Program: Is clutter making you feel bad?

Sana Qadar: Do you consider yourself a maximalist? Someone who enjoys having lots of stuff in your space. Little trinkets, pictures, books, etc. Or are you more of a minimalist?

Professor Melissa Norberg: I would say I am relatively clutter-free. So I can let things pile up for a week or so. But then I enjoy organizing. I just spent the whole weekend organizing my son's room. Which he may not have liked.

Professor Jessica Grisham: I would say I'm fairly in-between. I do really love reading and books. So I have probably a few too many books that I'm paring down. But I definitely wouldn't call myself a minimalist.

Sana Qadar: Where you sit on the spectrum of clutter can be a point of tension amongst family and housemates and even coworkers. But there's probably been a point in your life where you thought, Wow, that person has just way too much stuff. Or maybe you even thought that about yourself. I'm Sana Qadar. This is All in the Mind. And today producer Rose Kerr joins me in the studio to talk about clutter and decluttering. And why it can be so hard to get rid of our stuff even if we have too much. Hi Rose.

Rose Kerr: Hi Sana.

Sana Qadar: So last time you were on the show we were talking about collecting.

Rose Kerr: Yes, and we talked about why people love collecting and how it differs from hoarding disorder. And following that episode we got a listener email asking about decluttering. So Ray wrote, I'd love to suggest the topic of decluttering as a sister episode to this one.

Sana Qadar: It's a good idea. I mean it's a pretty universal topic. I don't know anyone who hasn't been irritated by clutter at some point or another.

Rose Kerr: Yeah, 100%. And Ray also had questions about the morality of minimalism and how we might tackle the idea of influencing people to buy less. Heaps of great ideas I'm really keen to get into today. But I thought the best place to start might be by talking about the power of decluttering broadly.

Rose Kerr: I'll be honest with you. I quite like clutter. I enjoy having my favourite trinkets and belongings on display and having lots of colour fill my home. I probably fall in the collector maximalist basket rather than the minimalist basket. And I definitely find decluttering hard. Plenty of people do enjoy decluttering. And everyone from Marie Kondo to my own mum say it's good for you. But is it really?

Professor Melissa Norberg: I think decluttering is helpful. So if you have so many objects in your house or in your office at work, it can make it hard to get things done.

Rose Kerr: This is Melissa Norberg. She's a professor of psychology at Macquarie University who specialises in hoarding and OCD.

Professor Melissa Norberg: If you declutter and you can easily find what you need and easily sit down and relax on your sofa, then that is going to be good for you and the people around you.

Rose Kerr: Makes sense. But before you get too excited and throw away all your belongings, it's not all good news.

Professor Jessica Grisham: I think the evidence might lag behind the enthusiasm in a sense.

Rose Kerr: This is Dr Jessica Grisham from the University of New South Wales. She's also a professor of psychology like Melissa, and they've worked together on a bunch of projects related to OCD and hoarding.

Professor Jessica Grisham: There is some evidence that for people who have tendencies towards excessive saving and excessive buying, that reducing their clutter improves their well-being, reduces depression and anxiety, and makes them have a higher quality of life. But for those of us not in a clinical population, I think there's much more scant evidence. So I think anecdotally it's really easy to relate to the idea that high levels of clutter make people feel overwhelmed, and that if you reduce your clutter you feel a little more mental clarity. But I think some of that experimental work is still in progress.

Rose Kerr: Jessica says the anecdotal association between minimalism and improving your well-being can have a flip side, leading people to make moral judgements about clutter.

Professor Jessica Grisham: When social media presents this idea, or pop culture in general, that we all need to lead an extremely minimalist lifestyle and have this perfect flow of efficiency, and not a skerrick of things that we don't need around, it creates possibly, paradoxically creates a little bit more stress to be really perfect in our minimalism, and to achieve a completely clutter-free lifestyle. It becomes much like all the other Instagram around exercise and eating and other lifestyle things, where it's marketed as this achievable ideal, and then people feeling a bit down on themselves if they fall short of that ideal. So I would caution against the idea that it is going to be the panacea that fix all our woes. I do think that there is a human tendency that we have evolved to be attached to certain objects, and it's okay to be attached to certain objects that bring us meaning and bring us joy, but if you start feeling kind of overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in your house, and discouraged and anxious about it, then it can be quite freeing.

Rose Kerr: If you've ever had to go through boxes of memories or belongings of a lost loved one, you likely know how hard decluttering can be. Because sometimes objects represent who we are, and it's hard to say goodbye to those things.

