Judith Kolberg founded FileHeads, a professional organizing company, in 1989 and has been a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) since 1990. She formed the Institute for Challenging Disorganization and has served as its director for seven years.
Judith is the author of Conquering Chronic Disorganization, co-author with Dr. Kathleen Nadeau of ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life, and Organize for Disaster: Prepare Your Family and Your Home for Any Natural or Unnatural Disaster and Getting Organized in the Era of Endless.
Everything A Professional Organizer Needs to Know About Hoarding
Hoarding disorder has been included in the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders. How has your expertise in working with clients with hoarding disorder influenced your ideas about mental wellness?
I love that you use the term ‘mental wellness’ instead of ‘mental illness’. As an organizer, I’m convinced that good psychotherapy is essential to the mental wellness of a person who hoards. A safe place to talk about what kind of life one wants to lead, how the emotional issues of loss, trauma and grief interplay with excessive saving and acquisition, and handling stress are key. Psychotherapy via Zoom, online individual and group, on-site, and peer-led support would be really handy in many hoarding situations rather than in a clinical, office setting.
When working with a hoarding client or their family,
Conquering Chronic Disorganization
what is one common motivation obstacle and a strategy for overcoming it?
An obstacle to motivation is the fear of discarding the person’s possessions to the landfill. Reassurance that this will not be so is essential, but the age-old issue is will this promise backfire. Will the people charged with sorting and discarding and reducing the hoard be thwarted by “You said my stuff would not be thrown out?” If the person who hoards sees that there are good “pickers”, organizers who take the time to pull out the “good stuff” and load it into lots of clear, labelled containers that helps. Deciding on a specific individual recipient for the excess stuff also helps, as all the shoes go to my brother-in-law. Specific charities also help – all the stuffed animals to the Red Cross for children of natural disasters, all the pet stuff to the pet shelter, and all the unused toiletries to the women’s shelter. I take the time to discuss my entire process with the family.
As a speaker, author, and trainer, you’ve been helping clients and families learn
Organize for Disaster
strategies to help people with ADD and ADHD get better organized. In what ways have those strategies changed from when you started studying in this field to now?
The “how” has not changed much even though the “why” is better and better understood. I would say that providing strategies to cope with technology, devices, the Internet black hole, and digital distractions is the new frontier. Ironically, helping ADDers to use these very same things to their advantage is also new.
For those who are especially challenged with ADD, what 2 strategies are most effective?
Getting Organized in the Era of Endless
We have to get better, as organizers, at helping people with ADD manage their tasks and time. One strategy is for the organizer to be the time estimator. It’s great if that skill can be transferred and it often can by example, but there is no harm in the organizer actually being the person who helps the ADD client estimate how long a project or a task will take and accounting for it in scheduling. Another strategy is to think of creative ways for a person with ADD to capture tasks on the run. That might be post-it notes, voice mail notes, texting oneself, sending yourself emails, or using apps that convert voice to text or text to voice.
What has been your biggest personal challenge around chronic disorganization?
ADD Friendly ways to Organize your Life
My disorganization is centered on directions, getting from place A to place B without getting lost. I use voice GPS and that has been absolutely dreamy. I’m told directionality issues are part of my brand of dyslexia. Lots of little spatial challenges thwart me. I can’t for instance, look at my PowerPoint, advance the slides, and speak at the same time. I have to use index cards, even after all these years.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. She guides and supports you to be accountable for your time, to complete projects and to reach your goals. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
My guest blogger is Marianne Simmons a licensed therapist that has been working in her private practice for more than 15 years. In recent years, she has discovered her passion for blogging and educating people about the importance of mental well-being.
Have you ever had your home in such a mess that you don’t even know how to begin organizing it? Usually, our brains tend to shut down and convince us to procrastinate in this situation because we don’t want to deal with a task that seems too demanding. Even though we get over this feeling and get on with decluttering, we always seem to end up in the same situation a few months down the line. Although this seems like a somewhat stressful but essentially not harmful process, certain consequences arise if we keep repeating the same cycle. We’re here to discuss how clutter can affect your mental health.
