This week was a lot. Two kids started track and had their first track meet on Thursday. Between them and the other two we also had dance, baseball, rehearsals for a play and a musical, and cooking club. We had horrible rainstorms with hail and tornado warnings almost every single day that altered our schedule and our sleep. One kid had a medical issue that needed attention. And another is having a conflict with her dad that required me to step in, in a way that pulled up all kinds of difficult memories from our divorce. Saying I was overwhelmed would be an understatement. I needed some stress relief.
So yesterday, I did something that might sound counterintuitive when you’re drowning in life: I picked a drawer and got rid of everything in it that I no longer wear. Mini-Kondo style. And this morning, I went through my filing cabinet (something I do approximately once a year anyway) and shredded / recycled a pile of old documents.
By the end of both sessions, I felt measurably better. Not because my life had changed. The track schedule was still there. The medical stuff was still there. The parenting-related stress were still there. But something had shifted. I felt less chaotic. More in control. Like I had reclaimed a tiny corner of my world when everything else felt out of control.
This is not an accident. It turns out the science on this is pretty compelling and I dug up some interesting things to share. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, this is the article for you.
What Clutter Is Actually Doing to Your Brain
Your brain is constantly processing your environment, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not. For every pile of papers, every overflowing drawer, every stack of things you keep meaning to deal with, your visual cortex is registering all of it as unfinished business. And unfinished business is stressful.
A landmark 2010 study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by researchers Darby Saxbe and Rena Repetti at UCLA studied 60 dual-income couples and found that women who used more “stressful” words to describe their homes (clutter, unfinished, chaotic) had measurably flatter diurnal cortisol slopes throughout the day, a pattern associated with worse health outcomes. Women who described their homes as restorative had the opposite pattern: cortisol that appropriately peaked in the morning and tapered off, which is the healthy rhythm.
Cortisol is your primary stress hormone. When it’s chronically elevated or when its natural daily rhythm gets disrupted you’re more prone to anxiety, depression, poor sleep, and a host of downstream health issues. The research found that cluttered environments were literally altering women’s hormonal stress patterns throughout the day.
A separate study published in Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology in 2021 took this a step further by using an experimental design. They actually created chaotic versus calm environments and measured the effects. Participants exposed to chaotic, cluttered spaces reported higher negative emotions and showed signs of increased stress compared to those in organized spaces. This wasn’t just correlation. The chaos caused the stress.
There’s a particularly relevant note for those of us who carry a disproportionate amount of the household mental load: the research consistently shows that women are more affected by clutter-related stress than men. Likely because women more often feel the cognitive weight of managing the home environment. When you’re already carrying the mental load of kids’ schedules, medical appointments, school communications, and relationship navigation, clutter compounds the burden in a real, measurable way.
I am so happy to see that these studies back up what I already felt happening to me. In messy, cluttered spaces, I feel more stressed (especially if those spaces are my home), but in clean, organized spaces, I feel calm and relaxed. Shout out to my husband for making sure we have an organized home most of the time! I’m very lucky to have a partner who picks things up constantly.
Why Decluttering Feels Like Relief
Here’s the flip side of all that research: clearing things out works. And it works not just because the clutter is gone, but because of what the act of decluttering does to your brain.
Columbia University clinical psychologist Dr. Michael Carollo describes decluttering as a form of behavioral activation, a therapeutic technique that involves purposefully engaging in achievable activities to improve mood. The key word is achievable. When life is overwhelming and most of the stressors are outside your control (a sick kid, a complicated co-parenting situation, a week of tornado warnings) doing something small and completable gives your brain a win it desperately needs. One study even found that cleaning can help alleviate stress even when the stressor has nothing to do with the clutter itself.
Utah State University Extension’s mental health resources describe it this way: the combination of letting your mind go while staying physically active can boost your mood because you feel less stressed about what was cluttered, and you feel accomplished after seeing the progress.
This maps exactly to my experience. When I cleaned out that drawer yesterday, I wasn’t solving any of my actual problems. I was, however, creating visible, tangible evidence of progress and making decisions in a week where so many things felt outside my decision-making authority. I was, in a very real sense, reclaiming control over the small corner of the world I could actually control.
The WebMD summary of this research puts it simply: getting rid of excess stuff can benefit your mental health by making you feel calmer, happier, and more in control.
The Mini-Kondo Approach: Small Is the Point
I want to be clear about what I’m not advocating here: I’m not suggesting you spend a weekend overhauling your entire home when life is at peak chaos. That’s a recipe for making things worse, not better.
What I do is small, targeted, achievable sessions. One drawer. One filing cabinet. One corner of one shelf. Even clearing out my old apps from my phone has brought me calm when I’m overwhelmed and not at home. Something you can start and finish in a few minutes that will show visible results.
Marie Kondo’s approach, asking whether something brings you joy or serves a genuine purpose before deciding to keep it, is useful because it removes the guilt from the equation. You’re not failing by getting rid of something. You’re making a deliberate choice about what deserves space in your life. In a week where life has been making a lot of choices for you, that agency matters.
I’ve written before about simplifying your stuff more broadly in my Simplification Series, which covers this territory in more depth if you want a starting framework. But the short version is: start small, do it regularly, and don’t wait until you’re feeling good to do it. Do it precisely when you’re not.
Controlling What You Can Control
One of the harder truths of a difficult week is that most of what made it hard was completely outside my control. I can’t control the weather. Nor can I control a child’s health. I can’t control the dynamics of a co-parenting situation. I can’t control the fact that fifteen different activities all collided in the same seven days.
What I can control is my workout clothes drawer.
And it turns out that controlling a drawer or shelf or desktop has a real, measurable effect on the stress response in my body. Not a metaphorical one. A hormonal, physiological one. The science says so, and my experience confirms it.
If you’re in a hard week, month, or year (you are NOT alone), I’d encourage you to find your drawer. Not to solve anything. Not to fix your life. Just to create one small pocket of order in the chaos. You will feel the satisfaction of a thing that is done, and let your cortisol do what it was designed to do: taper off by the end of the day instead of grinding on.
You might be surprised by how much it helps.
Sources:
- 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. Link
- Kok, R. et al. (2021). The causal effect of household chaos on stress and caregiving: An experimental study. Comprehensive Psychoneuroendocrinology, 8. Link
- Carollo, M. (2024). Reduce Stress Through Decluttering. Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Link
- USU Extension Mental Health. The Mental Health Benefits of Decluttering. Link
- WebMD. Mental Health Benefits of Decluttering. Link