Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to the Art of Decluttering podcast. I'm your host, Amy Revell. Welcome back to another week of like, let's get our clutter out of the way. Let's live the best lives that we can. Today, I wanna talk to you about the motivation and the benefits of decluttering. So it's almost like a full step back to right at the start. So what would motivate you to declutter?
And I want to present you with some motivations that you can consider if you're like, should I declutter or not? And those motivations also have clear and correlated benefits. And so I want to go into both of those with you. What I'm referring to, and there's a paper that I'll be going to that Dr. Rebecca Blackburn came on the show earlier in the year to talk about.
And these are identified, it was a paper on low consumption lifestyle. And one of the things that they looked at was motivation as to why people chose to live low consumption lifestyles. Why did people choose to live a life of minimalism?
And beautifully, and she would not have known this and I didn't know this, but for a long time I've had like these models of why would you want to engage in decluttering?
Chapter 2: What motivations drive people to declutter?
What are the benefits of it? And what I've been teaching for probably seven or eight years is the exact direct correlation to what the study showed, which was really exciting to see that come out in a research paper and have clinical evidence behind it.
So the motivations for decluttering and living a minimalist lifestyle and being an organized person, so kind of all that rolled into one, one of the highest motivations was greater well-being. financial benefits, more time and ethical considerations. So those were the four motivations of why people started the journey.
And what I want to talk about is how those four things, what the outcome actually looks like, because they are also the outcomes that I hear people talk about all the time. and clinically and in our session work with clients, these four things come out over and over and over again, hence why I've been teaching it for years and years.
And now I have research to back it up, which is really exciting. So the first thing I want to go into is this greater wellbeing. Here's a quote from one of the participants in the study. I feel much calmer and relaxed, less stressed. I feel like I've got space just to curl up on a comfy chair with a book and not worry about the things around me.
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.
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Chapter 3: How does decluttering contribute to greater wellbeing?
And so that was a great investment for us. But we wouldn't have been able to do that if we just had a whole lot of stuff and we were spending our time and our money just buying more and more and more because we wouldn't have that financial freedom.
And that financial freedom can look like paying a little bit more off your mortgage each week rather than wandering around the shops looking for things. You might save money when you're more intentional around your clothes. Australians, Americans, the Western world spend so much money on clothes they will not wear, they do not need, they do not like, end up in landfill.
I mean, I could do, I probably will do a couple of episodes about that. There's a few, if you go back into our back catalog, I'll put some links in the show notes that I've already done around like clothing and textile waste. But the benefits are you save so much money. When you've got less stuff, you can find what you need.
So if I'm going to a birthday party and you've got a cupboard that you might have bought some candles or you might have bought different things over the years that you're like, actually, that's on special and it's really lovely. I can find that.
Whereas lots of my clients are like, I know that I've got a cupboard somewhere of presents that I bought and then they will rebuy things because they can't find the things. And sometimes they'll buy clothes because they couldn't find what they needed or they'll buy toys because they forgot that they had one or they'll buy kitchen appliances forgetting that there's one at the back of the cupboard.
Capitalism does save you money in so, so many ways. And I find it exciting because when you've got all those savings, you get a bit more financial freedom and financial freedom is empowering.
It allows you to make decisions, it allows you to be not confined to just what the money will allow you to do, but you get to be back in charge, which is ultimately what we're doing when we're reducing our clutter anyway. The next thing is the motivation of having more time and then the outcome of having more time. So this is one of the quotes from one of the participants in this study.
I hate cleaning with a passion. Amen, sister. I don't want to be spending my weekends with a big yard, mowing lawns, maintaining a house. We've got so much more time to be creative, to get bored and to play games. I love that having an organized home allows us time. We don't have to spend a lot of time organizing because we don't have a lot of stuff.
And I think there is that initial time investment for the decluttering side of it, where you have to actually go through the things that you own
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