There’s something I hear all the time from people I work with, and it almost always comes out as an apology.
“I’m sorry it’s such a mess.”
“I don’t know how it got this bad.”
“I’m just not an organized person.”
I want to push back on that last one, because I don’t think it’s true for most people. I think a lot of us aren’t disorganized, we’re overwhelmed. And those are two very different things.
Your brain is carrying more than you realize
As a professional organizer, I’ve seen this over and over again. Most people aren’t struggling because they don’t know how to organize. They’re struggling because they’re juggling work, kids, caregiving, health challenges, busy schedules, and a thousand competing priorities. When life gets heavy, our homes often reflect that.
There’s also research suggesting that our surroundings can affect how we feel. A study from researchers at UCLA found that women who described their homes as cluttered or unfinished had higher levels of cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, throughout the day than women who described their homes as more restorative and organized.
When your home constantly reminds you of things that still need attention, it can feel difficult to fully relax, even when you’re trying to.
Every item is asking something from you
In a cluttered space, every item represents a choice.
Should I keep this?
Donate it?
Put it somewhere else?
Deal with it later?
One decision isn’t difficult. But when hundreds or thousands of items are competing for your attention, it can start to feel mentally exhausting.
And because so many of those decisions remain unfinished, your brain can keep returning to them in the background. You might sit down to relax and suddenly remember the overflowing closet, the stack of papers on the counter, or the box in the garage you’ve been meaning to go through for months.
That mental background noise can be surprisingly draining.
Clutter often comes with a running to-do list
Many women aren’t just looking at a messy room and seeing objects out of place.
They’re seeing decisions that still need to be made, items that need homes, donations that need to leave the house, things that need to be restocked, and spaces that somehow have to function better by tomorrow morning.
It’s not just the visual clutter. It’s everything the clutter asks of you.
That’s a lot to carry on top of everything else life asks of you.
So what actually helps?
Here’s what I’ve seen work time and time again:
- Start smaller than you think you need to. One drawer. One shelf. One corner. Finishing something, anything, helps create momentum.
- Make decisions by category when possible. Looking at similar items together can make it easier to see duplicates, identify what you actually use, and make decisions more confidently.
- Give things a home before you buy containers. Bins and baskets can be incredibly helpful, but only after you’ve decided what’s staying and where it belongs.
- Build in breaks. Decluttering takes more mental energy than most people expect. Thirty focused minutes is often more productive than hours of pushing through exhaustion.
What I hope you take away from this
If your home doesn’t look the way you want it to, that isn’t evidence that you’re a disorganized person.
It might simply mean that life got busy, hard, or heavy, and your space reflected that.
You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to tackle everything at once.
You just need a place to start.
You’re not behind. You’re just ready for a reset.
Drisana is the owner of Tranquil Design Solutions, serving the Tampa Bay area. She helps people declutter, organize, and create systems that actually hold up in real life.
Source
1 Darby Saxbe & Rena Repetti, UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF). Saxbe, D. E., & Repetti, R. L. (2010). No place like home: Home tours correlate with daily patterns of mood and cortisol. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(1), 71-81.