Clutter makes you stressed out
One of the ways clutter can take its toll on your mental health is by causing stress. Stress can lead to many physical and mental diseases, and it would be best to reduce it to a minimum. Even if you’re not consistently spending your time in a cluttered home but have those all too familiar bursts of organizing about once a month, that might be just as harmful. If you leave your items lying around and they pile up, you’ll need to set aside the time that you probably don’t have to be able to deal with it, which may require multitasking. Unfortunately, multitasking leads to stress, so you’ll end up in the same spot as if you were living in a messy house.
Clutter brings more clutter
Living in messy and cluttered spaces does more than just cause stress. If you’re constantly surrounded by items you don’t have any use for, you’ll start to feel like your thoughts are cluttered as well. Mental clutter is a real thing – you can feel unable to process certain information, sometimes even crucial information. Your mind’s all over the place and your brain is tired. Not being able to focus, complete tasks and reach your goals can lead to mental health problems, depression or anxiety. Lack of concentration may lead to more life-threatening issues (e.g., if you’re not able to concentrate on your way to work, you could hurt yourself in traffic).
Unhealthy life choices
As you have probably heard a million times over, if your desk is clean and tidy, you’ll have a much better chance of doing your work efficiently and vice versa. The same principle applies to the ways clutter can affect your mental health. Many of your life’s aspects will inevitably suffer if you’re in a chaotic environment. Clutter can cause:
● Unhealthy eating habits
If you’re constantly surrounded by clutter, whether it’s in your kitchen or the rest of your home, you’re less likely to choose simple, healthy options. If the clutter affects your organizational skills, you’ll be more likely to order fast food since it’s more convenient, more rapid, and takes less effort.
● Sedentary lifestyle
Especially if you’re used to working out at home, you won’t want to do that surrounded by many random possessions. Cleaning up will motivate you to get up and do some exercises. There are many mental health benefits of exercise, which is why you want to try to stay active and keep your body moving. You’ll do yourself a great favour by staying active.
● Inability to get your choresdone
When it comes to your work and your ordinary chores, such as paying bills, doing the dishes, or getting your child to school, you’ll find it more challenging to get it done on time in a cluttered home. You’re likely to spend hours looking for random items like keys. By developing routines you spend less mental energy worrying about getting chores completed. You’ll have more time for activities that bring meaning to your life. When your life has meaning your mental wellness improves.
Memory
Clutter can affect your mental health long-term by slowly impacting your memory. Of course, this won’t necessarily happen to everyone, but it could. Are you willing to take the risk? Organizing doesn’t sound that bad if it’ll save the future you from this struggle of memory issues.
Lower self-image
Just as checking offchores from a list can make you feel organized and fulfilled, not doing it and living in a mess can lower your self-image. If you’re always planning on decluttering and organizing but never get to it, your brain will get a bit more disappointed each time you fail to follow through with the plans. Eventually, you’ll not only have lower self-esteem, but you’ll also be less likely to get up and do the thing you’re putting off. If you’re already in this loop, getting out of it takes a lot of patience. Set realistic and easily achievable chores for yourself and declutter your home a little every day. After a while, you’ll get back on track and make this a habit.
Effects your social life
If your home’s messy, you’ll not only lack the motivation to go and hang out, you also won’t want to invite your friends over. A great way to deal with too much clutter is to deliberately invite your friends to your home and use that as motivation to clean up.
Clutter heightens the risk of hoarding
If you don’t work on this problem and start to increase the mess in your home, clutter can become an obsession. If you notice that you’re starting to save specific items just for the sake of having more stuff, if you’re forming a sentimental connection with practical everyday objects, if your rooms can no longer be used for their primary purpose, make sure to seek out help.
