Getting rid of clutter is not about getting rid of everything you love, and living in a stark white room. There are psychological reasons behind why people buy and store clutter, why people become hoarders and why letting go of stuff you don’t want or need is a therapeutic form of Swedish death-cleaning (meaning when you die, you don’t give your relatives the stress of having to go through all your crap, when they should spend that time grieving).
The Secret Life of Clutter is by an expert asking why so many people have such a hard time letting go of ‘stuff’ they don’t need and moving on. This is peaceful politics in action. Because people who accumulate clutter tend to buy more clutter, and fund a ‘buy and throw away or lose and buy again’ mentality that is harming the planet, with endless consumerism.
Amazing changes happen when you declutter your home. A new energy will emerge and often significant things start to shift. If you skirt around the edges of a clutter problem, you find yourself moving things from one place to another. I call this the washing machine effect.
I recommend rolling up your sleeves and setting aside a decent block of time to really get to grips with piles of clutter, and spring cleaning, deep into those corners.
In this book, the author takes us on 10 touching stories as people discover what their cluttered homes reveal about their lives, then make life-changing shifts when they start to let go and move on. The secret to a calm nurturing home is simply to uncover the psychological reasons that lie beneath the clutter, and how unlocking the meaning is key to saying goodbye to what you no longer need, while keeping precious memories intact.
A thoughtful and surprisingly emotional account of our complex relationship with stuff. If you don’t want your possessions to possess you, then this is a book you must read. Graham Allcott
Lost & Found is a book of 9 life-changing lessons, from a woman who lost everything she owned in a storage unit fire in Croydon, where she had stowed her stuff after a break-up. Left devastated, the event forced her to re-evaluate her relationship with owning material things. In this book, the author explores the psychological reasons for why we buy and keep things, and shows how to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of ‘too much’.
She interviews behavioural psychologists on the science of nostalgia, a nun (on what it’s like to own almost nothing) and consumer psychologists on why we spend impulsively, to help us better surround why we’re surrounded by clutter, and what we can do to change it. By the end, your relationship with your belongings will be changed forever.
The Simple Way to Get Rid of Stuff
Skoup is a company that can get rid of both household and business waste, and then recycles it to the appropriate places on your behalf. It turns green waste into compost, rubble into building materials, old paper and glass into new paper and glass, old metal into drinks cans and old wood into new wood.
Ideal if you have a lot of waste to dispose of (say a house clearance or you’re doing up a house), they will collect and take away your rubbish. If you have too many bin bags for kerbside collection, just pile up your biodegradable bin bags and they will take them away too for a much cheaper price. Just enter your postcode to see if this service operates in your area.
