Clutter can seem harmless and eccentric, an endearing characterisitic even, in some cases, of people that we love. However, it can be dangerous, and clearing it out can be beneficial to your health, helping you to avoid accidents in the home, messes that can attract unwanted household pests, and (I think most beneficially), easing stress.
It may seem a paltry point, but clutter can easily cause a number of household accidents. The most obvious would be tripping and falling, as in over a stray stack of newspapers or an errant toy. However, something many people don’t think about is the raised possibility of a house fire, as they are stacking things on top of the toaster or near candles, or desperately stuffing boxes in a hot attic and forgetting that there are aerosols with “contents under pressure” inside. These are just a couple of the many hypothetical situations that can lead to problems. I’m sure you’re imagination can come up with many more if you look around or go through your boxes and drawers of stuff.
If you don’t like getting sick, think about the numerous places that clutter gives household pests to hide, and to dine on forgotten morsels of food.  That box of stale cheerios in the back of your cupboard that you might be desperate enough to eat one day, the cheese that you threw into the box of old yearbooks and newspaper clippings for lack of a better place to pack it last time you moved and forgot to unpack, the leftover crumbs hiding behind your wall of stuff in the garage where your kids were sneaking chocolate chip cookies…all of these attract roaches, ants, rats and mice (which can also carry fleas and other parasites), and many other unthought of creepy-crawlies that can carry diseases and pass them on to you, or at the very least give you the creeps. Not to mention that while their digging through old magazines and clothes that don’t fit you anymore to get to this stuff, they’re also finding the rice that they wouldn’t have normally detected which you were going to eat for dinner tonight, chewing wiring in your house (also reaching back to fire hazards), and making nests in stuff that you might actually care about like your puffy eighties prom dress (no matter how hideous your mom thought it was, you still love it), or your favorite stuffed animal that you were going to pass on when you have kids.
And finally, there’s the stress. It might a very nostalgic and heart-wrenching task, tedious and nerve-wracking, to go through your clutter, get rid of the majority of it and organize the rest, but having the clutter around is even more damaging to your psyche, and if you never tackle it, it just gets worse. Between not being able to find important paperwork, a ringing telephone, your spare keys, or that twenty dollars you put away for a rainy day, clutter can make your stress level rise many times a day, and can affect the rest of your life if, say, you actually threw away a pile of what you thought was unimportant papers, but included your social security number on half the stack (identity theft, anyone?). Besides that, if you already have the itch to organize your stuff, every time you look on it can make you ache inside, feeling like you have to accomplish this huge task and can never find the time to go through those stacks that run from floor to ceiling. Remember, folks, stress is a major contributor to obesity, heart attacks, poor mental health, anxiety, and many other health conditions. And think of how much clearer your head will feel once you can inventory what you have and know where it is, and be able to walk through your house to pour yourself a bowl of Honeycomb and not have to worry about falling and getting bitten by Mickey Mouse as he gnaws through your breakfast. Triple Bonus!
I’m sure now that you’re thinking about it, you can come up with many other scenarios that show clutter to be unhealthy. Hopefully, you will realize that it’s not such a daunting task. It can even be fun to take short trips down memory lane! Remember, you don’t have to keep everything, you may find that you don’t know why you did keep half of your stuff (or more; and no, it’s probably not important if you don’t remember why you kept it), and you don’t have to do it all at once; you can go room-by-room. So try to have fun, don’t stress, start before it gets out of control, and if you haven’t already accumulated clutter, don’t start!
