Holding on Tightly or Letting Go Lightly: Clutter and Emotions

The Weekly Tittle is an exercise designed to focus your attention on a specific space, aspect, or challenge of decluttering and organizing your home. We assign a new tittle in each webcast/podcast, then check on your progress the following week.

Positive Reinforcement

This week’s assignment is to experiment with using a positive emotion to provide focus for your decluttering efforts:

• Select a decluttering project or a collection of items that has been keeping you stalled or stuck.
• Identify one or more positive emotions that you hope to feel when you finish the project in question, or that you think might help you get started.
• Write a statement that connects your project and the specific positive emotion(s). For example, “I will feel a sense of relief and lightness after I process this stack of papers” or “After I purge jeans that no longer fit, I will be grateful for clear space and proud to have shared my excess with someone who needs it.”
• Schedule an appointment with yourself to work on your project. Before you begin decluttering, spend a moment reflecting on the statement you wrote or reading it aloud. If you feel your energy starting to fade during your work session, repeat the statement to give yourself a fresh boost.
• If this exercise doesn’t produce results on the first attempt, try it again using another positive emotion as your focus.

For the full discussion of this week’s tittle, watch the Weekly Tittle segment on YouTube.