When I’m not berating myself about exercise I’m feeling hassled by our cluttered house. Complexity in life – including number of possessions – affects my mental health. There is a psychological cost to clutter and I feel calmer with less.
Gretchen Rubin, a well-known writer about happiness, makes the same observation:
“One of my key realizations about happiness, and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists, given its emphasis in popular culture, is that outer order contributes to inner calm. More than it should…”
In this post she walks through the things that stop us from clearing clutter. They are largely psychological.