Psychological Effects of Clutter

I’ve been a horror movie fan for most of my life.  I grew up watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies.  While I was in Aruba I went to the theatre to watch a movie and became so overjoyed when I saw the movie poster for a new Friday the 13th.  I was like a child the night before Christmas, so excited and filled with anticipation.

After we got back home I found out that it was going to be released on Valentine’s Day weekend.  The dilemna here is obvious; a Valentine’s Day date night with a pychopathic axe murderer?  Probably not.  There was a great amount of disappointment in my heart because I knew that I would probably be seeing a chick flick instead.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some good chick flicks but if I had my choice I’d rather watch Jason imposing his violence on about 2 dozen people.

My girlfriend knew how badly I wanted to see the movie so she said we could go.  I knew that she wanted to see something else but relationships are about compromise and it must have been her turn.  She’s so sweet!  I really enjoyed the movie, while she spent most of her time hiding behind her hands.

While watching the movie I kept thinking to myself, “Don’t these people ever clean their house?  Look at all of that junk!  There’s still Christmas decorations from the 60′s.”  Then it dawned on me, a lot of horror movies have cluttered houses.  Why?  Because they are scary!  Clutter is scary.  There is disarray and confusion.  Clutter is an outward reflection of internal being so it makes sense for the home of a pschopathic axe murderer to be messy, disorganized and chaotic because that is what is going on in his mind.

I’m not suggesting that everyone with a messy house is a psychopath otherwise 50% of the time I could be classified as such if that were the measuring stick which we used to gauge our mental state.  I do however, feel that the more cluttered our homes, the more disorganized and cluttered our minds and spirits are.

Having a clutter-free home is a good starting point to begin eliminating stress from your life.  You eliminate the need to focus your energy on the items you eliminate from your life.  A good example of an item that drains your energy is a car.  Not only must you fill the gas tank, you must also maintain it and keep it in good repair.  There are oil changes to have done and air pressure which must be checked.  You worry about getting in an accident or having it damaged at the grocery store by a runaway shopping cart.  When there is a bad thunderstorm, you may find yourself in a state of panic for fear of hail damage.  You must insure your car and you have to remember to pay your premiums.  You wonder if you have the right coverage, or enough coverage.   Maybe you could find a better deal somewhere else.

Every item in your life draws energy from your spirit in ways less obvious than my example of a car.  Some things you worry about breaking, being stolen or maybe you have to dust them frequently.  If an item brings a sense of negative emotions such as worry or stress, the best solution is to eliminate that item from your life.

As much as a horror movie fan I sometimes am, I sold my collection of horror movies because having them around was taking up space in my apartment which was more valuable to me than the DVDs.  Keeping them around was causing stress in my life so I eliminated that stress by selling them.  I earned a couple of dollars on things I no longer valued while creating a more positive energy in my living space.

I would recommend everyone begin eliminating the objects in their lives which are causing stress so that your house doesn’t look like something out of some horror movie!  You can start in the basement…I’m sure it already looks like Leatherface lives there.

The One-Year Box

I’ve been working to purge my apartment of unnecessary items for the last few months.  I started out by getting rid of the obvious; clothes that I no longer wore, books that I had kept for years and would never read again and DVDs that I bought on a whim and had no intention of ever watching again.

For the most part I would say that this first go around was pretty successful.  I had eliminated a lot of things that I no longer needed.  I made a pretty sizeable donation to Goodwill with the clothes and the public library was more than happy to receive my stack of books.  I made a few dollars by selling the DVDs, but nowhere near the amount I had paid for them.

Despite all of my success, I found that I still had a long way to go.  The problem wasn’t that I felt I needed the things that remained in my apartment but rather I had developed an emotional attachment with these items.

The other day while reading a website I came across a brilliant idea of what I could do in order to eventually eliminate these items, but without the commitment of having to do it immediately.  The idea was using a “1-year box”.  What you do is gather up all of the items in question, seal them in a box and post date it for one year from now.  If in that time, you didn’t need anything from that box, get rid of it without opening it.

It is amazing how such a simple idea can be so powerful!  I only recommend that you don’t put anything of personal value such as photos or other irreplaceable keepsake items into the box.  I started my 1-year box the other day and will add to it until it is filled up.  I will update you on the results in about a year!!!

I do not support putting your kitten in your 1-year box.

