A list of 10 ways excessive clutter can affect you and control your life:

1. Emotionally
Excessive clutter often causes feelings of guilt, anger, shame and embarrassment that create an inner feeling of burden and heaviness.
Clutter can drain your energy - and you may not even notice it until the clutter is gone. Every item in your home has an energy to it. When items go a long time unused, unloved and uncared for, they become stuck, stagnant energy that actually physically drains you of your energy. Energetically too many items in a house can cause a sense of overwhelm or disturbance.

2. Mental Health
Clutter decreases your ability to enjoy life causing stress, confusion, inability to focus, and often leads to depression. Sometimes clutter is initially caused by depression, but clutter also makes it nearly impossible to recover from depression. Most often once people start releasing their clutter, their energy comes back and their depression gets better, sometimes it may go away for good. There are some people who are extremely sensitive to their environments and just never realized what a difference it could make.
Even in people who don't have ADD, clutter causes ADD like symptoms.

3. Relationships
Clutter and chaos causes conflicts in relationships often due to chronic lateness and disorganization.
Cutter can keep you from socializing because you don't have the energy or can't find clothes to go out. It can keep you from getting close to people because you don't entertain or want to have people visit you in your home. Again, bringing up shame or embarrassment.

4. Time
Every thing you own requires some amount of care and organization. Simply having too much stuff eats up your time like crazy. If you have too much stuff, it's much more difficult, time consuming, and expensive to get organized.
Having too much stuff often leads to procrastination and lateness which wastes yours and other people's time and causes a whole host of other problems.
Not being able to find things is a huge time cost of clutter. In extreme it can waste several hours every day.

5. Loss of Self-Esteem
Clutter can cause you to feel like you aren't capable or are missing some basic skill that everyone else "seems" to have so you feel bad about yourself - the truth is you are not alone, many people have issues dealing with clutter. It is actually way more common than one thinks.

6. Physical Health & Stress
The stress caused by clutter is enormous. Every time you can't find something, or an argument flares up with a loved one, or you can't relax because you worry about all the things you need to do, but can't till you get the clutter cleared, your stress levels increase. Stress will then lower your immunity and resistance and so you may have frequent, persistent colds or other physical symptoms such as headaches, fatigue, sinus problems and allergies and more. It also results in not eating healthy meals.

7. Family
Clutter causes irritability, resentment and stress that leads to temper tantrums, outbursts, and overall disharmony (especially, if people are having to deal with "other people's clutter". You may start to feel like you aren't a good parent or aren't a good example for your kids
Excessive clutter can cause depression, acting out, bad behavior in children due to their inability to focus caused by the clutter. Self-judgments are a source for many forms of separation and disturbance within a family. Then of course, judgments on others create the same.

8. Financial
All things need a place to be – a home. Whether that home is an extra room, a piece of furniture, or a container, you continue to pay for things long after you initially acquire them. Clutter directly costs money in the following ways:
o Credit card debt - often for unused stuff
o Late fees for bills paid late
o Renting storage facilities
o Duplicates purchased because you can't find things – this happens a lot!
o Some people move to larger home to accomodate the stuff
Clutter affects people's careers. Studies have shown that people with cluttered desks and offices are less likely to be promoted. This of course affects how much money you can make. And if you own your own business –then productivity directly affects your bottom-line.

9. Safety & Hygiene
In extreme clutter, people have a hard time walking without tripping or bumping into things. Often there are things hidden in the clutter that are very unsafe for children. There are cases where a young child is pretty much confined to a playpen all the time because it just isn't safe to be out of the playpen.
Inability to clean cluttered areas can lead to extreme dust and even mold and mildew that can create even more potential health problems in yourself and your children.

10. Your Future
Holding on to clutter often grounds you in the past at the cost of your present life and your future.
Clutter distracts you from being able to think about your goals, projects, hobbies and get things done.
Learning to let go of items is a way of learning to let go of the past so that you can move on. This is often seen after divorce, death of a loved one or even with inheritance of items people actually don’t want or have space for but feel obligated to keep.


Most of us experience some of these areas. Some of us may experience many of these. If you are, it may be too difficult to dig out alone. Please seriously consider getting help.
There are people and companies such as SIMPLY CHANGE in your community that specialize in helping people improve the quality of their life and the lives of their families.
There is no stigma about this - most everyone can use some help in these areas.
Please reach out if needed. Your life is just too precious and too short to live in a manner that doesn’t support all the areas of your life. Help is available and change can happen quickly!