challenge because I feel so passionate about the impact that it can have on your life and sometimes it's not even that hard. And I myself, when I got back from vacation at the end of July and I was feeling that post-vacation, I don't know what you'd call it, slight depression maybe, like just kind of unmotivated, hard time getting back into regular life. Everything in my house was annoying me, and I realized it's the stuff. I can like feel the stuff in the closets. And so I gave myself this challenge. You know those blue Ikea bags, like the huge Ikea bags that you can get, and they sell them where you can get them with a zipper on them and you can actually use them for moving and everything. So I challenged myself over the month of August to get 12 of those bags filled and donated. I mean, I definitely threw some stuff away too, but donated. I didn't donate the bags because I love them and I want to keep them, but over the course of the month I just went from room to room and there are a couple nights a week during the week where I don't have stuff with my kids, and so I would just take like an hour or whatever and go through - like my bedroom took me several. Like one night I did one of my closets, one night I did the other, I did my bathroom, you know, those kinds of things, but just slowly but surely I went through room to room and I'm up to four bags of stuff now and I've probably done about a third of my house. So for me to set the goal of doing 12 bags in August was too optimistic and I'm unwilling to make myself feel overwhelmed or stressed out about it. So I'm just going to keep going.
Michelle Gauthier:6:23
But the reason why I'm doing a podcast in the middle of my own personal challenge that I'm working on is because it has had a tremendous impact on my mental health. I can't tell you how differently I feel when I walk into my bedroom and when I open my closet door or I pull open my - I have a drawer where all of my jewelry is - and when I pull that open and it's only the jewelry that I really like that I actually wear. I love buying jewelry from Express or whatever, just $10, $20 jewelry, and I buy it all the time. But then you end up with this huge pile of stuff and I just I didn't want it anymore. So, anyway, it's had such a great effect on me. Every time I do a room, I keep finding myself going into that room because it feels so good in there. So I just wanted to take the time to do a podcast about it and challenge you to do something similar. I'm not challenging you to do 12 bags in a month because, as I just told you, that's way too much. It's going to be smaller than that, but it's still going to have a great impact on you.
Michelle Gauthier:7:24
But first let's talk about the science behind this, because people tell me all the time that clutter really affects their mindset, and I believe that it's true. But when I researched this, I found lots of studies, many, many studies, but the one that really stuck out in my mind was a study where they went into the homes of families, 32 families, and they did cortisol tests - so that's the stress hormone tests - on the moms. I'm sure they did other studies on other people in the house, but this one was specifically on the moms, and studied the effect of clutter on their stress hormones and, to no surprise of probably anyone here listening, the moms felt much more stressed in a cluttered room, and the thing that I found really interesting about it is that it said there were times where the mom didn't identify that she was feeling stressed about it, but her stress hormones showed that she was feeling stressed about it. So I thought that that was really interesting, and especially after they said that they had specifically looked into this for moms, I started looking for women specifically, and studies observed that clutter was particularly stressful for women, leading to feelings of exhaustion and being overwhelmed.
Michelle Gauthier:8:38
I don't know exactly why that is. I would imagine that there's some social conditioning in there and that women have a pressure or a responsibility - air quotes responsibility - to make sure that the home is neat and tidy. If you're a woman and this doesn't stress you out, okay, good for you, good for you. But most of the women I know tell me that it definitely does. So what to do about it? If everything I'm saying right now is resonating with you and you're thinking, yeah, it definitely does stress me out and yeah, my home does have either a little, some, or lots of clutter in it, here's what to do specifically.
Michelle Gauthier:9:15
I'm first going to tell you what I recommend that you not do, and this is true for any situation where you feel stressed, embarrassed, overwhelmed. If you have a space in your house that you would never want company to see, or really anyone to see, a lot of times that can cause shame and overwhelm. And so what I always want to encourage you to do, and this is, again, I'm going back to the work of Brene Brown, which we have talked about on this podcast lots of times, but anytime women start to feel shame about something and they're trying to hide their vulnerability or something that they feel shame or embarrassment about, what happens is they isolate. And when you isolate, you feel more alone, and it reinforces those thoughts of I'm different than everybody else, I can't keep it together like everybody else does, etc. So the thing that I recommend that you not do is that - is that you tell yourself, I'm the only one who has this problem, this is such a big deal, I can't talk about it, I'm mortified, I have so much clutter. And I would challenge you this week to talk to somebody else about it. Talk to a friend at work, talk to your sister, or anybody who you trust or know, and just say, hey, I feel like I'm really affected by clutter. Well, how about you? Do you want to join me in doing this challenge? And just start talking about it. Because I've yet to meet someone who's like, my house is amazing, I have no clutter whatsoever, and this just doesn't - this is not a problem for me. I feel like we all do. So the first thing that I recommend that you do is just take an assessment of how you're feeling about it and if you're carrying any kind of shame or worry or overwhelm about it, and just sharing that with somebody else. With anybody. If you don't have a person who you feel like sharing that with, send me an email. I would love to hear that. michelle@ michellegauthier.com.