Professor Jessica Grisham: And those kinds of emotional attachments, that they remind them of people that are important to them, they're really hard to counter and really hard to think about other ways to have those relationships and express your identity that doesn't require hanging on to those objects. So I think that's like that stickiness of that emotional attachment, and that feeling people have, a lot of negative feelings sometimes letting those things go. They might feel guilty or sad. You know, sometimes people have relatives who've passed away, and they're hanging on to these memories through their stuff. So that's just a really powerful emotion to go through, and sometimes it's easier just to avoid and procrastinate.

Professor Melissa Norberg: You're going through your stuff, and then you're like, oh, I remember when I bought this, or I remember when I used to wear this, or I remember it jogs this memory I have. I don't want to get rid of that, because I want those memories.

Rose Kerr: Here's Melissa Norberg again.

Professor Melissa Norberg: It can also be hard decluttering if you easily get distracted. So you might get enmeshed in those memories and forget that you're supposed to be decluttering, or there just may be so much stuff that it's overwhelming, and you can't figure out where to start. And then it can be hard to figure out where everything needs to go. So if you have limited space in your house trying to figure out, where can I put things, and then it can just feel so daunting that you might want to give up.

Rose Kerr: And beyond getting lost in memories or just struggling to find a new home for your items, Melissa says another reason why clutter might build up is because of mental health concerns. And this does include hoarding disorder, but more on that in a moment.

Professor Melissa Norberg: People can get a lot of clutter built up in their homes when they're depressed. So not feeling motivated or having the energy to clean up and tidy up. Individuals also experience issues with substance use that might lead to clutter building up in the home. Individuals with schizophrenia can also experience a substantial amount of clutter in their home. ADHD can make people more distractible, and that can pose an issue with decluttering. And so as a mental health professional, we always need to figure out why the clutter is there to make sure that we give the right intervention to help with the clutter.

Sana Qadar: It's interesting because I feel like sometimes I'm in a mood where decluttering is really easy. It feels really good to be letting go of stuff. And other times if I'm kind of being forced by my husband to like go through my clothes and get rid of stuff I don't wear anymore, it's quite hard because I see something I bought in my 20s, and I'm like, that's attached to a memory for me. And I kind of want to hang on to that.

Rose Kerr: Yeah, 100%. And for me, I really related to the idea of decluttering being hard when you don't have enough space. Like when I moved off campus after university, the thought of actually decluttering made me so stressed that I just kind of boxed everything up and shipped it off to mum and dad. So I'm so sorry. (Both laugh)

Sana Qadar: They've got your clutter now.

Rose Kerr: They really do. But beyond the reasons we've talked about already, decluttering can be really challenging for someone with hoarding disorder.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, and so when does clutter become a symptom of something more serious, like hoarding disorder?

Rose Kerr: So the DSM-5 says the main criteria is difficulty discarding possessions. And that difficulty stems from emotional distress or feeling like you really need those objects, even though you don't. And Professor Melissa Norberg says the clutter reaches a point where it stops you from being able to use your living spaces.

Professor Melissa Norberg: It needs to impair people's living environments to the extent that they can't use them for what they were naturally intended. So if you think about your living room, its natural intention is to be able to relax. So if you can't sit on the sofa, read a book, watch TV comfortably, because there is so much stuff that you're unable to sit on that sofa or even see your TV, then you might meet criteria for hoarding disorder.

Rose Kerr: In terms of its prevalence, Professor Jessica Grisham says it's more common than most people realise, sitting around 2-3% of the population.

Professor Jessica Grisham: Whereas OCD is 1-2%, schizophrenia is like 1%. So to think about like three people in every hundred coming forward and having clinical levels of hoarding disorder, it's sobering. There's quite a few people in it. It's partly because it's a hidden problem and people are ashamed and not letting people into their home because of that, that I think it's more undetected cases even than we realise.

Rose Kerr: Hoarding behaviours have long been the fascination of reality TV programs and documentaries.

Youtube clip: We meet the extreme hoarders.

Rose Kerr: Listener Ray reflected on this in his email to us, mentioning these kinds of shows portraying hoarding as kind of a grotesque curiosity, whereas decluttering is almost glorified with minimalism being trendy. I've been wondering about this too, so I put it to Jessica Grisham.