Saying “Goodbye” to Material Possessions

Recently I began to see an error in the way which I was living my life.  I had spent a lot of energy and money in pursuit of material possessions.  I invested a great deal of time collecting DVDs, toys, books and magazines, and pop culture memorabilia from the 80′s like Garbage Pail Kid cards.  Then I experienced a monumental shift in my way of thinking.  I woke up one day and had no idea what in the world I was doing with all of this junk.  I decided that it was time to get rid of everything which was not creating some sort of value in my life.

I had a storage unit full of stuff, DVD towers overflowing with movies, plastic storage containers full of random things, objects hiding in corners, in cabinets, closets and drawers.  Everywhere I looked there were things that were useless to me.  Why in the world did I need to have a George Foreman grill?  I used it once, but on a whim I felt as though it was a life necessity.  I couldn’t live without it.  Now I couldn’t live with it.

My girlfriend thought I had lost my mind.  Here I was in the midst of a life-altering shift in perception with no understanding of why I suddenly had a completely opposite outlook on life.  Nothing in the house was safe.  I began questioning every item I owned, and then every item my girlfriend owned.  “Do we need 3 crock pots?  Two of them are identical, couldn’t we give at least one of them to Goodwill?”

Adjusting to the shift in my thinking was difficult.  There is a certain amount of emotional value invested into every object a person owns.  We have a connection to these objects.  Getting rid of the item means getting rid of that bond.  Sometimes that is incredibly difficult.  An example of this would be a gift that you recieved for Christmas or a birthday.  You really never cared much for it, but you can’t get rid of it for the guilt you feel in doing so.  Even though that item brings no value to your life, and even though you don’t want or need it, there is still an emotional attachment to that item because it was a gift.

What I am having a hard time convincing myself of getting rid of are my Kevin Spacey DVDs.  He is my favorite actor and I have almost all of the movies he has been in.  The problem is that they just sit there, collecting dust, taking up space.  There is a possibility that I will watch them again, but that is not the reason that they are still here.  I do not keep them around for their future potential of providing me with entertainment, but rather as a material indication of my affection for Kevin Spacey.  I would be no less of a fan owning zero DVDs than I am owning all his movies.  Even though I know this, I cannot convince myself to sell them.  I have an emotional bond with them.  They are a representation of my personality, and it is as if I would be giving up a part of my identity as an individual.

Throughout the process of eliminating the clutter in my apartment, I’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes it is hard to say “goodbye” to material possessions, especially those which you have applied a great amount of personal value to.  I’ve also come to the conclusion that sometimes it is necessary to eliminate some of these things in order to to get my priorities in line.  If my dream to be able to travel on a whim is ever to come true, I won’t have much room for 500 DVDs and a ton of other random things that will require being hauled along with me.

He-Man & The Masters of the Universe

Growing up, my best friend in the whole world was He-man.  I would spend countless hours watching He-man and Skeletor battle it out on the television screen while I re-enacted the scene on the living room floor with my action figures.

These moments are ones that I remember with a great amount of fondness.  They bring memories of a time in life when things were simple.  There were no worries of having to go to work.  No concerns about having to find time in my busy schedule to cook and clean.  I didn’t have any commitments or deadlines to meet.  Things were so simple then.

Eventually my relationship with He-man ended and we went our seperate ways.  I was growing up and he was getting old.  I would find myself looking at other toys in the same way that I used to look at He-man and I knew that we needed to go in our own directions.

Years later I would find myself looking back at the good times He-man and I used to have playing on the floor in our underwear on Saturday mornings.  Eventually I realized that I had been foolish to have ever think I could live my life without him.

Luckily I knew how to get him back.  I scoured the internet in search of my old friend and as luck would have it, there he was, on eBay!  I placed my bid and a couple of weeks later I had him in my hands again.  He looked the same, but he felt a little smaller than I remembered him being.  But that didn’t matter, I had him back!

I bought all of his friends, and his friends’ friends.  Then I bought his enemies and their enemies!  I bought everything I could find that was a part of He-man’s world.  I had new toys, old toys, posters, DVDs, toys still in their packages, toothpaste and toothbrushes.  Everything He-man was mine!

Eventually I had so much stuff that I didn’t know what I could do with it anymore.  I bought some containers and put them into storage.  I kept a few of my favorites in a display cabinet. 

It was then that I realized that I didn’t need so much stuff in my life to be happy.  It wasn’t the toys that were making me happy it was the memories I had of my childhood.  I didn’t need a storage unit filled with Masters of the Universe merchandise to find fulfillment.

So I decided that it was time that I leave He-man once again, and I left him where I found him, on eBay.