Amy Revell

So having less stuff allows you to feel in control of your space.

It allows you to feel good about yourself, about how you're using your time and your money and your energy and aligning how you live with your values.

This greater wellbeing, and we've talked so many episodes this year about that wellbeing and really going into some of the clinical research around it, which is great.

And you can go back and listen to those episodes.

But I want to help you to kind of picture and imagine what these things might look like because you might be motivated by the fact that the moment you get home from work, maybe you pick up the kids from childcare on the way or you're looking after the grandkids, you get home, you rush to get the dinner, you sit down at the table if you're lucky or maybe you're just eating as you're standing or eating in front of the TV.

And you're getting down dinner and you're straight into the dishes and you feel like you're on the go.

You know how people talk about like, we know what you do from your nine to five, but what do you do in your five to nine?

And if your answer of what you do in your five to nine is basically just look after the house and go, go, go the entire time.

One of the motivations can be like, I just want greater wellbeing.

I want my five to nine to not be as chaotic.

And there are seasons of life.

If you've got really little kids and you've got lots of little kids, there's going to be bath time and story time and readers and, you know, bathroom trips.

And you're going to have to do all of the things.

If you are looking for someone, looking after someone as a carer, that might be the time where you have lots of like tasks that you need to do in order to repair the person you're caring for, for bedtime routines.

So I totally get that for some seasons this is just like that is just the crazy time.

But it doesn't have to be for most of us because if you've got a home where stuff has a place where it belongs and you know where that place is and you put it in that place where you've got these little micro routines of tidying up after yourself or making things as simple as possible, having a clear bench so by the end of the night you can wipe it clean and reset for the next day, all of that contributes to greater wellbeing.

This might also take into consideration things like how we sleep better when we're living in a home that isn't cluttered, how our relationships have less stress and pressure on them when we're living in a home that isn't overwhelmed by clutter, how children can learn better.

So, you know, one of the things that we learnt during the lockdowns here in Melbourne that just went on forever and ever is

was that children in cluttered homes find it much harder to concentrate for long periods of time, much harder to engage in projects, much harder to sit still and listen to their teacher on a device or however it works for them when the environment is really cluttered.

And if you work from home, you probably find the same thing, that you're distracted a lot if the environment around you is cluttered.