The Clutter-Health Connection: How to clear the ongoing clutter at home and gain optimal health

By Julie Barton

While working with clients on residential organizing projects, Professional Organizer, Julie Barton could see the stress and energy drain that the clients felt from ongoing clutter in their living environment; a place that should be their restful haven!

This book is the response to that situation. In The Clutter-Health Connection, Barton presents the most relevant research available to guide the reader from the reality of personal energy drain, due to ongoing clutter, back to optimal health. The reader is given healthy and decluttering actionable steps to pivot back toward optimal health in their living environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781794809284

Julie Barton

Julie Barton is a writer living in Northern California. She has an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been published in several magazines and journals including Brain Child, Two Hawks Quarterly, Huffington Post, Louisiana Literature, The South Carolina Review, and more. Her experience of depression and her subsequent life-saving relationship with her Golden Retriever, Bunker, is the subject of her moving memoir Dog Medicine. She is a mother of two and an animal lover who lives in Northern California.

Book preview

Introduction

I finally set aside the time to work on my personal organizing project!  I knew it would take a while, so I blocked off a weekend to get started.  As a Professional Organizer, focusing on residential decluttering and organizing, I tested various organizing philosophies to see how they work out in real life.  This allows me to better suggest various types of tools to my organizing clients.

This particular Saturday I’d scheduled the big one—The KonMari method, by Marie Kondo. All totaled, I planned to give myself the whole summer, three months, to complete the whole house process. This was the largest chunk of time I had available, between homeschooling my daughter and other organizing projects at the time.  I was going all in to see if I could in fact complete all the stages Ms. Kondo suggests in her process.  I started with my clothes, as recommended in her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

Now, I stood facing all my clothes: tops, pants, jackets, t-shirts, dresses, skirts, and coats I owned, in category stacks on my bed. (I couldn’t bring myself to simply make a gigantic heap of clothes!)  How did I get to this moment?  Not just the facing of all of one’s clothing possessions in one place, but the moment of wanting to be mentally free from the burden of too much stuff and unmade decisions. 

I was done with feeling tired from looking around my home at the stuff for which I was responsible.  I was done with the mental space that was being taken up by the subconscious reminders that a particular area needed to be dealt with, organized, or cleared out. Just having the time to decide what I actually NEEDED and what I was just storing hadn’t yet happened. I held on to some things so as not to hurt someone else’s feelings or I didn’t know what else to do with it, or I didn’t have time to carefully think about it! (Do any of those reasons sound familiar?)

I feel compelled to insert here, that as an organizer, I regularly (read seasonally) prune and purge my clothes and have been doing so for many years.  So why would I need to do a deep dive like this KonMari method?  Humility, my dear readers.  I thought there may be something lurking in my closet that I hadn’t considered, that I no longer need, or that doesn’t serve me in this phase of my life now. I won’t know what that item(s) is unless I look.  I invite you, too, to look with fresh eyes at your spaces.

I will admit, I was a bit worried to think that my small walk-in closet would be emptied and then I’d have to put it all back, before bedtime! (How’s that for a compelling deadline?!)  I was almost overwhelmed when a thought hit me, I can now CHOOSE what goes back into my closet!  (So can you.)  Each item that goes back in will be carefully considered and deemed a favorite or it doesn’t earn a spot in this valuable real estate! I felt freer, in that moment, than I had in a while. (Full transparency: I share this closet with my husband and only my half of the closet belongings came out that day.) Sometimes it takes a big emotion to motivate us to make changes. I encourage you to adopt this freer mind-set as well as you enter into the small steps that I will walk through with you in this book.

I’m saying all of this to let you know that even someone who teaches the processes to others, still needs to perform it in their own living space regularly as well.  I want to suggest what is helpful and health-ful for my clients.  Therefore, I need to experience it myself. 

What you will read in these pages are experiences that I’ve had or my clients have experienced and how it has affected their health. 

We’re also going to dive into how the clutter in our surroundings affects our health ongoing and how that can impact us for years if we don’t stop and pay attention to what needs to be done and the decisions that need to be made.  We’ll look at research and studies that have been done that support these realities for our mind, body and ultimately our overall health.

Many organizers advocate that we should prune down to only have around us what is useful and joy producing whenever possible. I agree.  This book will call us to think about what is truly important to you and this phase of your life, and what can be let go.

I’m not advocating one organizing philosophy or process over another.  In fact, I share various styles of organizing with my clients; whatever will help them, based on how they think