PEOPLE WHO HAVE A CLUTTER CHALLENGE

ARE STUPID OR LAZY

People who don’t struggle with clutter think it, even if they don’t say it (although a surprising number of people do say it out-loud!). If we’re not careful, we can start to believe it ourselves and think that there must be something wrong with us.

We’re not stupid, and we’re not lazy. I’ve worked with judges, teachers, solicitors, celebrities, footballers’ wives, successful business owners – all of whom could never be accused of being stupid or lazy.

Here are 7 reasons why this myth is a myth.

1. Overwhelm looks a lot like stupid

The definition of stupid is ‘showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense’.  That’s all stored in the Pre-frontal cortex logic and reason part of your brain, which gets switched off when you’re overwhelmed. When that happens, you make decisions based on emotions, not intelligence or common sense.

So, it stands to reason that when you’re overwhelmed you appear to be stupid, when in fact it’s simply that you can’t access your intelligence and common sense in the pre-frontal cortex, logic and reason part of your brain because it’s turned off.

2. Fear looks a lot like lazy

If you consciously or subconsciously know that clearing your clutter is going to require you to look at things in your clutter, remember uncomfortable events and memories. or relive the trauma that they trigger, that’s going to trigger fear and resistance. 

If you don’t know how to deal with your clutter and make decisions safely, if you don’t have appropriate support in place, any attempt to go through your clutter without the appropriate skills could even be considered a form of self-harm. You only need to watch one of those TV decluttering programmes to see the pain and trauma the clutterholic is experiencing to see this in action.

You resist and self-sabotage, procrastinate and appear lazy to the untrained eye. What you’re actually trying to do is to avoid reliving the trauma and feeling the fear you don’t know how to manage.

• First You need to Understand
• and Learn

You’re not stupid – you just need to understand WHY you have your clutter challenge, learn HOW to clear your clutter, learn HOW to make decisions safely, and learn HOW to stay clutter free Forever.

The only thing that makes you stupid is when you’re fulfilling Albert Einsteins Theory of Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

You don’t need to be intelligent to successfully clear your clutter Forever. You need to be open to making the time to learn a different way of dealing with it, and then ‘Do the Doing’.

4. Habits

I would estimate / guesstimate that the average age of my clients and members since I started Clutter Clearing is 65, with an age range of 40 – 80. By the time we get to the age of 65 – heck, by the time we’ve reached 40, we’ve got some pretty strong, deep, automatic habits of thinking and doing that we don’t even realise we have.

Our life experiences, both positive and negative, mean we’ve collected a lot of bias’, assumptions and habits of thinking and making decisions that are hard to break, especially when we don’t even realise we have them. We’ve tried and failed to deal with our clutter so many times that starting and giving up has become an automatic habit.

To break that giving up habit we must feel the resistance and work on our Journey anyway at least 66 times. That going to take patience, persistence.

5. It bothers us

People who think we are stupid or lazy because we have a clutter challenge don’t understand that if we were stupid or lazy, it wouldn’t bother us – but clearly it does because we haven’t given up, we’re on our Journey which isn’t easy, and we’re learning to deal with it differently.

The litmus test to find out if someone IS stupid or lazy about their clutter challenge, or indeed any life challenge or task, is to find out whether they are bothered about their clutter challenge and want to clear it. if it bothers them and frustrates them, they’re not stupid or lazy. It’s only when we start our Journey that we discover that actually, there’s more to clearing our clutter than simply learning how to get rid of it all. There’s the resistance, self-sabotage, old habits, fear, trauma and so much more that we need to learn how to deal with. Quite the opposite of stupid and lazy.

6. Don’t judge us by our clutter

Since I set up Clutter Clearing in 2001, I have worked with a lot of highly intelligent, successful people who could never be described as stupid or lazy. Yes, we struggle with our clutter. Yes, we need to learn how to deal with it. But don’t make a huge generalisation about us just because we struggle in one area of our lives.

7. We’re In-Time

Those of us who struggle with clutter are predominately in-time – we’re driven by our emotions, don’t like planning ahead, forget the past quickly, are impulsive, get easily distracted in the moment, and temporal discounting is our best friend by helping us to sabotage our attempts to get into a routine.

Clearing your clutter requires you to be persistent and consistent, doing a little and often, not something that comes naturally or easily to someone who struggles with clutter, which is why to others we look lazy because (in the past) we only did a lot with our clutter in short bursts (blitz’s) when we felt like it.

People who call us stupid or lazy have clearly never struggled with clutter themselves, so don’t take it personally. We all have our own ways of giving ourselves mental and emotional safety which, from other people’s perspectives may seem stupid or lazy. The difference is, things they do that provide them with mental and emotional safety in THEIR lives, just aren’t as visible to us as our physical clutter is to them.

You can clear your clutter fast, or you can clear your clutter forever, but you can’t clear your clutter forever, fast.

To find out how Clare can help you clear your clutter Forever, without the need for an expensive home visit, click here now: https://www.clutterclearing.net/clares-help-centre/