Decluttering refers to the process of eliminating unnecessary items from our homes and, more broadly, removing the superfluous from our lives, such as non-essential daily activities and toxic relationships.
The process of freeing ourselves from excess, both in physical spaces and in life, brings a sense of lightness, provides better mental clarity, and increases our readiness to embrace future challenges.
How to declutter your home
To declutter, start by eliminating everything you don't regularly use that takes up unnecessary space: books, clothes, accessories, documents, knick-knacks, various objects, expired medicines, etc. Then, reorganize what you decide to keep in a more practical and rational manner.
If you plan to declutter the entire house, it's advisable to plan in advance which areas to tidy up based on your available time.
Tackling spaces one at a time in a logical order rather than randomly will allow you to optimize the work throughout the house.
- Begin by identifying a room in the house (for example, the bedroom) and within it, the different places where items are stored (for example, the wardrobe, the dresser, the nightstands).
- Once you've chosen the area to review (for example, a nightstand drawer), completely empty it, neatly placing all the items it contains on a table or bed.
- Then, carefully assess these items one by one, asking yourself if they are truly useful and if you use them in your daily life.
In this initial screening, keep only what you actually use and set aside everything else, including items associated with memories and various sentimental attachments, for the time being.
At this point, you'll start to feel a sense of accomplishment seeing the drawer or wardrobe with half the items it had before, neatly arranged, easily identifiable, and accessible.
- You'll find a certain number of discarded items that you'll review, sorting them into categories: items to throw away, items to donate (or sell), and, if there are any, items "on hold".
Items on hold are those about which you're not yet 100% sure whether to part with them, so you'll keep them elsewhere for some time to avoid regrets in the future.
These items include rarely or never used items, items you're attached to for sentimental reasons, and items that might be useful someday.
- Place all these items on hold in a location other than the attic or basement (so you won't forget about them), such as a small room or a shelf in the utility closet.
Arranging these items in a place where they generally "bother us" but don't disrupt our daily lives too much still means they're visible, and sooner or later, we'll be forced to reconsider them.
This "push" precisely achieves the goal of decluttering, which can be considered effective only when we remove superfluous items from our homes rather than accumulating them from one room to another.
- After a few months, when we revisit those same items, we'll surprisingly have a clearer idea of what to do with them: whether to give them away, sell them, throw them away, or keep them.
How to declutter your life
Decluttering has become a way of life, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries.
It can be applied to various aspects of our existence based on the principle of getting rid of the old, which often binds us, to make room for the new.
Alongside decluttering physical environments we inhabit daily, there's also decluttering to be done in our personal sphere, allowing us to live better.
This involves eliminating all those unnecessary daily activities that cause discomfort and those relationships we realize are harmful to us.
To identify the unnecessary activities to declutter, we can make a list of things to do during the day.
This list will help us prioritize some activities over others and prevent us from doing too much or, worse, doing multiple things simultaneously.
This way, we can carve out time just for ourselves, where we switch off our minds and focus solely on relaxing, essential for our psychophysical well-being.
Regarding relationships, we should first carefully analyze our interactions with others and distance ourselves from relationships that bring us anxiety and stress.
There's also a decluttering process to be done at a "mental" level, which involves selecting and rearranging our thoughts.
To do this, we shouldn't overthink things.
To avoid thought overload, we need to try to live as much as possible in the present moment, eliminating fears, anxieties, worries about the future, resentments, and grudges that generate stress and poison us every day.
This creates a less toxic inner space that frees us from suffocating unconscious constraints and opens us up to new and stimulating future experiences.
In conclusion, decluttering aimed at enhancing our personal well-being at all levels is achieved by starting from our external dimension, namely the environments of our daily lives such as home and office, then moving on to life and mental spheres, gradually unraveling everything that feels burdensome and negative.