As we live, we accumulate stuff.  That’s just life. If we don’t get rid of anything, it just builds up. These last few months, I’ve come to realize just how much stuff I have. It was getting overwhelming in the small house my husband and I share. I’d love to have enormous closets and a lot more square footage to fit all our stuff, but that’s not where we’re at now. It gave me the idea for this blog.

To explain this blog adequately, I need to take a step back and provide some context.

Some of the items I’ve accumulated are related to hobbies, such as scrapbooking, paper planning, and sewing. I went down the rabbit hole a few years ago with products from the Happy Planner company, which manufactures paper planners, stickers, notebooks, and other related items.

When I discovered the Happy Planner line in 2017, I was smitten with the products. This led me on a quest to learn about the Happy Planner from YouTubers (I later found out they were paid influencers for the company) who marketed the latest products by creating videos and paper planning spreads using stickers, washi tape, and other accessories.

The quest continued by visiting stores like Joann Fabric, Michaels, and Hobby Lobby to find Happy Planner products. And I wasn’t the only one. I joined a Facebook group for Happy Planner planners, and other paper planners had a lot more than I did. They were obsessed too on a much grander scale. If I bought one new release sticker book, others had twenty new ones.

Justification

I justified my need to continue buying Happy Planner planners and their Happy Notes (notebook), and the corresponding paper, was that it kept me organized.  And it does. However, after a few years, I’d accumulated a lot of stuff. Stuff I wasn’t using.

One day, I decided I was done watching the YouTubers peddling the Happy Planner products and didn’t need any more of the stuff. The Happy Planner products are wonderful, but I had just had enough of the pull they had on my life.

Learning How To Get By With Less

I came across some YouTube videos on minimalism from Dawn from The Minimal Mom and Joshua Becker. They opened my eyes to the idea that we need less than we think to be happy.

Dawn has a video on the concept of the “silent to-do list” from the book “Goodbye Things” by Fumio Sasaki. This list can become cluttered with your thoughts, overwhelmed by everything you want to accomplish, and the distractions around you. Even though we may think we don’t care about the messes or disorganization, worrying about our stuff takes our mental energy and “bandwidth,” as Dawn calls it. The answer is having less stuff. Of course, right?

 

Having Stuff Around Does These Things

1. Distract us from what’s going on in our lives. If we have a lot of things, we have to take care of them. There’s an excuse to use our time for that instead of doing something more important that aligns with our goals.
2. When we have a lot of stuff, it seems to insulate us. We can find comfort in our things around us. It almost feels like a protection, so we’re not exposed to the harsh realities of life.
3. Gives us a purpose. We spend time curating our stuff or organizing it, or finding ways to buy more of it.

 

Before the Happy Planner phase, I thought I needed more books, clothes, household items, and stationery products. I felt joy in sourcing them out, but the joy never lasted. It was a temporary fix, and I justified my purchases by telling myself I found a good deal and deserved it.

Facing Reality

What did I deserve? Time-sucking work to find a place for something new? Reorganizing my closet or desk to fit the new items with the other underutilized things?

I told myself I wanted to spend my time creating, not cleaning or organizing, but that’s not what I did. So, did I deserve not to honor myself for the sake of something new? I realized the answer was no.

If you’ve been there in that situation, you know how yucky it feels not to honor ourselves.

Shopping and collecting are coping mechanisms. Accumulating stuff we don’t use or need can cause us to feel stressed and anxious, but we still do it. It’s a way our brains deal with our lives. Shopping releases dopamine in our brains, the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of pleasure and well-being. Although shopping can help us cope with stress, it can also cause more stress by bringing home too much unnecessary stuff.

Our minds are capable of handling a lot, but when life gets overwhelming, we tend to lean on those coping mechanisms to help us. And our minds can only handle what they’re capable of at the time. That’s why suddenly losing a loved one hurts so much. Our minds cannot process it. It takes time to alleviate the pain.

We survive painful situations because our minds build new pathways that help us function. We can build pathways in our minds that lead to personal growth and happiness, or we can ignore the pain, keeping the same pathways going that require a distraction to feel better. My distraction was buying things.

Finding the Balance

Inspired by a completely different YouTube experience with the minimalists, I began to eliminate things by donating or discarding them, rather than wanting to buy more. It felt good to unburden myself, and I continue to do so.  Now I make a mental note when I want to purchase something and ask myself if I am buying it to serve a purpose and make my life easier.

I had to find the balance between what I want and what I truly need. It takes a little time to figure it out, but once you get used to parting with stuff and realizing that we don’t need all the things to be happy, we find other more construction ways to make us happy.

Stuff won’t help us heal. It can act like a band-aid to protect us for a little while, but the real magic happens when we face what’s keeping us wanting the distractions in our lives.

Think about your stuff. Do you love it? Enjoy it? Use it? Or does it seem to act like a protective insulator so you don’t have to face your internal stuff? I realized that keeping clothes that didn’t fit me in my closet (that I believed was “inspiration” to try harder to lose weight) weighed me down, making me feel lousy about myself because I couldn’t fit into them. They went bye-bye. I deserve clothes in my closet that make me feel good about myself as I am now. Now is all we really have. The past is gone, and our future depends on what we do now.

Shake the clutter tree and get rid of things. Like Marie Kondo says, “Get rid of things that do not bring you joy.”

A Simple Decluttering Plan

A simple way to start decluttering is to get a box or bag and fill it up by eliminating one item a day for a week. At the end of the week, put the box or bag somewhere out of the way, but write a note with the date and its location. Then give yourself a reasonable timeframe to get rid of the items if you don’t go looking for them or feel a sense of loss about them. This could be achieved by donating them to the Goodwill or the Salvation Army, or by choosing another charity, selling, recycling, or disposing of them in the garbage. See how it feels to remove seven items from your life. Chances are you’ll be fine and keep going with the process.

Also, keep in mind that all the things we accumulate in our lifetime will become someone else’s burden after we’re gone. Our treasures might be junk to another.

Thank you for reading this. We deserve a life full of joy and happiness.  I write these blogs to inspire and offer ideas that have helped me feel more joy, happiness, and, most importantly, peace of mind.

To decluttering our castles,

Francesca

 

Created by a human for humans.

2024 – Francesca M.E. – All Rights Reserved.