Professor Jessica Grisham: There's a small part that acknowledges that at least it's bringing this issue to the fore, but for the most part I think it's quite damaging in terms of focusing on the clutter and being very – eliciting a lot of disgust from people. And I think what you're saying is interesting to me about this moral judgement and this idea of morality that gets intertwined like cleanliness is godliness. This idea that if you're a minimalist or if your home is really clean and tidy, that makes you somehow a better or more valuable person. And if you have hoarding issues or your home is cluttered, that you are lazy or dirty, and I think that's probably something that goes back into deep into human history in the way that people are judged. But it's really time we kind of move past that.

Rose Kerr: Jessica says it's important to remember the real person behind the hoarding disorder.

Professor Jessica Grisham: Sometimes they have very severe deprivation in childhood or trauma in childhood, not always as people expect that they didn't have stuff when they were children, but a lot of times that they didn't feel they didn't have emotional support, going all the way to physical and emotional abuse and neglect. And kind of understanding those drivers and having a little more compassion for the people is not only I think just the right thing as a human to think about, but also is more constructive in terms of getting help for these situations, because when people feel really stigmatized and shamed, they are not reaching out for help. But it's tricky too because I think compared to some other disorders, the outcomes of hoarding can impact on neighbors in the community more than other disorders. With hoarding, people understandably get really frustrated when someone has severe hoarding and it's affecting their property and causing them concerns about their own health and safety. So that's very understandable. I think putting people in a kind of like subhuman category is not going to get very much traction in terms of actually addressing this as a community.

Rose Kerr: So, how do you treat hoarding disorder? Well, the first step is making sure the home is safe, removing stuff that could catch fire or cause a fall. Once basic safety is sorted, a psychologist might look to exposure therapy, facing the challenging emotions that come with decluttering.

Professor Jessica Grisham: People with hoarding are particularly - experience those negative emotions more intensely and they're more resistant to sitting with negative emotions. We call it intolerant of distress. So if you particularly feel negative things strongly and you don't feel like you can cope with negative emotions, you're even more likely to avoid dealing with it and throwing things away. So part of what treatment is about is getting people to notice those negative emotions, maybe label them and moving them towards practising sitting with those negative emotions when they throw things away.

Rose Kerr: Exercises like this might be done individually or in a group setting, giving people the chance to practice discarding objects and processing those feelings.

Professor Jessica Grisham: And the more people do it, the more they get comfortable with it, the more they get reinforced for it, the more they can start doing that process in their home. There's also just basic organizational skills and training and also exposure to not acquiring.

Rose Kerr: This is where a psychologist will take clients to op shops or markets wherever they normally buy things and encourage them to avoid actually making a purchase.

Professor Jessica Grisham: Having them experience urges, maybe handle things they get excited about and want to bring home and put those things back on the shelf and sit with that feeling of whatever that might be, disappointment or this missed opportunity. So that's one of the key elements is the exposure aspect and the organization aspect. And there's also some identification of like what are the thoughts behind it as an individual? Are you thinking about, is this a missed opportunity? Or I'll be able to use this one day or this represents who I am. Or if I throw this away, people won't really understand me. Or I'll forget everything about this wonderful trip to grace if I throw away this souvenir. What are those drivers and can you pull them out, unpack them a little bit, re-examine them and start to have more flexibility in your thinking instead of just going, yep, I'll forget the trip, back it goes. Start thinking about other ways you might remember the trip or what kinds of things hanging onto those souvenirs is preventing you from going on your next trip. So there's that cognitive work of exploring some of the things that lead you to hang on to stuff.

Rose Kerr: And much like sitting with any friend who's trying to declutter their home, Professor Melissa Norberg says part of her role is to be a support person for someone with hoarding disorder.

Professor Melissa Norberg: We might be going through their clothes and I'll try to make light of the situation when it's appropriate. So we might giggle together about the ridiculous things that are saved. And that can help just to make the experience enjoyable, but to also disassociate those psychological needs from the functional value. And just to see, oh yeah, I guess I really don't need this anymore. That was cool in the 80s, but it's not cool anymore. And so I can let it go. It's making time to enjoy the space that is freed up after the clutter goes, relishing in the beauty of a closet after it's organized. And so really seeing for them what is it they wanted to achieve and making sure they see that that's happened when the decluttering is over.

Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, producer Rose Kerr is unpacking decluttering. And Rose, we've talked about some of the reasons why it can be hard to get rid of stuff from depression to just being emotionally attached to certain objects. I feel like sometimes I'm reluctant to let go of things if I think, you know, they're in good working order. They could be useful at some point, even though I'm not using them so much. I don't use them that frequently and I don't really want them to end up in landfill.

