Health is more than emotional or physical ailments. It can also be the health of a physical environment, such as your dorm room or apartment. Plus, what’s in this environment can have a real effect on how you feel. Your brain can feel cluttered.
Multiple studies link cluttered environments with elevated stress. Objects compete for your attention, distracting you and adding additional tension to your life. With this, you are likely to think less clearly and get less done. This might be attached to the recent spike in the trend of minimalism and things like mindfulness, capsule wardrobes and tiny houses. Have you ever heard the name Marie Kondo or been told to meditate?
Today, our minds can be deluged with elements that can affect all of our senses. In a technology-driven society, there’s even more stuff from digital spaces. It seems like there are more distractions than ever.
Ads, notifications, pages on our computer and files on our desktop follow us to class, work and on the go. Now, clutter is mobile thanks to laptops, tablets and phones. Often, laptops are where we need to get stuff done, but they have built in baggage that make for easy stress and less focus.
That’s why I think it’s important to take in what’s in your space and how it makes you feel.
With less stress, your mental health and productivity can improve. Clean spaces can make for a clean mind. And once something is clean, you’re less likely to make it cluttered again.
A clean space is the perfect place to recharge and relax from the stimuli in daily life or focus on a task.
Think about study spaces on campus. They have just what you need to work: a place to sit and a surface to work.
Personally, I know I feel the weight of stuff. Plus, the longer you hold stuff or see it, the more you get attached and the harder it is to let go and create a clear space.
The Forest app is a way to limit digital distractions and, in return, it rewards you with a thriving forest that will result in real planted trees. Staying focused instead of clicking back and forth from a task can increase productivity.
Forest rewards you for staying on task, creating positive feedback. This shows the number of things in your space isn’t necessarily the problem. It can be the space these things take up and where they can pull your eye when you need to get something done. A ding of a text message can ruin your workflow. Forest works to prevent that.
With an organized desktop, sorted bookmarks and a physical space with wrangled clutter, your room will not only look better, but it will work better.
Reducing clutter doesn’t mean you have to get rid of stuff. It can mean giving stuff a new place or allocating a place for working. Some people can also function better with many elements in their space. These elements can inspire creative thinking.
No one’s space is exactly the same, and everyone functions best in different ways. Creating a healthy space doesn’t just mean eliminating clutter. It’s about finding the balance that works best for you.
Sophie Feinberg is a UF journalism junior. Her column comes out Tuesday and Thursday.
