Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (6 page)

Here's another force that's accelerating the pressure on us to keep consuming: the people we want to look like. Both Dr. Roberts and Leonard pointed out that we're no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses. After all, the Joneses live across the street from you and are more or less in the same boat. They have pretty much the same size house and the same class of car as yours and generally the same educational background, and they're in a similar tax bracket.

“The gold standard now is keeping up with the Gateses,” Dr. Roberts says. He's talking about billionaire Bill Gates and his family. You may not want to dress like him or adopt his haircut, but his mansion, toys, and checking account would certainly be fun to have.

If you don't have a roof over your head or enough to eat, you
do
need more, Leonard says. But once their basic needs are covered, people tend to decide
whether they have enough stuff by comparing themselves with not just their neighbors but also the celebrities on TV. “Now instead of comparing my shoes to my neighbor's, I'm comparing them to Angelina Jolie's or Kim Kardashian's, because our media is so focused on these celebrities and we have such access to their inner lives,” Leonard says. “Television disproportionately shows wealthy people. The more media we watch, the more substandard we feel by comparison.”

Can you learn to resist all this pressure to buy, buy, buy?

Sure.

Is it easy?

No. But you can do it, and I'll help you like I've helped many other people. It starts with developing an
awareness
of how you feel about material possessions and an
awareness
of the factors that influence your urge to shop.

“I live in Berkeley, California, where people wear clogs and flip-flops year-round,” says Leonard. “In Berkeley, my clogs feel totally fine. But when I'm in New York City, where the women have the
best
shoes, I get overwhelmed with this desire to buy shoes.” She used to think she actually needed new shoes in those moments, so she'd buy them. But now she realizes she's comparing herself to wealthier, glitzier people, so when she gets a case of shoe lust, she tells herself, “There's that thing happening again” rather than “Oh, I need new shoes.”

I love that line: “There's that thing happening again!” That is exactly the kind of awareness and insight I'm hoping you'll gain during the 6 weeks of this program. As you read this book, you'll have the chance to make these sorts of discoveries and gain a deeper understanding of your own motivations.

You've been manipulated for too long by clever marketing and the allure of owning more. However, with more stuff comes more stress, more demands to clean and care for objects, and more credit card statements with scary numbers—realities you might not have pictured while you were dreaming of all those “promises” this stuff would deliver!

Though marketing plays a substantial role in making you want more stuff, it's not the only factor driving you to add to your clutter.

Needless Acquisitions

That “promise” you see in your mind when you think about buying a new possession is just one of many thoughts you attach to objects. We also apply powerful emotions to the things we buy or receive as gifts. And once one of
these hard-hitting emotions gets attached to an item—even a cheap, ridiculous item you should
never
treasure—it surrounds the object like a magnetic field that sticks to you. Some examples:

You can't say no.
People express their love, their respect, and their admiration by giving
stuff
. You get married, you have a baby, or you move into a new home, and people will buy you things. When you simply invite people over for a meal, they'll bring you something. Even if it's just a bottle of wine, you have to make room for this gift somewhere.

You might tell your close friends and family members that you don't want all this stuff. But they're likely to blink nervously and think,
How can we express our love, respect, and admiration if we don't buy something for her? Anyway, she's just being polite. We'll keep buying her gifts
. Or you might feel like it's rude to tell people not to buy you gifts. You might think,
Why go to this hassle? Why not just accept the gift? I can always find room somewhere
.

You buy stuff for your family to show your affection.
On the other window open on my computer screen right now, I'm looking at two lists of customary anniversary gifts—traditional and modern. The traditional list starts with a paper gift on the first anniversary, then builds to gold on the 50th and diamond on the 60th. The modern list is front-loaded with more expensive stuff for the first 10 years of marriage, like china, appliances, silverware, and diamond jewelry (perhaps because so few stay married for 60 years?).

These lists suggest that society takes gift-giving seriously. Perhaps you've bought into it. Maybe you buy an anniversary gift for your spouse, as well as birthday gifts, holiday gifts, a Mother's or Father's Day gift, cheering-up gifts, and gifts “just because.” You buy stuff for your kids on important holidays, gifts for good behavior, gifts for good grades, gifts when they're sick, gifts because you feel guilty that you were impatient that time, and gifts because you want them to hug you.