Rose Kerr: For sure. Like there's just so much waste in the world. Sometimes you don't feel like contributing more to it. It was really interesting talking to Jessica and Melissa because this belief came up a number of times with their hoarding disorder clients. And I will say in those cases, they still work through decluttering in a safe way because ultimately that clutter is impacting someone's way of life.

Sana Qadar: What about someone like me, though? Like I don't have hoarding disorder. Is that a common way to think about things sometimes?

Rose Kerr: Yeah, I think it is pretty common. I know I hear a lot of conversations about it amongst my friends. And as I explored this topic for this episode, I noticed this concern for the environment coupled with the cost of living crisis has driven an interesting trend on social media called underconsumption core.

Youtube clip: We are in an underconsumption core era... There's always the next best thing. And how long are you going to use it...

Rose Kerr: Underconsumption core comes across as a response to content that leans into overconsumption, like the glamorization of consumer culture and the lavish lifestyles of influencers. Because this trend encourages you to buy less, so stop and clutter before it takes hold, I wanted to understand it from a business and marketing lens. Like, are we seeing changes in how people spend their money? Or is this just a social media trend? To get to the bottom of it, I spoke to Dr. Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee from the Ted Rogers School of Management in Toronto, Canada, and Dr. Omar Fares from the University of New Brunswick, also in Canada. Here's Mark.

Dr Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee: Rose, I'll share with you something very interesting. In the modern age, we are more aware and educated about sustainability. Yet, in the modern age, we are more wasteful and we're throwing out so much clothing and things than ever before in our lives. And so that's a paradox. How can we be so educated or how can we know so much more about sustainability than ever before, but yet we are not thinking about the waste that we are producing?

Rose Kerr: Omar and Mark co-wrote an article in the conversation about underconsumption core. And this is how Omar describes it.

Dr Omar Fares: So underconsumption core is a major TikTok trend that happened over the past year or so. And the general idea is the utilization or increased utilization of what you already have and minimal new spend on net new items. In essence, this is saving and this kind of champions the idea and actually paints it in a very positive light of minimalism and makes the idea of frugality or strategic frugality almost be a positive virtue as opposed to a negative trait.

Rose Kerr: So people are trying to buy less and are encouraging others to do the same. It's also about being strategic with your purchases.

Dr Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee: There was a popular trend back where there's a Marie Kondo effect. And one of the things that Marie Kondo talks about is that when you're sort of decluttering, you want to take a look at your T-shirt and say, does this bring me joy? And if it brings you joy, then you keep it. If it does not, you get rid of it. And that whole idea has been existing for quite a while. But the underconsumption trend, the idea and sort of this identity around it has surfaced. And it's different from minimalism. It's different from just spending less or being frugal. It's about spending so that it brings you maximum utility.

Rose Kerr: Speaking of buying less, Professor Jessica Grisham has been considering how we might influence people to do just that through a technique called nudging.

Professor Jessica Grisham: So nudging has been examined in lots of different kinds of human behavior and not just an acquisition. It's defined as something that changes the choices available. They call it the choice architecture in a way that influences people's decisions. So a good example of that would be putting fruit at eye level so that people make healthier food choices in a convenience store.

Rose Kerr: You might be familiar with nudges built into online shopping. Like if you close a website with items still in your shopping cart, you might get a follow-up email from the brand reminding you the items are still there, ready to purchase.

Professor Jessica Grisham: So these kinds of things that increase people's tendencies to buy. And so we've been starting to think about how we could use nudges to reduce that kind of online shopping. For example, maybe if you're online browsing something on the internet and you're about to shop up, maybe there could be a pop-up instead of urging you to buy, it might say, how often do you think you're going to use this item or something like that. The challenge would be, of course, whether or not corporations would be invested in doing these things. There are some corporations who are trying to be more ethical and more green that might be open to these types of approaches. But anything where you could build in what we call friction, where instead of immediately being able to see an object and it's suddenly on its way to your door, being able to build in a little bit of extra time to reduce that impulsive action and get people to think a little bit more critically, and also thinking a little bit more of their longer-term goals. So thinking about how we can start doing that maybe in a more personalized way. And I think for some people that also might be them building their own self-nudges onto their system. So perhaps you might add a program to your computer that when you're shopping, there might be a game that pops up that you do that just adds a little bit of delay before you end up finalizing your purchase.

Rose Kerr: Do we know how successful that slowing down is and if it's actually getting people to buy less?

