Do you have a lot of stuff in your house or apartment? Is your closet full of things you haven’t worn in a few months, or even a few years? What about your shoes? Do you have 10 pairs and you find yourself mostly wearing one or two pairs? What about your kitchen? What about your living room?
Most people own a lot of things that they don’t need, and they keep them in and around the house just in case they might need them in the future. However, their space and their minds are absolutely cluttered.
So how can you gain control and live a simpler more conscious life?
1. Letting Go
Most people own a lot things because it gives them the illusion of control. This usually happens when they feel inadequate in other areas of their lives whether it’s in their educational attainment, relationships, their physical health or their finances. And without having control in those areas, they feel insignificant.
So they start compensating. They start buying and accumulating things in the hope of masking their perceived inferiority. And buying a lot of stuff does that to them. It gives them a (false) sense of significance.
However, while distracting yourself with “stuff” can make you feel safe and temporarily significant, it will nonetheless lead to greater pain in the future. This pain can come in the form of credit card bills, broken relationships, chronic anxiety, and perpetual avoidance. Simply put, compensating a deficiency with “stuff” can turn your life into an ongoing emotional roller-coaster.
With respect to this kind of detrimental overcompensation, most counselors advise their clients to face the real issues head on, and that’s a very good advice. However, I found that starting with simplifying and de-cluttering your space is a better route to addressing the real issues.
De-cluttering will free your space and allow you to move round and about with more ease and comfort. And when you take care of what’s blocking you physically, you also reduce your overall anxiety, and only then would you be able to think clearly and mindfully about the real cause of your problems.
2. Start in the Kitchen
When I made the decision to de-clutter, I made a conscious choice to eliminate the things that I haven’t used for at least 3 months.
I personally recommend that you start with your kitchen. This is the area where the items you own have almost no sentimental value to you and hence they’re the easiest to throw away. Open the drawers and take out what you don’t use. Work your way slowly and mindfully.
When you’re done with your kitchen, you’re now ready to move to your living room. This is a difficult area to clean out because almost all of the items in our living rooms have meaning to us and thus they’re much more personal. For many people, it’s hard to get rid of these things even when they’re certain they don’t need them. If I were you, this is how I would approach it: I would begin by putting everything I know I want to get rid of in one box, and I would put the things that I’m iffy about in another box. And I would leave the “iffy” box it in the house for a few days.
This will give you the time to decide if you’re ready to let go of these items. It’s almost like a “free trial”: if you’re not ready to throw things away, then you can unpack the box and put everything back to where it belongs. And if you find you’re better off without the excess clutter in your living room, then you can put the “iffy” box in your basement and eventually throw or give things away.
Use the same method for your bedroom. Put what you’re iffy about in a box and wait it out. See if you like your bedroom without the extra “stuff,” and only then make the decision of keeping or giving away.
3. Pinch Your Pennies
In addition to de-cluttering your space, you should be careful not to clutter it again with buying new things. This is usually harder to do because not only is the temptation to buy new things high for most people, but also because buying new things for some people is intimately connected with how they feel about themselves. So it really takes quite a bit of self-control to succeed in that area.
I approached this area of my life using a minimalistic attitude.
I decided to try to live on the most basic means available to me. In fact, I made a conscious effort not to purchase anything I didn’t need. And while I initially struggled at it, I managed not to purchase a single item for a year and a half…except for the following: coffee, occasional chocolate croissants, and the rare (very, very rare) sandwich on the go. And that’s it… I cooked all my meals.
During that period, I didn’t buy a single clothing item. And when I needed an item, I would find a way to not need it. See below for more on this point.
Doing so made me realize just how much “stuff” we’re willing to waste our money on.
We already own a lot of things that we can still use and abuse, but we replace them with new things much faster than we should. It also helped me realize that what I wore never made much of an impact on my social life. In fact, most people could care less about what you wear as long as it’s clean and matches well.
It’s your personality that attracts people to you or repels them, so focus on that instead of what you’re going to wear.
4. The Psychological Effects of De-cluttering
Initially, living with less items made me a little unhappy.
I felt I had less choices and, to be honest, I struggled to cope with this new lifestyle. But I knew I was doing this to improve my life. I was doing this to gain a deeper understanding of the effects of social conditioning on our choices. And so I stuck it out, and here’s how I did it:
I began to think of the mental dissonance that I was experiencing as a form of withdrawal. My brain was sending stress signals telling me that some pleasures were being taken away from it and so it was asking me to react.
But I didn’t.
I viewed the whole process as an “outsider” and I observed my brain react to being denied the consumerist pleasure of the regular eat out. Again, I didn’t react to my brain. I just watched it. And I viewed the whole transition process as a purely physical one. I just had to wait for my brain to adapt to my new lifestyle choices and reach a healthy balance between my mind and my brain.
And eventually that’s exactly what happened.
I no longer follow a strict minimalistic lifestyle.
I like to enjoy the pleasures of life when I think I’ve earned them, and I like to buy new things if I think I absolutely need them, but that will never be a priority. Ultimately, I learned to care a lot more about what I already had… and the less I had, the more I felt I had.
It also taught me that I have mission to help people look inside themselves and realize that the happiness they’re pursing is not outside of them. It’s inside…but they need to learn how to externalize it. See my personal story for more.