When stuff becomes stressful it may be time to offload

Kirsty Mcluckie on zen and the art of decluttering

Are you losing sleep over how much stuff you own?

It is admittedly a very first world problem, but I can identify with those who are stressed by their own belongings.

A self storage company, Space Station, conducted a poll on the impact of our surroundings on our wellbeing recently and found that seven out of ten respondents feel stressed by clutter in their home.

The figures said that 62 per cent of us hold on to household items that we don’t need, and the average Brit has 71 unused possessions in their home.

Nationally, over half of the poll respondents feel they sleep better and over two thirds say they are more productive when they take a minimalist approach and are surrounded by less “stuff ”.

I can understand this and certainly having a home with surfaces free of correspondence, bits of someone’s homework, spare spectacles, dog leads, odd socks waiting for a match and other family detritus is a daily battle that I never seem to win.

But then, looking around my own home, I think that having only 71 items that you no longer use would be a luxury.

From the broken popcorn maker in the garage, which I’ve been meaning to see if I can fix, to the lacrosse stick in the hall – now warped and certainly unused since I left school several decades ago – it seems I might have a problem with letting things go.

Some items of course have sentimental value even if they aren’t much use.

The 20-year-old baby clothes neatly folded in the airing cupboard are not something I could chuck into landfill, and I might one day want to reread some of the books on the shelves, in boxes in the loft and gathering dust under the bed. But while I am nowhere near the poor unfortunates who feature in those voyeuristic hoarding programmes on TV, I recognise that I do have too much stuff, and it definitely has the potential to cause stress.

Interviewing people about to move house each week reveals that many people feel the same.

Those who have lived for decades in a family home find that getting the place ready for sale, and the required disencumbering it requires, can be the one thing that persuades them to put off selling for another year.

Space Station has helpfully offered tips to those of us who find it difficult to achieve calminducing minimalism however.

One point suggests that you don’t have to get rid of your belongings to achieve domestic zen, merely creating enough decent storage space and putting things out of sight will help.

Another suggests junking anything that you haven’t used in six months, the thinking being that if you haven’t missed them in that time, you are unlikely to.

I see the sense in this, but while it might take a couple of years, I’d certainly miss the fondue set buried somewhere in the back of the pan cupboard the next time the whim for a 1970s themed party hits me.

A third tip I certainly can’t contemplate however.

It suggests that with new technology coming to market every day, it’s easier than ever to digitise items that take up too much space in the home.

While I may be sentimentally attached to my books, the husband would be carried out of the house in a box before he let anyone do the same to his disorganised stacks of dusty vinyl records.