Clutter & Overwhelm

Why is it so much easier to sort out a friend's messy cupboard than my own?

This month I'm getting into overwhelm and executive dysfunction, specifically the pile that's been sat on the chair for 3 weeks, the drawer that only opens halfway, and the shame that builds up around it.

I break down what executive function actually is, why clutter turns into hundreds of tiny decisions your brain just can't process when it's already running on empty, and the 4 reasons it's so much easier to be decisive with someone else's stuff than your own.

Transcript

Clutter & Overwhelm 0:02

And hello to you, and welcome to the Richard Nicholls podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate, and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols, and today you'll learn all about the overwhelm of clutter. And if you are ready, we'll start the show. Watcha folks, how's things? It's a new month and sometimes when that happens It can feel like a bit of a line in the sand, can't it? The start of something new. So if you did say to yourself last month that some things on your to-do list could wait until next month, well, it is next month now. So the father's Day card in your office that your son gave you in June can probably get recycled now. I'm talking about myself here obviously 'cause I am just as guilty as most people for getting overwhelmed with stuff. And that's why today I wanna talk about mess and clutter. The pile on the chair that's been there so long, it's basically furniture now. The kitchen drawer that only opens six inches 'cause something's jammed in the back. The wardrobe, you can't actually open without something falling out and hitting you on the head. And somehow that's happened enough times that you've just accepted it as part of getting dressed now. Because if you struggle with this, and I know for a fact that a lot of you listening will, you'll have probably had someone at some point tell you gently or not so gently, that you just need to be a bit more disciplined, a bit more organised, sort yourself out. And I wanna properly push back on that today because for a huge number of people, the mess isn't a discipline problem, it's an executive dysfunction problem, which is a different thing entirely. And it's worth separating out three things that people tend to lump together as I need to sort my house out, which is cleaning, organising, and decluttering. And I think they need separating because they actually ask completely different things of your brain. Cleaning is physical, wiping, hoovering. It's mostly muscle memory once you've got started. Organising is spatial. Deciding where things live so that you can find them again. And decluttering is the one that really hurts. 'cause decluttering is almost entirely decision making. What stays, what goes what that thing even means to you. So you can be brilliant at cleaning and completely stuck on decluttering. And it's usually decluttering that people mean when they say that they're overwhelmed. Even if what's sat in front of them might look like a cleaning problem. So let's talk about executive dysfunction and what it actually means. 'cause it's one of those terms that gets chucked around without ever being explained sometimes. And I don't like it when other podcasters do that. So executive function is the name for a set of mental skills that basically run the admin department of your brain. We've got task initiation. That's the ability to actually start something rather than just intending to. Working memory, holding a few things in mind at once while you act on them. Planning and sequencing, knowing what order to do things in. Time perception, actually knowing how long something will take or how long you've been sat there. And prioritising, deciding what matters most right now out of everything competing for your attention. Now, when that system's working well, you don't even notice it. You walk into a messy room and some quiet background process goes Right, cup first, and then the post, and then the vacuuming and off you go. But when executive function is impaired, whether that's because of ADHD, autism, depression, anxiety, burnout, grief, menopause, or honestly just a stretch of life, that's been too much for too long, that background process does not fire properly. You walk into the same room and there is no automatic sequence. There's just everything all at once. Undifferentiated. And your brain faced with that does something very ancient and very understandable. It freezes . 'cause here's the thing nobody tells you about clutter. Every single object in a messy room is a decision. Every one. Keep it, bin it, file it, wash it, fix it, give it away, work out where it even lives. And most of us can absorb a few of those decisions without noticing. But when a room's got 200 small decisions sitting in it and your decision making system is already running on empty, your brain does the maths and goes, Nope, not doing that. And it shuts the whole thing down. Rather than trying to process 200 decisions one at a time. That is not being lazy. That is a nervous system protecting itself from overload in the same way that it would with any other threat. It's genuinely the same machinery just in a different place. And I see this regularly with my therapy clients and honestly with myself, if I'm being properly honest with you, there's a specific kind of paralysis that happens where you'll walk past the same pile and I'm looking at one right now 'cause it's in front of me here. Look at all of this. Oh, I'm just as bad as almost all of my clients, aren't I? So you can walk past the same pile of to-do stuff for three weeks, or in my case, every single day when you sit down at this desk and a part of you registers it and some part of you feels the guilt of it, and neither part actually does anything about it. And the guilt itself becomes another layer that's sat on top. Because now it's not just I have a messy pile, it's I have a messy pile and I'm the kind of person who can't deal with a messy pile. And that story starts to feel like it's about you as a person rather than about a system that's currently jammed, which it isn't. If this is you, you are not broken. Your admin department is just overloaded. One of the reasons this topic is on my list of things to talk about is because I had a patron a little while back ask for advice on my Patreon page, and she's given me permission to mention this today. She's a lovely woman who runs her own small business. She's absolutely on top of everything professionally. Invoices get sent on time, deadlines get hit, her staff is managed properly. And she was asking for advice because she was mortified. That was genuinely the word that she used, mortified about the state of her spare room. 