Are you one of those people who never keep anything that they don't use, or are you a hoarder like me? I still have old finger paintings and cards made by my children when they were tiny - they both live in their own homes now! I have hundreds of books, videos, DVDs, cassette tapes, records, clothes that no longer fit, shoes and jackets that I never wear etcetera etcetera....
So why do we need to hang on to all this stuff? Well many of us are intrinsically disorganised - but I cannot use that excuse as my organisational skills border on OCD levels. Some of us though keep things because we think we may need them later, or with me it's because we associate sentimental memories with them leading to strong attachments and we link emotions to our inanimate 'stuff'. We look at the piles of junk in our attics and stuffed into our draws and cupboards and we promise ourselves that we will have a major clear out this week, month or year.
Psychologically such hoarding can be a reaction to feelings of distress, loss or depression, but those thoughts tend to occur only when it comes time to throw things away. Collecting the 'stuff' however, may be due to more innate and therefore unconscious urges. Psychologists theorise that the instinct to collect and hoard may have once had evolutionary advantages being adaptive in allowing individuals to survive and achieve reproductive success when competing for limited resources. Hoarding of food for examples is common amongst many animals and has an obvious survival advantage. In humans however, the excessive acquisition of things such as old greeting cards, your 25-year-old daughter's first attempt at a painting or theatre and other event tickets does not seem to provide any survival advantage at all, in fact the process of living with all this 'stuff' is positively stifling and very stressful .
Many Psychologists now believe that the 'new' fashion for minimalist living is a reaction to the stress of our increasingly materialistic, possession acquiring lifestyles. After all what does all this materialism lead too?
- Debt = stress
- Less space in our homes = stress
- More stuff to maintain & clean = stress
- Needing more money to feed our addiction to 'stuff' = stress
- Working harder & longer hours to gain money to feed our addiction to 'stuff' = stress
- Guilt about working harder and longer hours and not spending time with family in order to feed our addiction to 'stuff' = stress
How can this minimalistic lifestyle help you psychologically? Well as previously mentioned it can lower your levels of stress. It also costs less and so can lower your levels of debt and enable you to get a job that you love rather than one that pays you enough money to feed your habit for acquiring 'stuff'. It means that you spend less time on cleaning and maintaining freeing up your time for having fun. After all we only have one life and no one is guaranteed a tomorrow. It allows you to spend more of this precious time on creating, enjoying the company of your family, on doing nothing and on doing the things that give you joy. There’s more time for exercise, for growing things, for eating well and getting healthy. It is a greener and more sustainable lifestyle that makes your life easier to organise.
There have also been numerous psychological studies that have shown that giving your 'stuff' to others significantly increases a persons feelings of happiness. So together with an increase in feelings of happiness, the greatest thing that a minimalist lifestyle will provide you with is time, time for you to do what you want to do, not what you feel that you have to do. How can that fail to enrich your life? This summer I intend to start my own journey into minimalism, I will let you know how I get on......
Related reading: 
Related articles
- Finding Joy in Simplicity (exploratoriablog.wordpress.com)
- Stuff = happiness? (rightdownmyalley.wordpress.com)
- Minimalism vs. Environmentalism (yourgreenerpath.wordpress.com)
- How to Live a Simplistic Lifestyle (lifehack.org)
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