What does it mean to tame your environment
What is taming your environment?
Taming your environment is to create order. You create order by finding a place for your stuff in your home and decluttering what is not required. When you bring order to your environment, your mind becomes more orderly, and you start taming the chaos in your life.
How does decluttering your home, bring order to your mind?
Bursting cupboards and piles of paper stacked around the house may seem harmless enough. But research shows disorganisation and clutter have a cumulative effect on your brain. Your brain like order and being in a cluttered environment reduces your ability to focus. The visual distraction of clutter overloads your brain and can decrease your working memory.
A 2009 study from the USA shows that mothers with a cluttered home environment experience higher cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone. Increased cortisol levels can make you feel more anxious and depressed.
Imagine you have a stress bucket; it will either be a 2l, 5l or 10l bucket depending on your ability to cope with stress. Living in a cluttered home is like filing your bucket halfway and keeping it there. Instead of filling your bucket with 2l, 5l or 10l, you reduce your stress capacity. Lowering your ability to deal with stress can lead to continually being in low-grade fight or flight response, which keeps us in survival mode.
Being in survival mode keeps us from thinking clearly, and this leads to rash decisions and reactions. Have you ever reacted to something that your partner or kids did and thought to yourself that you might have overreacted a bit? That is what happens when we are in fight or flight mode. We react from the fear part of our brain the amygdala instead of the cortex’s thinking part.
How does decluttering your home, improve your health?
Continually being in survival mode can trigger physical and psychological changes that affect how we fight bugs and digest food and leave us at greater risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
People who sleep in cluttered rooms are more likely to have sleep problems, including difficulty falling asleep and being disturbed during the night.
Disorganised and messy environments led participants in one study to eat more snacks, eating twice as many cookies than participants in an organised kitchen environment.
Other research has shown that being in a messy room will make you twice as likely to eat a chocolate bar than an apple.
A study found that people with overly cluttered homes are 77% more likely to be overweight.
Having a tidy home can be a predictor of physical health. Participants whose houses were cleaner were more active and had better physical health, according to this study.
These are only a few examples of why it is a good idea to tame your household environment. If you feel that you need someone to help you stay motivated, look at my From Chaos to Calm program.
