Most people understand that the environment in which they live has an effect on their quality of life. However, you may not realize that this includes your home environment, where you may be subjected to piles of clutter. The messes in your home may just be the signs of wholesome living, but they can lead to a problem. Clutter impacts the quality of your mental health in the following ways.
Clutter Leads to More Stress
In general, you’ll feel higher levels of stress on a daily basis when you see clutter throughout your home. Even though you won’t realize it on a conscious level, walking into a room where there are stacks of papers, piles of clothes, or toys scattered around will leave you feeling on edge. Your emotional health will suffer because your mind will be continuously thinking about the mess. Unless you take action to eliminate the mess, you’ll always feel that increased level of tension and anxiety.
You Could Develop Unhealthy Eating Habits
As messes pile up in your home and you feel the increased level of stress, your mind will look for ways to alleviate it. The most common response is that you’ll experience a sweet tooth. That will cause you to reach for junk food as a way of alleviating your feelings. While the sugar and fat in processed foods can give you a pleasant rush of energy, it won’t last long. You’ll be left with the empty calories that have been stored in your body as fat. In this way, clutter in your home can cause you to gain unwanted weight.
Your Relationships Will Suffer
Recent studies have found that messy surroundings, or environments with large amounts of stimuli, inhibit an individual’s ability to focus on one person or object. This means you’ll never really be paying attention to your significant other, children, or guests when they’re speaking to you. Whether you realize it or not, your attention will be divided between someone speaking to you and the clutter that surrounds them.
You’ll Lose Time
While a blackout is one type of missing time, there are other ways you can lose time. One way is in the time you spend looking for a simple object amid the messes in your home. People who don’t keep a neat home often spend much more time searching for keys, a phone, or another important object they temporarily misplaced. While it may only take a few minutes to find the desired item, think about how often you have to look for something important. That time adds up and can leave you wasting hours of your life searching the clutter that you let accumulate on a daily basis.
While cleaning up the mess in your home may not alleviate serious mental health problems, it can help reduce the amount of daily stress and anxiety you experience. In addition to seeking professional help for your emotional health, keeping a cleaner home can help you relax more fully and enjoy your daily life. At the very least, clearing the clutter out of your home will help you function more efficiently.