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You're listening to The Decluttered Mom Podcast. A podcast built specifically for busy moms by a busy mom. I'm your host, Diana Rene, and in 2017, I had my second daughter, and it felt like I was literally drowning in my home. Okay, not literally. But I felt like I couldn't breathe with all of the stuff surrounding me. Over the next ten months, I got rid of approximately 70% of our household belongings, and I have never looked back. I kind of feel like I hacked the mom system, and I'm here to share all the tips, tricks, and encouragement. Let's listen to today's show. 

Welcome to the very first episode of 2024 of the Declutter Mom podcast. It sounds so weird to say that, especially because I am recording this in December of 2023, but it is January 2nd when this episode comes out of 2024. And I saw a meme on Instagram a couple of weeks ago that I shared to my stories and it was like did it hurt when you realized that 2019 was five years ago and you're still processing it and it's 2024? And I was like, oh my gosh, that's so accurate. The whole world has felt different. Time has felt different since 2020 and like 2019 felt like the last normal year and it's just bizarre. I could talk about that for like five hours, but that is not what we are here for today. Ps, even saying 2024, I had to stop myself. I stopped the recording and I was like wait, is it next year, 2024? I just feel like my brain cannot comprehend time, and I'm sure part of that is just all the holiday stuff, like all the holiday stuff at school, like all the extra stuff that we have to remember and all of the end of year things. And you know, I don't have to tell you how crazy it can get. And so even this week, my nine year old was like I feel like I don't even know what day it is Like. On Tuesday she's like it feels like a Friday and yesterday she's like it feels like Monday. And so I was like, girl, I get it, I 100% am there with you.

But what I want to talk to you about today I just want to be basically a bug in your ear while you're listening to me, of encouragement. I want to be an encourager to you today because I don't know where you are right now. I don't know where you are mentally. I don't know where you are with your home. I don't know where you are with your family? I don't. I don't know where you are, and I think that oftentimes we always automatically think that New Year's means like hope and excitement and something new and starting fresh. And while it can, it doesn't for a lot of people, and some years it does and some years it doesn't. And if you are in just an extra tough time, you're in a, you're in a tough chapter of your book right now. I just want to be here to encourage you and to remind you that we can take tiny little baby steps and we can start to feel hope and we can start to feel progress.

I'm speaking about our home specifically, but I think that that can translate to a lot of different areas of our life not all areas of our life, but when it comes to our home, you're likely feeling extra overwhelmed in it right now, because if you are like most families and if you have kids, then you probably have more stuff in your house right now than you did the majority of the year due to Christmas. Or if you don't celebrate Christmas, then that may be not your story and kind of where you are, but if you do celebrate Christmas and we have kind of like double whammy because we have Christmas and then we have both girls' birthdays within two weeks, so we get like everything for the whole year in like a two week time period and it's just. This is a time of year to feel overwhelmed when it comes to our home. If you have not gone through the whole decluttering and systemizing journey before, then, you likely already were feeling overwhelmed in your home and then you had this like avalanche of stuff come into your home over the last few weeks. On top of that, you probably maybe, maybe not I know this can be very controversial you may still have like holiday decorations up, and isn't it interesting how, like when you put like your Christmas tree up or other holiday decorations and it feels like it makes your space feel so different for a couple of days, and then you just get used to it and it's just like normal and it's just part of your space, and then by the time you take it out, like you're the room that you have the tree in looks ginormous.

You're like what? Let that be a sign of how decluttering can feel, because we often have stuff in our homes that is clutter that we don't even register anymore. Our brain our brain identifies it as something that's stressful because it's taking up space and it's making our space feel cluttered, which, if you're new to the podcast, there is scientific research that shows that, especially for women, when we perceive a space in our home to be cluttered, it raises our cortisol levels, which is our stress levels, and if you are not new to the podcast, you have heard me talk about that many times so you know that it's true. So, just for example, if we have like a stack of boxes from Amazon sitting by our front door and it's there for a week, your brain starts to just register that as like that's part of the house. Now that doesn't mean it doesn't register it as clutter, it just registers it as like you don't see it. Does that make sense? I hope I'm making sense, but often that is why that is exactly.

That's one of the reasons why I tell people that when they are decluttering, always take a before picture. You do want to take one anyway, because you want to have that before and after, because it'll help to show you like, if you feel like you're not making progress, it'll show you how much progress you're making. It also can like help push you as you are in parts of your home that you're making, you're feeling a little are a little harder. It can like help to bring back the momentum when you can look at the before and afters. But the main reason I really, really, really encourage people to take before pictures is because when you take a picture of a room let's say it's your family room, because that is where I am right now, so I'm staring at it.

If you take a picture of your family room and you look at it through the lens of the photo versus just looking at it with your eyes, you start to see things that you don't really notice when you're just looking at it with your eyes, because that's what you're used to, and the photo is kind of just showing you a different perspective. It sounds weird because it's the same thing, but I promise it works. It's showing you a different perspective of what is in the space and you start to say, hmm, hmm, that stack of Amazon boxes should not be there. So if you remove that, then that's going to open that corner up a lot, and so that is something that can be truly, truly beneficial for you as you are starting this decluttering journey, and this year, if you are, I hope you are, because there are so many benefits and we're going to have a series very soon on the podcast about how many benefits there are to decluttering and how it flows into other areas of your life. It's not just having like a tidier home, that it flows into your finances and to your relationships and to your parenting and to your just overall well being and to your productivity, like there are so many things in your life that decluttering helps with. So we're going to get into that in a series pretty soon here on the podcast. But for now let's just let's just say that decluttering. Decluttering can change so many things in your life for the better, for the positive, and so if you are going to start that journey, always take before pictures. So true to Diana brain style.

We are kicking off the new year with the first episode of me going on tangents, but I wanted to just encourage you in that you don't have to declutter and systemize and organize your entire home this week. You don't even have to do it this month. You can take baby steps and you are going to start seeing improvements. You're going to start seeing a change in your home and a different you're going to feel. You're going to start to feel different in your home when you start making these baby changes.

And there is a book that is it's probably one of my all time favorite books and I've talked about it before on Instagram. I'm sure I've talked about it before on my podcast Maybe someday I can get the author on but it's called atomic habits by James clear, and just read this book. It will help you so much because it really talks about how true habits are formed and how most ways of creating habits are like they just don't work. They don't work. And I mean we know that, right, we're in New Year, we are in the land of New Year's resolutions and we know that most of the time, new Year's resolutions don't work, and a big part of that is because we try to do really big things and we try to do them with Absolute perfection. I am a hundred percent guilty of this. You guys. I have gone through different phases of my life with all different types of goals and desires and New Year's resolutions that like by day seven, if I'm not doing it perfect, then like I might as well not do it. That's how just that, that's just how my brain thinks. And In this book I mean I can't paraphrase the entire book for you.

But the whole concept of Like just improving by one percent is discussed. And think about if you just improved your home and the feeling in your home and the systems in your home, if you just improved by one percent, even if you improve by one percent a month, but let's say, let's say we improved by one percent each week. That is I don't know the math, I should know the math, but I don't know the math. But it's a huge improvement by the end of the year because those tiny one percent changes. They are small enough that you can remain consistent with them and then over time You're just improving so much because you're constantly adding one percent and it's not like, okay, now you have to declutter your entire home in one week and then you have to implement 18 systems and you have to do them all perfectly on top of your normal full-time job and all your kids activities and Making sure that you have your meal plan done and making sure that you get the groceries in time and all of the normal Responsibilities you have. It's not gonna happen. It's, it's just not going to happen. So if you can start small and if you can take smaller actions, you are going to see big improvements and you're going to also. You're going to feel improvements along the way. It's not like you have to wait until the end of the year to feel those You're going to. If you're taking the correct type of actions, you're going to feel a difference along the way.

So I say that because I think we can get really overwhelmed in the new year and set these really lofty high goals for ourselves and then feel even crappier about ourselves in a couple weeks when things just haven't gone as planned. And so we do have and you heard about it at the beginning of this episode but we do have a five-day challenge right now happening. We're on day two. It's not too late to join. People join. We cut off registration on day four, so If you are hearing this after that, I'm sorry. We do have a free training for you otherwise, but we do allow people in through day three because we have found that's kind of the cutoff of when it becomes more overwhelming. But joining by day three absolutely works and we've had many people do that in the past.

But we just do one task a day for 15 minutes or less, and they're tasks that pack a big punch and they make you feel different in the space that you're working on. And again, it's just 15 minutes. We're not asking you to devote four hours in your new year every day. That's not realistic, it's going to frustrate you, it's going to overwhelm you and it's going to make you stop. It's going to kill your momentum and that is the last thing we want to do when we're talking about making the improvements in your home. And so if you want to join us, great. If you don't, that's okay too, but we are here if you want to, and the link is in the show notes below. But above all else, really, the goal of this episode today is just to remind you that, if the new year feels hopeless to you, if you're in a position or you're in a season of your life where just you're not even thinking about New Year's resolutions, you're just in survival mode, I just want you to know that I see you and I want you to know that it's okay and you don't have to take New Year's to be the time that you start to make those slow, baby step improvements in your life. 

It's a good time for a lot of people, because a lot of people are motivated by it. I am one of those people that is motivated by the New Year, like the fact that New Year's starts on Monday this year is like perfect for me because it's for my brain. It's like a fresh start plus a fresh start like amazing. So for me, that's really motivational to me and I have to be careful not to make too many like resolutions or goals at this time, because I am so motivated by the idea of New Year's and having a fresh start and that's great. It's a good thing for me. I have learned over the years how to set up my goals in a way that I'm not overextending myself or shooting too high, because then I know it will discourage me. So I enjoy the New Year aspect of it. 

But if you don't, that's okay. There's nothing, there's no law or rule written somewhere that you cannot make the changes that you want to make on February 17th, like you know what I mean, like it doesn't have to start now. So if you are in the season where you're just feeling really overwhelmed, you don't have to set these huge goals for yourself. You can either make those tiny changes that you you know the 1% that you're working towards or you can just coast right now and you can be in survival mode or you can just be like in a season where you are just doing the best that you can and adding anything else to your plate feels too overwhelming. So you're just gonna, you're just gonna go with the flow right now and that's okay.

But I want to make sure that that's not always right Like acknowledge that this is a season and it's not your forever. If you are in a really tough season right now, it's not your forever, just like. Just like it's going to rain some days and some seasons. It's gonna rain every freaking day, and then other seasons it's not gonna rain for three weeks. So remember that this is just a season and it doesn't mean that your entire 2024 is like done, like it's screwed because you can't figure out how to, in the first week of the new year, get to where you want to be.

This is a season. There is always room for growth in the future and sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is just take care of ourselves. It's just to take a breath and take care of ourselves and do the minimum that we need to be doing to just be Right. So this is not my normal new year like message. Normally I'm like, let's do it, let's go, but I just feel like there's so much and maybe it's because of the types of DMs I get on like honestly, a daily basis about just the overwhelm is higher than it has ever felt before. In so many aspects, I think, especially with I don't know. We're not going to go into all of the details of why or the theories of why, but I just think that the overwhelm factor is higher than it normally is right now.

And so I just want to speak to those who are feeling it. If you are not feeling it, if you are someone who's like you know what I'm in a season where I'm like ready to take action. I'm like at the point where I've hit this wall. I can't do it anymore. Like this house is driving me insane, then join us in the challenge. Anyone's welcome to join us in the challenge. But specifically if, like you are ready to make a change, then we are here and we are ready to help you do it in just 15 minutes a day.

So I hope this was helpful. I hope this was encouraging. I hope it was hopeful, because that's my intent with this episode and I'm excited for this year, you guys, with this podcast. We have so many things planned. It's going to be. It's going to be fun. This is going to be a big year, I think, for the podcast, because we have so much planned that we have not done before, and I'm excited to see how it plays out and how much we can help, because that's our goal. Our goal here is not for you to just listen to me like babble each week. My goal is for you to feel inspired, for you to feel hopeful and for you to have like specific, actionable things that you can go do that are going to help you in your home and your personal life and your motherhood and all of it. So happy New Year and we will see you next week.

Thanks for hanging out and listening to The Decluttered Mom Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world if you could write a review or share this episode with a friend or your Instagram stories, and if you're on Instagram, be sure to follow me at the dot decluttered dot mom and send me a DM to say hi.

I'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. I hope you'll come back next week and hang out with us again.