Amy Revell

But for the sake of this example, if you've got one, if that stuff has started to creep and now you also have like a couple of dune bags on the ground or maybe it started to climb up onto the bench or the fruit bowl no longer has fruit, it just has random bits of things that you don't know what to do with, the glasses and keys and a golf ball.

And this is kind of that malignant clutter that is taking over spaces.

It's growing and it's spreading.

Children can often start with benign clutter and then in their own environments, it moves to malignant.

And so sometimes what I see is if benign clutter is left or added to or something shifts, it can often come malignant.

What that might look like is you do have the after school activities bags that just get thrown up against the wall at the end of the night.

Maybe the kids had swimming lessons.

So there's a couple of bags.

But what might happen is a wet towel is left in there and all of a sudden it starts to go moldy and then the bags are going a bit moldy and then you feel overwhelmed by it.

And so you throw other stuff on the pile and this pile just seems to start and grow and it creates a life of its own.

And we talk about clutter attracts clutter and flat surfaces are magnetic.

So you can imagine how putting something down on a flat surface quickly can go from benign.

I can clean that up.

It's fine.

I know where it goes to malignant where it's just spread and it's all of a sudden everywhere.

There's some great reels that I've seen on Instagram where someone clears off a kitchen table and

someone puts down one glass, turns back around and the kitchen table is full of clutter again.

It's like clutter, putting one thing down gives permission for all the other things.

And so what I want you to be able to do is identify what type of clutter you have.

Like it's a really