Decluttering refers to the process of removing unnecessary items from one's home and, more broadly, eliminating the superfluous from one's life such as non-essential daily activities and harmful relationships.
The process of freeing oneself from the superfluous, both in a physical space 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 we do not use regularly and that occupies unnecessary space: books, clothes, accessories, documents, decorative items, various objects, expired medications, etc... and then reorganize what we decide to keep in a more practical and rational manner.
If we intend to declutter the entire house, it is advisable to plan in advance the rooms to organize based on our availability of time.
Organizing the spaces one at a time in a logical manner and not haphazardly, will allow us to optimize the work throughout the home.
- Start by first identifying a room in the house (for example, the bedroom) and within it, one by one, the different places where objects are accumulated (for example, the wardrobe, the dresser, the nightstands).
- Once you have chosen the place to review (for example, a nightstand drawer), we must empty it completely placing all the items neatly on a table or on the bed.
- Then assess these items one at a time carefully, asking ourselves if we actually use it in our daily lives.
In this initial sorting keep only what we really use and set aside for the moment everything else including items tied to memories and various sentimentalities.
At this point, we will start to feel a great satisfaction seeing the drawer or wardrobe or furniture with half the things that were there before, organized neatly, easily identifiable and accessible.
- We will find a certain number of discarded objects which we will review by dividing them into: items to throw away, items to donate (or sell), and, if there are any, items "on hold".
The items on hold are those that we are not 100% sure yet that we want to get rid of and that we will keep elsewhere for some time in order not to have regrets in the future.
This category includes: items never or rarely used, items we are attached to or linked to specific memories, and items that might one day be useful.
- Store all these items on hold in a place that is neither the attic nor the cellar (because we would forget about them), but that can be, for example, a closet or a shelf in the utility cabinet.
Storing these things in a place where they generally "bother us", but do not too much interfere with our daily lives, means we still keep an eye on them and sooner or later we will be forced to reconsider them.
This "enforcement" exactly meets the goal of decluttering which can be considered effective only when we remove the superfluous objects from our home and not when we shuffle them from one room to another.
- After a certain number of months, when we look at those same items again, we will 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 true way of life especially in Anglo-Saxon countries.
Indeed, it can be applied in various areas of our existence according to the principle of letting go of the old that often imprisons us to make room for the new.
Thus, alongside decluttering that concerns the physical environments we live in daily, there is also a decluttering to be implemented in our personal sphere that allows us to live better.
It is achieved by eliminating all those superfluous daily activities that generate discomfort and those relationships that we realize are harmful to us.
To identify the superfluous activities to declutter, we can create a list of things to do during the day.
This list will help us give the right priority to some activities over others and will prevent us from doing too many things or worse, doing multiple things at the same time.
In this way, we can carve out time spaces dedicated only to ourselves where we turn off our minds and think only about relaxing; essential moments for our physical and mental well-being.
Regarding relationships, first of all, we should carefully analyze our relationships with others and distance ourselves from those relationships that bring us anxiety and stress.
There is also a decluttering to be done at a "mental" level based on the selection and organization of our thoughts.
To implement it, simply, we should not overthink.
To avoid an overload of thoughts, we must try to live as much as possible in the present moment eliminating fears, anxieties, concerns 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 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 in the environments of our daily life like the home and office, and then moving to the sphere of life and the mental one, unraveling one by one everything we feel as cumbersome and negative.