The Truth Behind Clutter You’ve Been Avoiding —And the One Shift That Changes Everything

As soon as you walk through the front door, you feel it before you see it—shoulders creeping up, jaw tightening, that low buzz of tension you can’t quite place. It’s not catastrophic, but it is relentless: the basket of clean-but-unfolded laundry that’s starting to feel permanent, the counter covered in mail from three tax seasons ago, and the hallway, also known as the final resting place for unmatched shoes and last-minute chaos.

You tell yourself that it’s fine and that you’ll get to it later. But your nervous system always seems to know better. It’s not just messy—it’s loud, and not in a “someone left the TV on” kind of way. It’s sensory overload in disguise, and it’s pervasive in all areas of our life.

Clutter has a way of crawling under your skin–it doesn’t just take up physical space, but it also scrambles your mental clarity. Your external environment always quietly mirrors your internal one, even when you say it doesn’t. When everything around you feels out of place, it’s hard to feel like you belong in your own mind.

Research clearly supports these feelings. Clutter is linked to elevated cortisol, decreased focus, sleep impairments, emotional dysregulation, and more arguments at home. Translation: when your house is in chaos, your body responds like something’s wrong—even if nothing dramatic is happening.

The Emotional Weight of “Stuff”

People love to say, “It’s just stuff.” However, these are usually the same people who aren’t responsible for organizing it, dusting it, or emotionally unraveling every time they open a drawer. The truth? It’s rarely just stuff to us. Emotions are attached to our things, and those emotions can be much stronger than we realize. 

It could be the baby onesies you saved and never used, the books you were supposed to read to become the “new you,” or the kitchen gadgets from that one inspired week you thought you’d start meal prepping. Most clutter carries a story—or at the very least, a version of you that didn’t quite pan out.

From there, every single object becomes a decision your brain hasn’t made yet. Keep or toss? Fix it or finally admit it’s broken beyond repair? Face it or push it back into the cabinet and hope it magically sorts itself out? Multiply that by hundreds of items in your line of sight, and now your brain is running a full-time job in the background just managing these “someday” decisions.

That’s not a character flaw–that’s an overburdened mental load. It’s the ongoing emotional bandwidth we give to things that seem small but collectively drain us. There’s a reason why clutter feels so heavy: it’s the weight of all the unresolved tasks, emotions, and expectations packed into a physical form. It’s why just getting more sleep doesn’t help, why your patience is thin, and why you get disproportionately mad about the cabinet that won’t close right. It’s because your system is tired of holding it all, and it’s probably been tired for a while.

When Clutter Feeds Depression (and Depression Feeds Clutter)

Clutter is rarely about laziness–it’s more so about capacity. Your home didn’t spiral because you don’t know how to clean. It spiraled because there’s a limit to how much one person can manage before something falls through the cracks. When life inevitably gets heavy—emotionally, mentally, physically—it’s understandably usually the dishes, the closets, and the junk drawer that take the first hit.

It’s not that you don’t care–you actually might care too much. That’s part of the problem. You’re carrying so many things at once that clearing the table starts to feel like the emotional equivalent of a marathon in the moment. Then later, because the space looks neglected, your brain loops back into shame: “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I keep up?”

The answer is simple: because you’re a human, not a machine. You weren’t designed to parent, partner, perform at work, process global crises, regulate emotions, maintain relationships, fulfill your needs, and navigate global crises without a break–much less maintain a perfectly curated home in midst of everything else going on. The house is cluttered because your mind is cluttered–not in a broken way, but in an overwhelmed, emotionally overburdened kind of way.

You Can’t Organize What You’re Still Avoiding

Part of the issue is that when people feel the tension of clutter, they reach for organizing bins and label makers or a new habit-tracking app. While those containers certainly help, organizing clutter is like alphabetizing your stress. It might look better, but the weight of it all hasn’t changed.

The real work is asking why the clutter is there. What story are you telling yourself about the object you can’t part with? Who are you trying to protect by keeping it? What emotion are you avoiding every time you tell yourself that you’ll deal with it later? Sometimes clutter is grief in disguise. Sometimes it’s anxiety. Sometimes it’s a nervous system that hasn’t had a break in so long that it can’t initiate action and create change without crashing.

What you don’t need is a Pinterest-perfect mudroom–you need a moment of honesty about what your space is reflecting back to you. You also need a little compassion for the version of you that’s been trying to hold it all together with a rubber band and a paper clip when you really need superglue and welding.

