September 12, 2024
by Elizabeth Earnshaw, MA, LMFT, CGT
Psychology Today
How clutter creates stress and what you can do about it.
KEY POINTS
- Studies show spikes in cortisol related to clutter in the home, and women show higher spikes than men.
- Clutter may have a greater impact on women because they take on a disproportionate amount of mental labor.
- Women are more likely to feel that they carry the burden of “fixing” the clutter.
In 2010, a study was conducted on dual-income married couples with at least one child living in the home. The study showed that when the wife viewed a home as cluttered, her cortisol rates rose throughout the day while those not experiencing a clutter problem noticed their cortisol levels dropped throughout the day.
In this study (and others), women tend to be more impacted by the stress of clutter than men. My hypothesis for this is that women are overwhelmed with the clutter because they know they have to carry the cognitive load of ultimately figuring it all out.
In most American homes, women carry the bulk of what’s called mental load. Mental load is any work that requires our brains—noticing, remembering, delegating, researching, etc.
When a woman sees clutter (yes, this is a generalization and might not apply to all), she doesn’t only notice the mess but begins to actively process what she is going to need to do next and how she will do it.
Cognitive Overload
Thinking through the act of navigating clutter can create cognitive overload, which results in a stressed state that can cause agitation, overwhelm, and shutdown. When this happens, people struggle to engage with their life in a way that they’d like to, possibly feeling so overburdened by where everything should go that they either shift into overdrive putting it all away or shut down completely, unable to take action.
Read the entire article on Psychology Today.