Your home should be the place where you can rest and rejuvenate after a long day.

It’s hard to start fresh each day when the first thing you wake up to is a mess. A mountain of work just waiting for you.

Want to host a girl’s night? Or even have the family over for Thanksgiving dinner? But the idea of having everyone see the mess is too terrifying. Not allowing loved ones into your intimate space can stagnate your relationships and make you feel isolated and lonely.

Having clutter around the house is not only dangerous for babies and kids but also effects their mental development. Clutter makes it harder for little ones to focus, causing confusion and decision paralysis which leads to frustration and anger.

Not agreeing on tidiness is a known deal breaker between couples. But, it is also completely normal and even expected for two people to grow up with a different perspective of cleaning and maintaining the home (opposites attract, after all). Simply by acknowledging each other’s perspective is the start to getting on the same page.

But if left unchecked, a messy home can invite blame between partners which eventually festers into resentment.

There are many studies on how your environment effects you. Physical effects can range from high levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, to poor quality of sleep and weight gain. You also are more likely to have respiratory issues from all the dust accumulation.

There also are obvious safety concerns too, like fire hazards and tripping and falling from the clutter.

The biggest impact, however, is on your mental health. Clutter can cause depression, poor memory, and irritability among many problems.

Your messy home and poor mental health create a vicious cycle, where one feeds the other. But, this also means there is a powerful opportunity to use cleaning your home as way to hack your brain, and allow you to move through all other areas of your life with ease.

This is because you don’t have the knowledge of optimal storage plans. You buy some containers from The Container Store® but it’s not quite the right one so you buy another and another and another…

This is fear-based motivation. If you are guilt-tripping yourself into taking action you will not create long-lasting and impactful results.

There is so much to do and you become too overwhelmed to know where begin. The decision paralysis and productive procrastination kick in so you never start.

That’s because most of it is dead weight. It is from an old you, maybe one that you’re not quite ready to let go of.

If there is no room for growth in your home, there is no room for you to grow in life.

“Out with the old and in with the new!”