Time Is Not the Problem

Most people think that they need more time to declutter. It’s either wanting more hours in the day, or saving it for a long weekend, or deciding to take a month to strategize before starting. The issue is that clutter really isn’t about time—it’s about friction. The mental resistance that builds up around every item, every pile, every decision that hasn’t been made.

You don’t actually need more time. You need fewer decisions screaming at you as soon as  you walk through the door. Here’s the truth most productivity hacks won’t tell you: when you’re emotionally depleted, efficiency doesn’t fix it. You could have all the planners in the world and still not have the energy to fold the laundry that’s been staring at you for a week.

Decluttering usually isn’t a scheduling issue. It’s a bandwidth issue. And because it’s a bandwidth issue, addressing clutter has to start with your nervous system, not your storage bins.

Start Small—But Start Where It Actually Hurts

If your space feels overwhelming, the answer isn’t a cleaning marathon. That usually ends in burnout or avoidance. What works better are micro-decisions with meaning. Start with the drawer you dread opening or the corner you’ve trained yourself not to look at. Prioritizing these difficult spaces isn’t to be dramatic, but to be honest. and to take a step towards making a change. Let your emotional response be messy. Let yourself feel what comes up without judging your emotions or trying to “fix” them. 

The truth is that what’s in that drawer isn’t just junk. It’s old versions of you and past lives you’ve lived: hopes, habits, identities you’ve outgrown. If you get stuck decluttering, it’s not because you’re weak. It’s because clutter often holds emotional contracts you never consciously signed. Decluttering isn’t about tidying–it’s about re-examinating and renegotiating those contracts that you made with yourself another lifetime ago.

In short: no, you don’t need to do the whole house this weekend. You need to pick one space that holds more emotion than function—and deal with it honestly, without rushing or numbing yourself through it. Whatever you feel is okay–you don’t need to have emotions about your emotions. The goal is to say goodbye to things that no longer serve you now, even if they might’ve served you well in the past.  

This Isn’t About Stuff. It’s About Self-Trust.

One of the most under-acknowledged parts of clutter is the erosion of trust. Not only in your space, but also in yourself. You start to question your ability to handle things. You avoid rooms, delay decisions, and lower your expectations for how good your life is supposed to feel.

But the moment you begin to reclaim your environment—one drawer, one decision, one clear surface at a time—you send your nervous system a different message: I’ve got this. I know what matters. I don’t need to carry what’s no longer mine. What seems like a small shift isn’t small at all– it’s a shift towards internal safety. And internal safety just happens to be the foundation for every meaningful change.

Therapy That’s Not About Perfection—It’s About Permission

If your relationship with clutter feels tangled and emotional, you’re not alone. You don’t need to untangle it in isolation either, especially if you’ve tried all the surface-level solutions and still feel stuck.

This is where therapy comes in—and not the passive, nod-and-smile kind of sessions. My sessions are the kind that helps you identify what you’ve been carrying and gives you language for how you’re feeling. We can identify patterns for how you protect yourself successfully and unsuccessfully, and you can learn tools to help your nervous system shift from shutdown to forward motion. You don’t need someone to judge your piles. You need someone who can sit with the why behind them—and help you move through it without shame.

If you're ready to stop acting calm performatively and start feeling like yourself again, therapy might be a good place to begin.

When You’re Ready to Look Beneath the Mess

Most of the time, clutter isn’t just clutter. It’s the buildup of everything you’ve had to put off—things like decisions, grief, and roles you didn’t choose but ended up carrying anyway. You look around and feel stuck, but not because you don’t care, but because your brain is already running on fumes.

I typically work with people who are holding a lot—mentally, emotionally, and physically. Sometimes that shows up as burnout, and sometimes as numbness. Sometimes it’s projected as a home that doesn’t feel like it fits you anymore. There’s nothing weak about needing support. There’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting your space–and your mind—to feel lighter.

If You’re Carrying Too Much, You Don’t Have to Do It Alone

You don’t have to figure it all out before reaching out. You just have to want something different than what you’ve been holding onto.

Schedule a consultation with me, Dr. Jaclyn Valadka, if you’re looking for a place to be honest, unpack some of what’s been building up, and start clearing space—internally and externally—to make room for the version of you that feels more like you.

 Schedule here