Perhaps you aren’t familiar with the term “hoarder.” Allow me to create a visual. You know how in the movies when someone has to clean their apartment quickly they’ll shove everything in the closet? For a hoarder, that closet is home sweet home. An explosion of mostly useless items—magazines practically chiseled on stone, broken appliances, trash bags full of packing peanuts. Things she’ll never need that somehow seem valuable.
You may not have an obsessive compulsion, but maybe you’re a pack rat disguised as a
collector—someone who holds onto things way past their usefulness, creating clutter in your home. The first step to de-cluttering and de-stressing is admitting you’re a little too attached to stuff.
To learn if your stuff attachment is causing chaos in your life, see which signs apply:
10. If someone asks a trivia question about Nixon's presidency, you dig through your newspaper tower for the answer.
9. You separate your clothes by when you bought them, starting with back-to-school ’76.
8. You refuse to throw away mail—even that sweepstakes letter from Ed McMahon—because you never know when you may need it. (Maybe you even store it in a refrigerator box in your garage.)
7. You find a nasty moldy jar. Even though you have more than enough containers you think, “I might want to make jelly some day.”
6. When you upgrade your electronics, you put the old item in a “just in case I need it” pile—which still holds an Atari and an 8 mm camera.
5. At a concert you find the Mix 104.1 promotional table—then you miss your favorite song while trying to stuff as many mouse pads in your bag as possible.
4. Your boss asks you to take some picture frames and knick knacks home because your cluttered desk is hurting productivity—for the entire office.
3. Your air conditioner is broken and it’s 104° F; but you won’t call someone to fix it because of the 50 Christmas gift boxes that block it.
2. Your car’s glove compartment holds a decade’s worth of grocery lists, fast food wrappers, and empty Tic Tac containers.
1. You’ve never done spring cleaning because the guilt over wasting things is just too much to take.
Maybe some of these apply to you on a small scale. If it’s not negatively impacting your life it really comes down to a choice: do you like having a lot of things around? Or would you feel more centered and less stressed if you canned the unnecessary items and organized the rest using free online tools, like we offer here at
MyThings.com?
Or maybe these all apply, and your hoarding interferes with your ability to function and maintain relationships. If that’s the case, here’s what I recommend: