Why organized People are Less Stressed Out
Have you ever gotten so busy that things just pile up on you? The kind of busy where staying organized is impossible, and you feel rolled under the sheer amount of pressure screaming from your to do list?
Once this happens, you really aren’t living any more; you are coping. And whatever your coping strategy is, it still isn’t good enough to keep your body from experiencing…stress. *cue horror music*
Believe you me, I have been there. Last year was a difficult one for me, and by the time I signed my last grade card and hugged my last student goodbye, I was wrung out. I kept thinking to myself, “How did I get to this point?”
I did a little life audit and realized that not only had I been keeping myself too busy, I didn’t go into my busy seasons prepared.
If you are feeling the same way, it could be time to take a step back in your life and reevaluate. Maybe you are just doing too much. I know I was. Being overly busy does allow stress to build into your life. But, maybe the problem is not about how busy you are and instead how prepared you are. Being busy is not necessarily bad if you are prepared for how it will look in your life. So, learn to prepare, and you will be less stressed out.
Why is staying organized important?
As I tried to figure out how to better prepare my days, everything came back to organization. I realized there was a link between organization and stress. When things get busy sometimes our homes start to suffer.
We put our head down and meet work deadlines, get to our kid’s soccer game, run that charity event, but we stop working on our house. We live in denial of the papers piling up and the dust everywhere. Those toys in the living room, the shoes you keep tripping over, the dirty laundry overflowing hampers, you will get to it when you have time.
The time problem
Of course, time is the problem. Time keeps flying by you. But surprisingly, working first on organizing your home helps reduce stress and skyrocket productivity, so you just get more things done.
In order to do it, though, you need an effective way to keep from overworking yourself and keep stress levels lower. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why it is important to be organized.
Staying organized from the get go and having organization systems already in place will help you when the going gets tough. If you are struggling to set up organization systems in your home, you can grab my free living room organization guide at the bottom of this post.
Does staying organized help reduce stress?
Short answer, yes. Long answer, when you are stressed out, you instantly become less productive. Your body moves into fight or flight responses, and your brain’s main concern is for survival.
According to the American Institute of Stress, living in a state where your body has repeated or extended stress responses can lead to detrimental health effects including hypertension, heart disease, anxiety, depression, and shockingly cancer.
One of the benefits of staying organized is that you are less likely to experience as much stress because you set yourself up to not even experience it. You won’t get overwhelmed by the clutter, dishes, laundry, etc. because you have systems in place to take care of them.
What are the advantages of organizing?
Organization helps you relax
Not to say relaxing is organizing. It can be for some, but the result is indubitably relaxing. When your space is full and crowded, it causes you to have a physically negative response. You might be thinking, “Really, I don’t mind. I barely notice.” Hubs is like that. But the connection to organization and stress is still there because when everything is organized, we both relax better.
Things run much more smoothly at home and away. When I set something on the coffee table, I know it isn’t going to send another pile crashing to the ground. We have space to move around and our home is filled with things we enjoy.
The way your home looks is a huge factor in relaxing. If everything around you is cluttered and shuffled, your eye doesn’t have anything to rest on. Organizing your things and giving yourself clear lines of sight instantly will help you settle and relax.
Basically, if your things are organized and put away, you won’t have to think about them. You won’t walk in your door and see the pile of mail you have to go through. You won’t walk through the house and bump into the ironing board you always keep up or see the stuff you bought on Amazon and never found a place for. All of these things will either be put away, or have a place to be put away quickly. Which means less stress for you.
Organization saves time cleaning
One of my favorite advantages to organizing is how easy it makes cleaning. Maybe because I pretty much hate it.
And dusting? Oh that is my absolute nemesis. It’s horrible and boring and has to be done every. Single. Week. Ugh.
Whether you like cleaning or not, organizing will help you save serious amounts of time. When my living room is organized, I can dust thoroughly it in under 10 minutes. When it was cluttered and disorganized it took 30 or more minutes just to dust. That doesn’t count the time I spent attempting to tidy up. Overall, having a clean home can do wonders for your mental health.
Find out how I dust my whole house in 15 minutes.
There’s less to clean.
If you continually stay organized, there will be less to clean. You might still have some tidying to do, but the majority of your things will be put away where they go. The things that need to be tidied up will be small and quick.
Vacuuming, dusting, and floors will take significantly less time because instead of putting a bunch of things away or moving them from one place to another, you just run the vacuum, dust, or sweep. Easy peasy.
Everyone can help with the mess.
When everything you own has a permanent place to go, it is much easier for everyone to pitch in and help tidy up. Your children can put away their things and shared things. As your family gets used to the places things go, they are more likely to put them away the first time. It is part of the process of mentally retraining your brain to keep things organized.
If everyone is doing part of the work, there is much less to do. Sure, you might have to prompt your family to take a few minutes to tidy up. But, what used to take you an hour, will take everyone half the time.
If you are struggling to get your family involved in the tidying process, here are some tips that will help you all build the tidying habit:
- Set a good example.
Your family will not change just because you ask them too. They need to see what you want them to do. Start building the habits organized people establish. Keep your space clean and organized. Have a good attitude about tidying and organizing. If you show the positivity that comes from organizing, your family will pick up on it.
- Have a “home” for everything in your house.
Organizing takes time because every single thing you own should have a place it goes. That place should not often change. Your family should also know where everything in the home belongs so they can always put it away where it goes.
- Do group tidying.
Instead of asking your children to clean an area by themselves, get in their and work with them. Have the whole family work on the same area. This does not necessarily have to be permanent, but will allow hands-on training of how organizing and tidying works.
- After tidying, reward your family by spending quality time doing something you love in the newly cleaned space.
Purposely plan family time after you have tidied up. Give your family something to look forward to and allow them to enjoy the space. This is a fun way to set a routine, but also will teach your family to take time to enjoy the space they have organized. So, order a pizza, break out the board games, or rent a movie and spend some time enjoying the space you worked on together.
Each thing you own has a place to go.
Cleaning is so much faster if you know where you are putting something. You pick it up, and put it away. Having organized cabinets and closets makes slipping something back in place a breeze. No fumbling, no shuffling, and definitely no frustration with figuring out where to put things.
As you assign all of your possessions a home, you will notice it is easier to clean things up throughout the day because you won’t be left guessing where to put it or shoving it in a drawer. Junk drawer, anyone?
Decreasing the mental stress of cleaning up is why it is so important to be organized.
I do want to point out, this doesn’t mean that you have to have everything put away where it can’t be seen. I keep my library books stacked on the coffee table and anything from school in my school bag slung on the back of the dining room chair nearest the door. These things are almost always out, but I know where they are, and it is easy to put stuff away when I am done with it.
If you are needing a little help to get started organizing, grab the freebie Living Room Organization Guide at the bottom of this post.
Organization helps you reduce mental clutter (organization and stress)
When you get busy, you tend to get overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with dinner plans and carpool arrangement. Overwhelmed with appointments and deadlines. There is so much going on in your brain. I call this, mental clutter.
While there are some great strategies, such as a brain dump, that help you to feel less stressed from mental clutter, one surefire thing to do is organize your space.
Reducing or completely removing tasks such as cleaning, tidying up, or even clearing the table of clutter before every meal time, takes the strain off of you. It helps you start to get things off your plate instead of trying to continue juggling so much.
Having an organized space also means you have a haven. When you get home, no matter what time, you know your space will be organized and fairly clean and tidy. We are not going for perfect, we are trying to use the organization to reduce stress.
Organization helps you enjoy your home instead of just living in it (benefits of organizing, why organize,)
We all live in our homes, but we don’t all enjoy them. I have been here. It seems like the busier I am, the more I let my home go. Then, I come home to a constantly messy, difficult to clean house that I, frankly, don’t really enjoy spending time in. Sure, I can tune out the mess if I have to, but I still am not enjoying my home.
Remember, when we mentioned that a clean home can lead to better mental health. Well, the opposite is also true. A disorganized home can lead to poor mental health.
Organizing your space gives you the chance to enjoy your home. You can feel happy to be there instead of walking in and seeing a to do list a mile long run through your head. You have space to eat dinner at the kitchen table or play a game with your family. Guests have a place to come and gather. And, overall, you feel more comfortable in your home.
Basically, you enjoy it more.
Organization helps you prioritize your life
One of the great benefits of organization is that organizing your home is a catalyst to self evaluation.
One of the outcomes of reviewing your possessions is you begin to review your life as well. By choosing to prioritize keeping an organized home, you free yourself up for other priorities that you decide to keep as a part of your life.
Organization trickles into other areas of your life
The longer you pursue organization, the more you build the habit. You will notice that you take steps to keep your home organized without having to try. It will also get easier to organize other areas of your life such as
- your schedule.
- your meals.
- your budget
The advantage of organizing other areas of your life is that the more you plan ahead, the easier things become. Making these plans for organization will reduce stress in other areas of your life as well, helping you to feel more comfortable and relaxed.
What are good organization skills?
Now that we have talked about the benefits of organization, you might be wondering what good organizational skills are.
- Building habits
- Staying consistent
- Having a plan
- Delegating work
- Setting good priorities
I like to think of it not so much as skills, but as an organizational system. With an organizational system, you set in place a routine that will help you keep up with your home in the shortest amount of time possible. We are talking 10-15 minutes a day to organized, plus regular cleaning. Which, if you are organized, should also be cut much shorter.
I use an organizational system in my home. You can use my organizational system to organize your living room with the freebie Living Room Organization Guide at the bottom of this post. This system consists of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks that Hubs and I complete.
Having a great routine has helped us enhance our organizational skills and keep up with our home throughout our crazy, busy life.
How do you stay organized?
Our end goal is to use organization to reduce stress which is why it is important to be organized. Once you know how to stay organized, you will experience life-changing power over your home.
It sounds great, right? But how do you get there? Staying organized is a habit. Like any other habit, it requires practice and planning.
Start with one room. For me, the living room was a great start because it was the first thing I saw every time I walked in the home.
Find a place for every stray item in the room. Many items may already have a home, so get them back there.
Identify items you no longer want to keep. Clear your living room of clutter. If it doesn’t belong there, put it away, donate it, throw it out. Whatever you need to do to get it out of the living room.
Create storage with containers. We have a basket for our blankets, and a decorative fabric box for gaming controllers. Putting something away, might mean designating a space for it.
Stick with it. Now that you have organized your room, teach your family how to organize it too. Make sure it is organized before your nighttime routine starts. Designate time to work on it as a family. For right now, you are building a habit and setting up a routine that will carry over after you have stopped emphasizing the organization so much.
And ta-da! You can now enjoy more relaxed mental health because of your organization.
Once you have the tools you need to organize one space, you can begin working on organizing the rest of your home as well.
Are you feeling overworked, stressed out, exhausted? What do you do to cope with your crazy life?