'cause it had boxes in it that she'd never unpacked from a house move, I think four years earlier. And she kept saying, I don't understand it. I'm not a messy person, I'm not lazy. And she wasn't being either of those things. What she was, in chatting on the forum, was burnt out from spending everything she had on the business. So by the time she got home, there was nothing left in the tank to run the admin department on herself. The competence hadn't gone anywhere. It just had a queue and her own house was permanently at the back of it. And that's the vicious cycle bit because it doesn't stop there, does it? Because the mess triggers shame. The shame triggers avoidance because who wants to walk into a room that makes 'em feel like a failure? And the avoidance means the pile just sits there or grows, which triggers more shame next time you see it and round and round and round it goes. And the just be more disciplined message that well-meaning people throw at this doesn't break that cycle at all. It just adds another log onto the shame fire, which makes the avoidance worse, not better. It's the exact same mechanism as telling someone with anxiety to just stop worrying. Technically true, but completely useless and probably gonna make things worse. Now here's the bit that I find genuinely fascinating though, and it's the bit I actually wanted to get to today. Because so many people who cannot for the life of them tackle their own clutter, will go round a friend's house and sort theirs out in an afternoon quite cheerfully and decisively. They'll go, Right. Bin that, keep that. Why'd you even own six of these? And there is no hesitation. There is no brain freeze. And then they go home to their own pile and it's back to square one. It's mad, isn't it? Why is it so much easier to sort someone else's overwhelm than your own? Well, there's a few reasons and I think they're worth sitting with because they tell you a lot about what's actually going on underneath. First, there is no emotional weight attached to someone else's belongings. Your own clutter isn't just objects, it's decisions you've been avoiding, memories, guilt about money spent, maybe. Evidence of who you used to be or hoped to be, and unfinished projects that remind you that you didn't finish them. Someone else's junk drawer is just a junk drawer. There's no story pulling at you when you pick up an old receipt that isn't yours. So the decision fatigue simply isn't there in the same way 'cause the objects aren't loaded with anything. Second, novelty genuinely helps a stalled initiation system. Walking into an unfamiliar space, your brain treats it a bit like a fresh task, almost a game rather than the same defeated pile you've been avoiding all year. There's a reason it's easier to be productive in a coffee shop than it is at your own desk. That new environment doesn't have any history of failure or associations attached to it yet. Third, and I think this is the big one, honestly, when you are helping someone else, you get to be the calm, capable person rather than the person drowning. There's no shame in the room for you. You are not the one being judged by yourself or anybody else. So your brain isn't spending half its energy managing that shame while trying to make decisions with the other half. You're free to just think clearly, which when you actually notice it tells you something important. It's not that you are incapable of making these decisions, you've just proven you can in someone else's house an hour ago. It's that your own clutter comes wrapped in judgement and theirs doesn't when it's not your stuff. And fourth, there's usually a clear line with someone else's space. You can see what done looks like because you're not emotionally inside it. At home done can feel like it doesn't even exist. 'cause you know that there's always gonna be another drawer, another cupboard, another decision behind this one, it never quite resolves the way it does when you're just doing someone else's spare room for an afternoon and then going home. And it's worth saying this isn't an amateur thing either. Professional organisers, the people who do this for a living will often tell you their own homes are nowhere near as tidy as the ones they get paid to sort out. There's even a version of this in loads of other trades. We've all met the plumber who's got a dripping tap at home or a mechanic driving around in a car that's had the engine light on for about eight months. And it's not hypocrisy. It's the same principle showing up everywhere. Skill and emotional load are two completely different things and doing the thing for yourself carries a weight that doing it for someone else just doesn't. So what do you actually do with that if this is you? Now I'm not gonna give you a system. 'cause systems are usually exactly the kind of thing that becomes another overwhelming decision in itself. But a few things genuinely do help and they all come from the same idea, which is borrowing what makes helping other people easier and bringing a bit of it home. So body doubling is a big one and it's worth knowing the phrase, 'cause it comes up a lot in lots of different spaces. Body doubling is just having someone else in the room while you do the task, even if they're not helping, even if they're just on their phone in the corner. Doesn't matter why it works and honestly we don't fully understand it. But having another person present seems to lower that freeze response and makes starting easier. It's almost like having a witness reduces the shame enough to unstick you. Lowering the bar helps too, properly lowering it. Not the fake version where you say just do 10 minutes and then you feel like a failure at minute 11. I mean, actually deciding that one drawer or even one section of one drawer is a full and complete win today. 'cause the size of the task was never really the problem. It was the number of decisions inside it. And reducing the decisions themselves helps enormously. So instead of Keep, Bin, or Maybe I'll need it for every item, which is three decisions each time, try just two boxes. Staying or going and that's it. No maybe pile. The maybe pile is where executive function goes to die. 'cause it's the same decision. Deferred just relocated. There's also something in borrowing the actual mechanism I talked about earlier, the pretending it's not yours trick. Sounds daft, I know, but some people genuinely find it easier to sort their own kitchen if they imagine they're doing it for a friend who's about to move in. It's a bit of a cheat, but if it quietens the emotional noise enough to let the decision making part of your brain actually function, I'm not gonna argue with it. And maybe the kindest thing you can do is stop treating the mess as evidence of who you are. It is not a character flaw, it's a system under load. The exact same system that works perfectly well when the pressure's off or when the mess belongs to someone else. Anyway, that's your lot for this month. Have a proper think about which bit of your life you'd sort out brilliantly if it belonged to somebody else and see if you can borrow a bit of that clarity for yourself. Time for me to go. Enjoy your week. I will of course be back on Monday on Patreon, if you want a little bit more from me, with a super hypnotherapy track all about this very topic if you need it. And I am very cheap as well, don't you know. You'd probably spend more each month on potatoes that you end up throwing away 'cause they went weird. Just buy smaller bags of potatoes and support your mental health instead, you know where to find me. The link to my Patreon page is in the description, as always. Take care of yourself. I'll speak to you again very soon. Bye for now.