Ever wonder why people start cluttering their spaces in the first place? Sometimes the answer is pretty simple, but more often than not it is pretty complex. But one way or another, the individual that’s collecting needs to be handled with care and instead of being judged: understood. Having a lot of clutter in your house is bound to make you feel as if you yourself are cluttered. Mentally or emotionally speaking.

It’s like needing to do a specific task at the end of the day and not being able to fully relax all day because you know that task still hasn’t been done yet.

Are You A Hoarder?

Hoarding is the next level of collecting or being cluttered. Hoarding occurs when someone struggles to discard old items and collects unnecessary items. Eventually, the inability or unwillingness to throw things away can outrun the pace of collecting. Leaving the hoarder suffocated yet unable to let go.

Hoarding can create unsafe and unlivable environments and can even negatively impact relationships with other people. Figures indicate that hoarding tends to get worse with age and usually starts in the teen years. Hoarders tend to come from households that were unorganized, tended to live alone, and also, had difficult and deprived childhoods.

People clutter because they develop an emotional attachment with the items that they are collecting. The items collected become like extensions of themselves, so throwing them away would feel painful and like they are throwing a piece of themselves away. However, there are other reasons that people can’t let go of clutter. And those vary and can include: uncontrolled consumerism, shopping addiction, mental health problems, and associating the items that are cluttering the place with a spouse that passed away.   

In this blog post I would like to talk about hoarding and why it happens and what some of the underlying issues are. I will then give you a couple of very helpful solutions to get to the root of the problem and help you or your loved one solve it. But I’ve got to warn you; it will take a lot of work, determination, patience, and time. But all the good things take effort and time, and if you hang in there, then it will be worth it as you will notice a significant positive change in your mental health and well-being.

There’s a garden variety of reasons we have clutter. So let’s talk about some of these. 

Why We Collect Things

As emotional beings, we have the tendency to infuse our belongings with emotion. In many ways, we perceive these items as extensions of ourselves. The process starts in early babyhood, whereas the baby or the toddler gets attached to their favorite blankie or a stuffed animal. Having the object close by helps the child feel as if their nurturing and warm mother is always next to them. Hence, they use the object to help them fall asleep, to ease their nerves whenever something spooks them, and to boost their self-confidence while trying something unknown. And this process continues into adolescence whereas teenage girls start trading clothes with one another as if to signify  that they share not only clothing, but also identities. 

Others started collecting trophies and plaques from childhood and adolescence victories. And can’t part with them because looking at them makes them feel as if they are right there on the field again, powerful and unstoppable, fearlessly taking on their competition. All of those associations make the process of decluttering a very painful process for many.

Sometimes people collect or hang onto items because the items remind them of an idea or a memory from the past that they associate with something loved and cherished or valuable.

For instance, a widow might be hoarding her passed away husband’s stuff, and to her, throwing away his items is like throwing away the memory of him. Or in another example, the person might be collecting because they think that the item holds monetary value and might be worth a lot more in the future. So they collect the items and purchase more if they come across something similar. People who have specified collections, such as unique cars or stamps, deliberately search out specific items, categorize them, and carefully display their collections. Collections tend to be large but don’t feel or look cluttered, and they don't cause the distress and impairments that are part of hoarding disorder.

Shopping Addiction

When people experience painful emotions and either don’t know how to handle them or don’t want to, they often end up resorting to unhealthy means. And that’s their way of running away or trying to escape. The new habit can become a drug addiction, a gambling addiction, and even a traveling addiction. But in this case we will discuss shopping addiction. For instance, a woman that I knew back in the day had a terrible shopping addiction.

She used shopping as her way to avoid dealing with painful emotions, and when she shopped, she kept everything.

Over the years, her closet and her house started looking more cluttered than a Chinese flea market. She shopped when she was feeling happy; she shopped when she was experiencing sadness, and she shopped because she was bored. That fresh dopamine boost never went wasted. The woman’s motto was “always be positive” and “don’t tell me anything negative”. Talk about toxic positivity. 

 Mental Health and Clutter

Hoarding Disorder is often a symptom of other mental health conditions such as: anxiety, ADHD, dementia, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, and depression. Research also suggests that hoarding disorder may also be associated with a lack of executive functioning abilities such as - paying attention, categorizing things, and making decisions.

There are exceptions, but more often than not hoarders really are suffering from a mental health disorder and it is projected out into their external environment. In that case, making that individual acknowledge that they have a problem is a very difficult task. Family and friends can usually tell almost immediately but simply don’t know how to approach the hoarder. At the end of the day the hoarder must be receptive to treatment; otherwise it might prove to be an impossible task to get them to change.

To Conclude

People clutter for various reasons and some are simple while others are a lot more complicated. Clutter is usually not a great sign, but can also indicate that the person is simply too emotionally attached to the objects cluttering the space. Clutter can indicate an emotional attachment to the items or perceived monetary value. It can also indicate a shopping addiction. And last, a hoarder can have a mental health condition such as Hoarding Disorder, which may or may not be a symptom of other and more serious mental health disorders like schizophrenia.

So what are some effective treatment options for hoarders? 

Let’s find out.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)

This is the most effective treatment and should be directed by a medical professional. The goal here is to alter behavior and the thought process that contributes to hoarding. Therapy focuses on why someone is having a hard time letting go of items and can be done on an individual basis or in a group setting.

Peer-led Groups

These special groups are a little less intimidating and can also help someone dealing with HD. They often meet weekly and involve regular check-ins to provide support and evaluate progress that you’ve made.

Medications

Unfortunately, no medication exists specifically to treat HD. But certain medications that help ADHD have also been shown to improve HD. A doctor may prescribe a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor to help with the condition. These medications may help with other disorders too, and it isn’t really clear if they can treat HD.

As a loved one or an outsider, it’s tempting to believe that by cleaning out the clutter yourself, you can somehow solve the problem. But you’ve got to realize that it’s not that simple in most cases, and the individual has to be self-motivated to do that. And for that, more often than not, bigger and deeper root issues need to be addressed. 

So if you are the one who just realized that you might have a hoarding issue, then I congratulate you. Because what gets noticed can finally be eliminated. Cheers to that and cheers to you, new and soon to be improved life.

Learning How To Manage and Handle Emotions

You might need to remove yourself from an unhealthy situation or become more aware of your negative thought patterns and work on changing those. The key job of your emotions is to get you to see the problem for what it is and push you into making the necessary changes. To address your emotions, change what you can, and find a healthy outlet like meditation, running or working out, chatting with friends or writing in a notebook, or creating a less stressful schedule.

Sources

The psychology of stuff and things | The Psychologist (bps.org.uk)

Is hoarding considered a mental illness? (psichologyanswers.com)