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Diana Rene: 0:06

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 10 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 another episode of The Decluttered Mom podcast.

Diana Rene: 0:53

I really wanted to talk today about something that I think can be a common myth when it comes to the decluttering slash minimalism world. If you really get into it on Instagram and you start going down a rabbit hole, there are probably, at this point, thousands of minimalism accounts that really focus on decluttering to a maximum level, to the minimalist level, and I think minimalism as a whole is left up to interpretation. You know, in many ways, I think maybe people describe it in different ways. How they believe it applies to them can be described in different ways, and that's, I think, a whole other conversation, but what I really want to talk about today is the idea of what happens when you declutter, and does it take away all of your stress and all of your worries and all of your troubles? Will you never have a problem again for the rest of your life if you declutter? Well, it might feel like it on Instagram when you start getting all of the reels from all of the minimalism accounts. It sometimes feels like they are saying that if you declutter, you will have a fantastic life, that you never are stressed ever again in life, and I think that's just not true, and I think that we can break this down a little bit further.

Diana Rene: 2:33

So, before someone declutters, they have all of the normal daily stressors of life, right, but they also have a home that is overwhelming them by itself. They have a home where they have too much stuff in it, probably way too much stuff in it. They have things in there that they really don't want, that they're not sure if they want, and things that they just aren't really sure what to do with, even if they wanted to get rid of them, and so the things stay. Or they feel so overwhelmed that they just don't have time to let go of anything, and so the things stay and I think over time things just build up and the next thing you know, it feels like your home is being overrun by just stuff. It feels like you can't breathe in your own home. It feels overwhelming, it feels suffocating, it causes tension, it creates less patience in yourself as a mom, as a wife, as a friend, as all of the above. It makes you feel rushed, it makes you feel stressed, and that is all a symptom of the home, right? Because when we have an environment that overwhelms us, we will naturally just be more overwhelmed.

Diana Rene: 3:47

And I know I've talked before about there has been a study about this, about how if a home has clutter in it, the woman that lives in the home will have higher cortisol levels because they perceive the clutter to be stressful. Their brain perceives clutter to be stressful and we're not going to get too much into that idea today. But when we have too much stuff in our home and we have too much clutter, it impacts our emotional state throughout the day, from the second we wake up until the second we fall asleep at night because we are surrounded by it, and it makes life harder and it makes it easier to lose things. It makes it more frustrating in the school mornings because you're running late for school and you can't find three different things that your daughter has to have at school today. So there's just all of these aspects, right, that clutter increases the amount of stress and it just makes life harder. So when we get rid of the clutter and we have not necessarily a Pinterest perfect, minimalist home, but we just have less stuff, we just have less items in our home taking over and causing all of that stress, then we are creating for ourselves an environment of a less stressful baseline.

Diana Rene: 5:14

And so the baseline is where I think the magic is. Does it mean that no one in your family is ever going to get sick again? No. Does it mean that you're never going to have any financial troubles in your future? No. Does it mean that you and your spouse will never get into an argument again? No. Does it mean that you're going to know how to perfectly parent your children for the rest of their lives? No, like you're human, right, you're going to still have human things. You're going to still have human issues. You're still going to have troubles. You're going to. You're still going to have stressful moments.

Diana Rene: 5:47

Like life is not going to magically be stress-free and problem-free, but you have that less stressful baseline and so you're able to deal with all of the things that life just naturally has for us. And we're able to approach it in a different way because we aren't coming at it from an already stressed out feeling, an already overwhelmed nervous system from our environment. It just makes the fight fair. It makes all of the problems that you have as a normal human and mom and friend and daughter, it makes all of those problems just those problems, and it doesn't exacerbate them or put them on steroids because we are already feeling so overwhelmed in our home and we are already feeling like everything is frustrating and your stress level isn't already high because of your environment. And so you're just able to deal with things easier, you're just able to get back to that baseline easier and you're not fighting an uphill battle when you don't have to be.

Diana Rene: 7:09

By having clutter, we are making it harder on ourselves to just live our daily lives and live all of the things that come up for us as humans. And it's not fair, right, we don't. It's not fair because we weren't really most of us were not raised to understand how to let go or how to have a simplified home. But we know that if we are able to do that, everything else just becomes a tiny bit easier, which, especially if you have a lot going on and there's a lot weighing on you and you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders even if we can just make it a little bit easier for you, it's going to feel like a really big breath of fresh air, right, and if we are able to get out of bed in the morning and know that we have that work deadline maybe we got into an argument with a friend last week that's still kind of bothering us. We know that your kid has a field trip today and they have to bring a specific shirt that they have to wear on the field trip.

Diana Rene: 8:25

Like when we have all of those things that we wake up knowing and there are potentially stressful or just things that we have to remember or problems that we're having in our life, if we're able to get up and we walk into our bathroom and the counters are clear and we know where that shirt is that she needs for her field trip and she's already put it on because we laid it out the night before, and we are able to walk downstairs and the kitchen is clean, there's nothing in the sink, the dishwasher is clean, ready to be unloaded, you already know what they're having for breakfast and where it is. All of those things are just going to make the problems that you're having throughout the day a little bit easier. You're coming at it from that less stressful baseline, and so that is where I really feel like the power of decluttering comes into play. It's something where no minimalism which I am not a minimalist, which again is another story for another day but minimalism and decluttering is not going to solve all of the problems in your life. It's just going to make it a little bit easier for you to live, to live your daily life and approach everything else that you have going on.

Diana Rene: 9:50

I hope this was helpful for you. I hope this was motivating or encouraging to get to that place. If you are not there and if you are there, it's just a good reminder of how much it can impact our daily life in a positive way. And if you're not there, that's okay. We have a free training for you in the show notes that's going to give you three steps you can take right now. That's going to help start you on that journey, to be able to be there and for me to help you through that.

Diana Rene: 10:19

So if you have any questions, as always, shoot me a DM on Instagram and I hope you have a great rest of your week. We'll see you next week on the podcast. 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 thedeclutteredmom 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.