Have you ever walked into a messy house and instantly wanted to have a panic attack? According to various studies, our brains are wired to react to the clutter in negative ways that can cause depression and anxiety. If this happens to you, you’ll definitely want to see this.

Many studies show that disorganization can cause extreme anxiety and feelings of depression

Looking at your messy house can be overwhelming, sometimes, you don’t even know where to begin. It becomes a daunting task that makes you feel hopeless and unmotivated.

According to Psychologist, Sherrie Bourg Carter, there’s a link between the mess and the stress.

Clutter bombards our minds and overloads our sensory

When we let messes build into clutter, our stimuli are overloaded with unnecessary emotions that bring on stress and anxiety. It can become hard to focus on anything and everything. It’s difficult to relax, you begin to feel like the mess is an endless abyss with no way to climb out.

Clutter can also cause feelings of guilt, embarrassment, and shame for not being more organized. If you’re an artistic person, clutter can be your worst nightmare. It makes it nearly impossible to produce the way you would in a tidy house, your brainstorming and problem solving go right out the window.

Being cluttered isn’t just physical, your brain can also be plagued with mental clutter

In this day and age, things like social media, games, and other distractions can build up in your head to form mental clutter. According to Motherly, clutter affects our cortisol levels, our creative ability to focus, and can trigger our experiences with pain making us feel boxed in.

When clutter causes your stress cortisol hormones to release, you may begin to have feelings of depression and anxiety, that in turn, makes it hard to even deal with the clutter.

The good news is, it’s an easy fix compared to other causes of stress and anxiety

Start getting organized by enlisting the help and giving your family-specific tasks and/or daily chores. You can also start getting rid of things, if you don’t uses it, lose it. Get in the habit of putting things back where they belong, this will reduce the clutter and hopefully the stress.

You can also make cleaning fun, put on your favorite type of music, listen to a podcast, or make it into some sort of game. It might even help motivate you if you give your self rewards, it’s okay to put prizes at the end of your cleaning.

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between mental and physical clutter-stress, so treat both equally important

If you get rid of the clutter in your house but you’re still finding your self stressed, it’s probably because you’re focusing on too many things at once, turn off your phone and television and give your self a safe space to focus on the tasks at hand.

Next time you’re getting stressed from the disorganization, remember you’re not alone. The science behind clutter shows us that our brains can’t help it, but once you get rid of the mess you’ll feel a lot better. When you just take those initial first steps, it becomes much easier to maintain a neat house, car, office, etc. To see why clutter causes stress, watch the video below

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Source: Scared Mommy, Psychology Today, Motherly , YouTube