Why Decluttering Is So Hard and Why You Keep Putting It Off | Heather Aardema

Heather Aardema founded the School of Living Lighter. She came to this through a multi-year mold journey that forced her to get rid of most of what she owned, and she has read hundreds of letters people wrote to their own clutter.

Clutter Is Neutral, and It Still Costs You

Her first principle is that clutter is neutral. It does not make you a bad person and it does not make you immoral. It does come with consequences, and those are two different things.

She describes it as a cortisol drip. You see it, you perceive it, you feel it, and it disrupts your sleep. Then the next morning decisions are harder because you slept badly.

It also shapes what you do next. Walk into a calm space and you take the dog out. Walk into a disheveled one and you end up in the kitchen zoning out until you can be present again. There is research on this. In one study, people who came out of a clean office were twice as likely to take an apple over a candy bar.

The Part Nobody Says Out Loud

So many people are embarrassed by it. Friends stop by, and instead of opening the door you talk to them out on the porch.

That embarrassment is what keeps this a private problem, and it is why the years go by. Heather's phrase is that we blink and it is thirty years and we are still thinking about decluttering, still moving things from room to room.

Why the Category Method Fails

You know the version. Start with the clothing. You feel energised, you empty every closet onto the bed, and then you look at the mountain you have made.

Three months later you are sleeping on a sliver of the bed, or on the couch, because every time you look at that pile you are dysregulated. Nobody accounted for your nervous system.

Her order is the other way round. Create safety in the body before you try to create it in the house, and part of that is understanding why the clutter is there in the first place.

Your Things Are Worth More to You Than They Are

There is a name for this. The endowment effect. Anything you own, you subconsciously value higher than it is worth. A shirt you paid thirty dollars for and have not worn in a year sits in your closet valued as if it cost three hundred.

Letting go works against your biology unless you are being deliberate about it. For most of human history the focus was food, shelter and safety, and acquiring more felt like being safer. That instinct did not disappear when the shops did.

When It Is Not Really About the Object

Heather's books were harder to let go of than her wedding dress, and she knew they were making her sick, because mold loves anything absorbent.

What she worked out was that the books had become her adult trophies. You get trophies as a child for the swim team. As an adult, the shelf says look at these, I am an interesting person. There was self-worth in them.

Her way out of it was to decide the job was complete. When she bought the book there was a dopamine release. Her body had already had the benefit. The book did not need to do anything else, including be read.

If money is the worry, that the book was expensive and you could not replace it, get curious about where that comes from. If it goes back to a childhood where money was tight, the useful thing to notice is that you had no agency then and you have some now.

Write a Letter From Your Clutter

This is her tool and it costs nothing. Do it when you are settled rather than when you are overwhelmed. Sit down and write: dear me, I am your clutter, and this is what I want you to know.

If you do not know what to write, do not get up. Ask yourself what you would write if you did know, and start there.

The letters written from a calm state come out full of compassion, and they surface things people had not connected. Someone who moved constantly as a child, whose things became their friends. There is always awareness in them, and usually permission.

Living by Design Instead of Default

Default is the hamster wheel, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result. Design means answering one question: what matters most to me in this season of my life? Most of us have spent far longer on what matters to everyone else.

The book on the regrets of the dying puts the top one as not having lived a life true to yourself. So whatever is blocking you from that is the clutter, whether it is objects or the belief that it is easier for other people.

Do it inch by inch. Weekends, scheduled, at whatever pace suits you. What tends to happen in the space afterwards is the thing you had been waiting to do turns out to be possible. People in their eighties open up that space and write books, and one woman in Sweden decluttered at 87 and trained as a coach.