How to Become More Organized When You Are Feeling Overwhelmed Part 2

Why you won't take action on tackling the clutter in your home.

This is episode 2 of the series where we are diving into How to Become More Organized when you are feeling Overwhelmed with Clutter.

Today we are going to focus on the three reasons that your cluttered home is overwhelming you to the point that you are unable to take action.

First things first, I want you to think back to the last time that you made an attempt to declutter an area of your home.

• Think about how that process made you feel.

• Think about how it went. Were you successful?

My guess is that it made you feel anxious and tight in the chest. And I am willing to bet that success wouldn’t be the word you would use to describe your experience.

If I am ringing a bell, then this episode is for you because it sounds like you might be a bit overwhelmed by your clutter and we are going to get down to the bottom of why that is.

In my experience there are 3 reasons that you might be struggling to take action on the clutter in your home. Sometimes it is just one of these things that is stopping you and sometimes it is a combination of all of them. But like the guilt that we talked about in part 1 of this series, understanding what is causing the hesitation is half the battle.

The first reason you may be hesitating is the most obvious.

You have too much stuff!

The sheer volume of items to go through might seem impossible. Sometimes I can get this feeling when I'm in a client's home who has a lot of things. Sometimes, it's not easy to see exactly how much is in a space until I start pulling it out and when I start digging deep and pulling things out of drawers, I can really start to get a sense of what's there. Sometimes it just seems like it's going to be impossible for me to tackle within the time frame that I have.

So, this is the first reason that you are possibly feeling overwhelmed, and it's probably the most obvious. If you haven't done any decluttering in the past, this is probably going to be a big issue for you. It can be really hard if you are not used to downsizing and let it go of things to get started on it because it's something that you've never really done. When you're starting from that point the volume of things can seem extremely hard to manage.

The second reason you may be hesitating is because you look at decluttering and see a task that is so complex that it seems beyond your ability or skill in this department.

You might start looking around the room and seeing things and you know, you want to get rid of them. But you immediately start thinking of what you need to do with that item. You start asking yourself questions like, who am I going to give it to or do I need to throw it away? Am I going to sell it? Am i going to donate it? Or maybe you start to thinking about whether you will regret letting go of it or not.

Your brain is getting ahead of itself and that can be a huge cause for overwhelm because you're thinking too far into the future. Nobody wants to be wasteful. Nobody wants to throw everything they own away. It's natural to want to find solutions for these things, somewhere else that these items can go, that is useful. It's normal to worry about the regret of getting rid of things as well. The problem is that when you start thinking of all the different steps that are going to happen after you declutter, you start to feel that overwhelmed.

The third reason is that it is too long of a process that you just don’t have the proper time to dedicate yourself to.

Whether it be that you want to declutter your entire home or even just a certain space like your office or a guest room, you start to look at that stuff and feel overwhelm. Sometimes it's not even about the amount of stuff, it's about the amount of time that it's going to take to achieve the results that you want. The real issue with this is that you're looking at it as one whole project and instead what we need to do is to look at it as smaller projects so that it is not so overwhelming.

All three of these are valid things that can make decluttering feel overwhelming.

One of the most important things that you can do is figure out which of those three things, if not all of those three things are causing the overwhelm. When we come back next week, and I give you the tips and tactics you will know of them that you need to try to use to get past your specific overwhelm for this project.