Inability to throw away, recycle or donate belongings
Anxiety when parting with items
Difficulty organizing possessions
Embarrassment about the number of items you own
Fear of running out of or losing any of your possessions
Ways to improve your mental health
It’s important to continue taking small steps and improving your mental health, even if you still struggle with clutter. Bit by bit, you’ll be able to deal with this problem as well.
●Part with the items creating clutter
If you feel comfortable with it and it’s not causing you anxiety, try to part with any clutter that you own. Give it to a charity so other people can use it. Since we purchase many items, seasonal clearing can be done at any time not only spring and fall. Declutter frequently, it makes the task easier.
● Physical activity
Apart from decluttering and organizing your home, it would help if you also tried to stay active. It’ll do much more than keep you fit and be great for your body – it’ll increase the hormone of happiness in your body and significantly affect your mental health.
● Meditate
Just as much as physical clutter can take its toll on you, mental clutter can as well. Try to find at least five to ten minutes a day to enjoy the silence and clear out your head.
If you know that clutter can affect your mental health, you should take the necessary measures of precaution. Be regular with cleaning, and don’t hesitate to part with anything that no longer serves you. You’ll be surprised to see how much happiness a clutter-free life can bring.
In the comments let me know how clutter affects your life
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of physical activity to reduce clutter, in your home and office. She guides and supports you in managing your time. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
We no longer call it hoarding or call a person a hoarder. Now we refer to it as hoarding disorder and a person with a hoarding disorder. There is much more respect for the journey being travelled by the person with a hoarding disorder.
In Making Peace with the Things in Your by Cindy Glovinsky, she writes about the internal battles of guilt and shame and by making peace with those a person can make peace with their things. She talks about figuring out what is going on in the person’s life so they can figure out why they are doing what they are doing. Part I talks about assumptions, Part II looks at habits and feelings, Part III describes possible causes of dealing with things and solutions and Part IV looks at ways to detach oneself from automatic emotional responses that perpetuate cycles of clutter.
The Institute of Challenging Disorganization is a resource for many different types of organizational problems including hoarding disorder. They developed the ICD® Clutter-Hoarding Scale® that is based on five levels of clutter.
Clutter Image Rating
The Clutter Image Rating scale (with 9 levels/photos) was created by Dr. Randy Frost and Dr. Gail Steketee. They are experts in the field of hoarding. Their books are a good resource.
Offering Help
A lot of times a friend or family member will offer help. Too often the person thinks it would be better for the friend with a hoarding disorder to have a less cluttered space. The help is usually offered in a well-meaning manner. If the person with the hoarding disorder is not ready to change, progress will not be made or if some is made it will not be a lasting change. Talk to them about what they want and need. It may be to join a group for peer support in conquering their hoarding habits, working with a therapist or working with a Professional Organizer. The journey of changing habits and conquering shame is long but worth the time, energy and support you can give them.
Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments about your hoarding disorder journey.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of physical activity to reduce clutter, in your home and office. She guides and supports you in managing your time. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
For children of parents who hoard, the mess remains after their parents pass away.
Newsweek by Hannah R Buchdahl
“Greg Martin wasn’t sure what to expect when his mother died last May, forcing him to return to his childhood home for the first time in nearly 18 years. The house, located on a pleasant block in San Diego, had always been cluttered, but now it was virtually uninhabitable. “There were piles as tall as me, six feet or so,” Greg said. “Where there used to be floor, there were trails—a foot and a half high, so you’d be walking on stuff.” Greg was forced to navigate through piles of magazines, papers, and books, plastic bags filled with thrift-store purchases, expired medicine bottles and literally tons of clothes. The only “living space” was a small pocket by the front door, where his mother, a colorful and fiercely independent woman, had collapsed shortly before her death at the age of 83. Greg, who has taken a leave of absence from his job, expected that cleaning out the house would take six months. It’s now been eight—and counting.”
Relatives are forced to put grief on the back burner and the emotions that surface are usually anger, frustration, guilt and depression.
Books
This book can help you to better understand hoarding even if you are not a professional organizer.
Everything A Professional Organizer Needs to Know About Hoarding by Judith Kolberg
Clutter Scale
It can help to get information so you better understand the situation. You can download a clutter scale at https://www.challengingdisorganization.org/clutter-hoarding-scale-
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
Pile of misc items stored in an unorganized fashion in a room
Here is a good article on hoarding. Why do people like to live with so much stuff? There is no one easy answer. Some people feel it is part of a mental wellness issue and hoarding has been added to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Others feel it is a learned trait because they see it in families. Since people notice hoarding running in families they think it is a genetic trait. A person with a hoarding disorder once said to me, when the place was decluttered,” It feels like all my friends are gone.” Applying feelings of love and security to inanimate objects may also account for keeping stuff.
What is hoarding disorder?
Hoarding is not about being messy. Hoarding disorder is a persistent difficulty in discarding or parting with possessions because of a perceived need to save them. A person with hoarding disorder experiences distress at the thought of getting rid of the items regardless of the actual value of the items. Rooms and spaces become so cluttered that they cannot be used for their intended purpose. A person with a hoarding disorder won’t be able to sit at their table to eat, might not be able to sleep in their bed, may not be able to sit on their couch etc because they are filled with stuff. Hoarding disorder is a very complex issue. Seek out information and help to guide you through the process of letting go of things.
If you find yourself in this situation please contact me at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
Some people feel very anxious about missing some important news or information. They will save all kinds of articles, websites, reviews, newspapers etc. With digitizing information becoming so quick and easy now, many people are putting everything into their laptops, Dropbox, and cloud storage. Before you continue to save everything sort through it and keep what you need and love so you will be able to find it again on your device. If you have 11000 photos will you be able to share the one you want to find without becoming overwhelmed and frustrated? If you keep everything you will not be able to locate the information you want. Once again you will feel anxious. It started well worrying about missing out on information and it ends up with so much information it is useless. The anxiety is still there.
Read it and delete it
It is ok to forget things, in the past, you only remembered a few things that were important to you. Most things were forgotten.
File it so you can find it.
Make folders, files or date tabs so you can find things that you store. Delete duplicate and out of focus photos and file the best photos with a name on the picture. Use meaningful file names to help you set limits on the types of material you will store. Avoid file names like, to read, someday, when I have time, next month.
When it becomes obsolete delete it.
Your interests change, jobs change, where you live changes and the information you have collected is no longer relevant or of interest to you. You can search your files to find that type of information but that may take too much time, when you come across files that no longer interest you, delete them. It is ok. You are changing and growing and you are moving away from past interests. There are a lot more interesting things in your current life, you can let go of the 10 year old information holding you in the past and taking up your time. Look to the present and keep moving forward.
Avoid the temptation to save
Melinda Beck writes in the Wall Street Journal, “Nobody knows how many Americans have digital-hoarding issues … but the proliferation of devices, the explosion of information and the abundance of cheap storage have made it all too tempting for some people to amass emails, text messages, Word documents, Web pages, digital photos, computer games, music files, movies, home videos and entire TV seasons than they can ever use or keep track of.”
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. She guides and supports you to be accountable for your time, to complete projects and to reach your goals. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Here is a great article about living with the overwhelming need for stuff. If you have a hoarding disorder or live with someone who has a hoarding disorder this information may help you to better understand the situation.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
For children of parents with hoarding disorder, the mess remains after their parents pass away.
Newsweek By Hannah R Buchdahl Jan 26, 2011
Greg Martin wasn’t sure what to expect when his mother died last May, forcing him to return to his childhood home for the first time in nearly 18 years. The house, located on a pleasant block in San Diego, had always been cluttered, but now it was virtually uninhabitable. “There were piles as tall as me, six feet or so,” Greg said. “Where there used to be floor, there were trails—a foot and a half high, so you’d be walking on stuff.” Greg was forced to navigate through piles of magazines, papers, and books, plastic bags filled with thrift-store purchases, expired medicine bottles and literally tons of clothes. The only “living space” was a small pocket by the front door, where his mother, a colorful and fiercely independent woman, had collapsed shortly before her death at the age of 83. Greg, who has taken a leave of absence from his job, expected that cleaning out the house would take six months. It’s now been eight—and counting.