Michelle Gauthier:11:06
And to get you started today, let's pick a super small area and I'm going to tell you exactly how to declutter it. I also want you to know that I have another podcast episode, episode eight, which we'll link in the show notes, that talks a lot about decluttering and some of the questions that you can ask yourself in order to decide what to keep. But for today, I want the goal to be for you to feel like you have made progress on decluttering something today. So that means don't choose your kitchen. Instead, choose, like, your sock drawer. I'm going to give you a list here of 10 things that you can think about decluttering that will take you 20 minutes or less, start to finish, and that way you will get a newly organized space and you will also start getting those benefits, the clarity of mind that comes with decluttering even one little thing. Okay, so I made a joke about the kitchen. Definitely don't do that.
Michelle Gauthier:12:04
But you could absolutely do the junk drawer. You could do your purse or your bag, if you have like a gym bag or something that you carry around with you all the time. You could do your nightstand, just your nightstand. You could do your bathroom, but just your countertop. You could do one shelf in your pantry. You could do a shoe rack like not all of your shoes, but like a section of shoes, maybe tennis shoes or something like that. You could do the console in your car or the glove compartment. You could do the fridge, but just the door. I bet you money, if you spent a little time, you could find some expired condiments in there. You could sort through your mail pile, that would be one area you could declutter. And the last one is you could declutter is like your entertainment center, if you have remotes or cords or things like that, or if that tends to be an area where people set things down.
Michelle Gauthier:13:05
So here's how you do it. Number one: pick your area. So I'm going to pick a purse. One of my favorite times to declutter my purse is when I have to stand in line somewhere or when I'm getting gas. I also always empty out my car of all trash, which there constantly seems to be in my car. Okay, here are the steps to actually decluttering it. So we're just going to focus on the purse for this example. Number one, just for fun, take a before pic. Just open up your purse and take a picture of it. Then take everything out. Just take absolutely everything out from the space you're decluttering. Don't skip this step. It doesn't take as long as you think. And then sort each item. So definitely, when you're cleaning out a purse, if your purse is like mine, you'll have throwaway or recycle items. So that's number one. Always receipts and crap in there or pens that don't work, whatever.
Michelle Gauthier:13:53
The second pile is giveaway. I'm unlikely to probably find something in my purse that I'm going to give away. It's pretty much gonna be throw away or it's in the wrong place. So if it doesn't belong in there and either it needs to be given away or - I'll find some random stuff in my purse, like a tape measure or something I threw in there for a specific purpose - and it needs to go back to its home. And then the things that you wanna keep and keep in your purse. Then you just process the item, so throw away the throwaway, put back the things that don't belong in there or give them away, and then just neatly organize and put the keep items back into the area. If you're doing something like your fridge door, you could also - hopefully there's not a lot of giveaways in there - but it's pretty much like throw away or recycle or keep and then, before you put them back in, you could wipe it down. Or if it's your purse, if your purse is like mine, I know it gets like random I'm just picturing like crumbs from a granola bar or something in there you can quick clean it out too, put everything back in and then take an after pick and then just bask in the glory of your beautiful new space.
Michelle Gauthier:14:54
And what this will do is first, first of all, you'll find yourself looking in your purse all the time, in this example, or looking in your center console, if you clean that out, or opening your fridge and looking at the door. And what this will do is it will give you clarity of mind on things that are unrelated to your purse or your fridge or whatever, and it will also encourage you. It gives you that positive feedback to say, hey, maybe tomorrow night I can do like one shelf in the fridge, or now that I've done my purse, maybe I can do my gym bag, or now that I've done my purse, maybe I can do my bathroom counter, whatever it is. Sometimes it just gets you going on a roll. So I would love to challenge you to do that today. Take those steps, get on my email list so that you can do this challenge with us and you will be eligible for those prizes when you reply back to me and let me know what you decluttered. Okay, good luck, and hang around for Michelle's Do Less for More Success tip, which is up next.
Michelle Gauthier:16:07
Here's my Do Less for More Success tip for this week. It is when you're driving in your car by yourself. Maybe that's rare for you, but when you're driving in the car by yourself, try not listening to anything. Try to just drive in complete silence and see what that does for the overwhelm that you're feeling. Sometimes people are afraid to do this because they always want to have something else to think about, but I've just noticed, if I drive in complete silence, that after a few minutes I can feel my whole body relax. It's like the one place in life where you can really be by yourself and be quiet. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Michelle Gauthier:16:38
Thanks so much for listening today. Get on my email list so you can participate with us all week on this decluttering challenge. It's going to be so much fun and by the end of the week, hopefully, you'll have a clearer mind and a clearer space. See you next week. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthier.com. See you next week.
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