This adds up to a lot of stuff over the year. It all takes up space in your house.
I can always find room somewhere,
you sigh.

You buy stuff to feel better.
How often are you fully and completely free of unpleasant sensations? You're well-rested and well-fed. You're not sleepy, hungry, or thirsty. Your mind is occupied, and you're not bored. You're happy. You're not annoyed with someone. You're not feeling bummed-out or worried about a work deadline. Nothing itches. You're thoroughly pleased and satisfied.

Such moments are rare. Usually
something
is bothering you, even just a
little. If you're like most people, the thing you can do to fix this problem—or at least distract yourself from it—is to buy something. Maybe you go to the vending machine for a pack of gum. Maybe you type in the first few letters of your favorite online retailer and the computer takes you the rest of the way there. Or you hop in the car and drive to the store, daydreaming the whole way.

These purchases that fix a momentary unpleasantness create a river of stuff that flows into our homes.
I can always find room somewhere
, you think, but you know you can't.

You're out of room.

But your house isn't overcluttered and out of room only because you bought and received too much stuff. It's also because you held on to stuff when it was no longer doing you any good or serving any real purpose. A whole other set of factors may lead you to do that. Let's take a look at them.

Cluttered Mindset

I'm not sure why we still make such a big deal about spring cleaning. Every February and March or so, reporters want to interview me for feature stories about new and improved ways you can clear out your house so it feels spring-fresh.

At one point, people actually
did
spring cleaning. The ritual originated in Europe hundreds of years ago, when winter snows finally receded and people could open up their stale, cramped, smoky hovels. The reason the concept of spring cleaning doesn't sit well with me is that:

Few people actually do it. They might open their windows (until it gets too hot and they turn on the air conditioner) and do some dusting. But few people make large-scale efforts to haul out clutter.

It reinforces the idea that cleaning/decluttering is a once-a-year event, when it should be an ongoing process.

Think about it. Over the course of an average week, do you bring more objects into your home than you take out? Society's attitudes about “clearing out” tend to be fairly indifferent and fleeting. For all the rituals we have in which buying things is expected—holidays, anniversaries, graduations—we don't really have customary times throughout the year when we take stuff out of our house. On the other hand, people's feelings about
keeping
their stuff are often numerous and powerful.

As a decluttering expert, the work I do sometimes overlaps with the efforts of researchers who study hoarding. As I'll explain in the next chapter, there are differences between people who are merely
heavily cluttered
and those who are
hoarders
. But they're not always far apart when it comes to specific attitudes. If you have too much stuff around your house, the factors that follow may help explain why.

You feel like it's your job to take care of these objects.
“Many individuals, whether they meet the criteria for hoarding disorder or not, keep objects from their childhood. Why do we hang on to mementos that may not be useful or monetarily valuable?” asks Kiara Timpano, PhD, a hoarding researcher at the University of Miami. “People have all sorts of reasons for saving things. Sometimes it's because of the potential for future usefulness, or perhaps you don't want to be wasteful. Sometimes people are emotionally attached to an object and will feel
responsible
for it.”

All these reasons for saving—including that sense of “I wouldn't want anything bad to happen to the object” or “If I'm going to get rid of it, I want to know that it's going to a good home”—are actually normal ways to feel about objects, she says. But
how strongly
you feel this way can make the difference between hoarding disorder and customary reasons for saving. It can also make the difference between a neat, streamlined home and a place that's chaotic and full of clutter.

Some people I've worked with talk about many of their possessions as if they were their pets or even their children. When they adopt this mindset, it becomes easy for them to claim that no one else could possibly care for these objects as well as they can. They get sad, upset, and even angry at the thought of these objects being neglected or unappreciated. Unless they're convinced (and they seldom are) that these objects are going to “a good home,” it's close to impossible for them to part with them.

The ex-journalist I worked with who saw her books as an extension of herself—“my babies,” as she called them—found it impossible to look at the books as anything other than living, breathing beings she was charged with nurturing and protecting.