It’s a scenario that’s all too familiar to children of hoarders, who are burdened with far more than funeral arrangements, probate, and grief. They must also deal with the overwhelming piles of stuff that a parent with hoarding disorder accumulated over the years—in apartments, in houses, in storage facilities, and in garages. The items themselves may vary, but for many children of parents with hoarding disorder, the result is the same: the unwanted inheritance of a whole lot of nothing.
Greg Martin’s mother lived in this home until her death last year. (milbetweenus.blogspot.com)
The inclination to hoard typically begins in the teenage years, but experts say it can also be triggered—or made worse—by brain damage, a traumatic life event, or depression. As the people with hoarding disorder age, the piles grow, gradually eclipsing everything else in their lives.
“I’m dreading the day when the house needs to be cleaned out, more than I dread the day that they leave us,” laments Teresa C. of Winnipeg, Canada. Teresa, like several others interviewed for this story, did not want to give her last name because the hoarding is a source of tension in her family. For Teresa, inheriting her ageing parents’ hoard is a worry for the future.
Hoarding is an extremely complicated mental disorder that generally involves the acquisition of too many items, difficulty getting rid of items, and problems with organization and prioritization. Few statistics exist related to hoarding, because people with hoarding disorder rarely seek or accept treatment. But shows like Hoarders have certainly raised awareness and triggered a tidal wave of anecdotal evidence to suggest the illness, often associated with obsessive compulsive disorder, affects millions—either directly or indirectly. Support groups and message boards are flooded with stories about the once-secret life of a person with hoarding disorder and their families, and the constant battles to get the person to understand the impact their illness is having on their loved ones. That impact doesn’t end with their passing.
“Nine times out of 10, it’s not the person with hoarding disorder who suffers; it’s whoever comes after them to clean up,” says a very frustrated Bill L. of Colorado, who’s been working to clean his mother’s home, located in a different state, for almost five years. (She suffered a stroke and has since moved into assisted living.) It took a dozen people, and eight Dumpsters, to clear out the first floor. Still to go: the second floor, a large attic, a basement, a garage, and a storage locker that Bill says should be easy, but may not be.
Often, people with hoarding disorder are the only ones who know or understand their system of “organization,” keeping stock certificates amid expired receipts or diamonds amid a pile of junk jewelry. For survivors, the stress and strain related to the search itself may simply outweigh the potential of finding any objects with financial or sentimental value. Bill plans to return to his mother’s house soon with a professional cleanout crew. “That will mean forgetting about recovering anything of value,” he says, “including possible family heirlooms. If we tried to continue sifting the hoard, we’d still be at it 10 years later [and] we’d be jobless, homeless, and insane.”
Cory Chalmers, owner of California-based Steri-Clean, which provides help finding hoarding-remediation specialists around the globe, estimates a typical clean-up can range from $5,000 to $20,000 and beyond depending on the severity of the hoard, conditions inside the home, and regulations relating to the disposal of electronics and hazardous materials. His crews occasionally recover items of value that may help offset the cost of the cleanup. But more often than not, it’s a simple, yet massive case of quantity over quality. “Most of the elderly people with hoarding disorder we work with all say the same thing: they’re saving this because it all has use, ‘I want to give this to my son, and this to my daughter, and this to my grandchild. [But] no one wants that crap,” he says, not without sympathy. “What they see as this big investment to pass on is really a big stress on families and not even worth it. A lot of them don’t want it. They’d rather just walk away.”
Share where you found your best information on hoarding disorder.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of physical activity to reduce clutter, in your home and office. She guides and supports you in managing your time. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.