If you are feeling stressed then have a look around at your life, as well as your home environment to see if your life is full of clutter. The reason being, whether it is physical clutter or emotional clutter, it can be a symptom and a cause of stress in your life. It can impact all aspects of your life, from home life, work life, and personal life, all rolled into one. Tackling the clutter in your life can seem like a massive task if you aren’t sure what to do and where to go. But if you make an effort and make time to get rid of clutter and make things as clutter-free as possible. Then it can help to make your life and your home much less stressful.

The best thing that you can do is take small steps at a time. A little bit at a time doesn’t have to feel overwhelming, and small changes are easier to make longer term commitments and change. Then you can make sure that you’re able to maintain the clutter-free life and live a much less stressful life. If you’re not sure where to start, even with those small steps, then here are some ways to declutter and enjoy a life that is filled with less junk, both physically and metaphorically.

Work area

If your work area is stopping you from being as productive and focused as you wanted to be, then that can be a good place to start. Starting off with your desk is a good place to start, but taking all of your papers and items on there and empty out of all of the drawers. From there you can reorganize what needs to go where and clean it all down. Then you can label, sort, and even get things ordered alphabetically if that is your kind of thing. When it is easier to work because you know where everything is, then it can mean a more productive and less stressful day. So it really is worth investing the time to make a difference.

Your computer can be one of the next things to organize, as it can quite easily get filled up with lots of files that you no longer need. So much like you would with a physical desktop, think about what you can do with the computer desktop. It can make your computer even work faster so that makes it worth it more than anything, right? Take control with things around your work life and it will mean things are much easier for you when you’re working.

Your home

Your home is one of the places that you are going to spend the most of your time. So having a place that is messy, dirty, and cluttered, and it can mean that you just can’t relax when you’re home, adding to the stress of home life. When you get home from a busy day at work, having a little haven to relax in is what you want the most. Starting off with the rooms in the home and giving them a declutter is really important. If you’ve got a lot to clear out or will be swapping out furniture and so on, then it could be worth looking for cheap bin hire to make sure that you can clear everything out all at once and not have to do so many trips to a skip. Once you’ve started with decluttering, you will be able to clean properly and organize all of the things in the way that you want.

According to the recent hype of organizing with Marie Kondo, the thing that you should start off with first is your closets. Clothes are usually something that we are less emotionally attached to and so it can be a good place to start. What no longer fits or is in bad condition? If you can donate some of your items then that is really useful. You should only keep the things that you really need, use a lot, or just love to have. Then you could move onto drawers and things like bookcases and storage units.

Your life

It can be all very well to declutter your home and work areas to calm you and destress you, but your life, which does involve all areas, is another thing to take a look at. Extra stress in your life from things in personal life can impact all areas such as your physical and mental health. So it is completely worth looking at what you can do to declutter your life.

One of the first things that you can do is to reduce the commitments that you have. We do all have some things that we can’t just get out of, but there are a lot of extra things that we can put on ourselves that we don’t really need to be doing. We may feel out of obligation that we need to do some of these things but we don’t really need to. Learning how to say no to things is really a skill to learn, as we as human beings seem to have an innate feeling to please others. So learning to say no really is important.

If you have toxic friendships in your life, then you will know how draining it can be? And as hard as it can be to let these people out of your life, it does make a difference when you do. Spending time with these kinds of people can be hard and stressful and just generally leave you feeling down. So declutter those kinds of friendships out of your life and move on from it. Reconsidering how you do things, and your routine in everyday life, is a really important aspect of decluttering your life too; what is no longer needed? Can you batch together some of your tasks, such as doing things like laundry all in one day, rather than spanning it over a couple of days. Making a plan of your week and what needs to be done is a great idea to make sure that your week runs as you want it to.