Professor Jessica Grisham: So think it's a very new space is the short answer. And we don't really know yet, but I think given everything that's happening so rapidly with social media and with AI, there are going to be more things where people start thinking of how we can not just use these kinds of things for nefarious purposes, but how can we harness it to start getting people to make more careful decisions that are going to reduce overconsumption.

Rose Kerr: Whether you're trying to buy less or reduce the clutter you already have, there's one aspect that has kept coming up in my conversations with Jessica, Melissa, Mark, and Omar, and that's reflecting on your values. It seems understanding your values might be key to making these tricky decisions. Here's Mark Lee again.

Dr Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee: Just because you're going out there buying sustainable goods, but if you're buying massive, massive amounts of them and then throwing them out a year later, then are you actually doing something good for the society? So it really comes down to your values and not just as an individual, but thinking about the society as a whole. And that's part of why this underconsumption trend is continuing to thrive.

Rose Kerr: And Omar Fares says being a mindful consumer is all about finding balance.

Dr Omar Fares: How do we, on a very micro level, go about healthy consumption? It starts off with effectively utilizing mental accounting, and that should be driven by value-based systems where you have almost a job for every dollar that goes into your budget. What we've known time and time again, you will tend to spend more mindfully. So add this with Mark's points about the social side. I think we have a whole lot of healthier consumers.

Rose Kerr: This focus on values is key to some of the recent work Melissa Norberg has been doing, combining her expertise in hoarding disorder with her interest in the environment.

Professor Melissa Norberg: I got interested in the environment because of hoarding. So when working with individuals who hoard, they'll often say, I can't let this go. It's just going to go to landfill. Or they pick up things that are waiting for the council pick up because they want to rescue them from going to landfill. And so there's a constant environmental theme that researchers and clinicians, for the most part, I think, have just ignored. And this encouraged me to think about, well, if this is part of what's driving hoarding, then we need to harness it and think about, well, how can I help you to actually help the environment? Because keeping these things in your home isn't really helping the environment if they're not being used and people are going to buy new things when they could maybe borrow what you have.

Rose Kerr: Melissa designed an online program called Breaking Up With Belongings.

Professor Melissa Norberg: We all buy stuff that we don't need and hang on to things that we don't need. So I set out to create a program that would help the general public, which includes people who experience compulsive buying or hoarding disorder, to live with less.

Rose Kerr: It's a self-guided program that has animated videos and a digital workbook. It starts out with helping people identify their values.

Professor Melissa Norberg: And this is because making changes is always hard, regardless of what it is. And the way to make it easier is to realize why something's important to you. And so the first thing the intervention does is asks people to think about all the things that they value. And so they can realign their behavior if it's gotten off track.

Rose Kerr: So participants reflect on their values and consider how much their actions are meeting them. After that, they set revised goals to meet those values.

Professor Melissa Norberg: Then it talks about why we become attached to objects and how this leads to overconsumption because we are using objects for their psychological value.

Rose Kerr: Feedback from Melissa's original trial of the program included that some participants were able to increase their understanding of their emotions and how that influences their shopping and saving behaviors. If you'd like to read more about it, we'll link to Melissa's paper in the show notes.

Rose Kerr: Decluttering, minimalism, overconsumption, underconsumption, waste, personal meaning, values. It is all a lot to balance. To finish up, I wanted to ask Professor Jessica Grisham if she had any thoughts on why this is all so hard for our brains to work through.

Professor Jessica Grisham: I think it can be very confusing, but as long as you are getting back in touch with what's important for you and having an individual approach to that, that can be a good guiding light for people. It's a Goldilocks problem really, right? We want just right situations. We don't want people who feel like they need to have everything perfect. I think it's going to be like many things where it's just learning the more boring middle road of how to self-regulate and make sure that you're not buying too much stuff, but that you're not also becoming obsessed with a minimalist lifestyle to the point that it's overwhelming other things that are important to you. But generally, I feel like we're probably at bigger risk of overconsumption for most people, right? Whether you have hoarding or not, the rate at which we're consuming resources and goods, I think is probably that's the bigger push right now is how we can all reel it back a little bit and start consuming less and focusing more on other important things to us.

Sana Qadar: That is Jessica Grisham from the University of New South Wales. You also heard from Melissa Norberg from Macquarie University, Seung Hwan (Mark) Lee based at the Ted Rogers School of Management in Toronto, and Omar Fares from the University of New Brunswick. Thanks also to our listener Ray for suggesting this topic. This episode was reported and produced by Rose Kerr. Thank you also to senior producer James Bullen. And thank you tosound engineer Simon Branthwaite. I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.