Your Brain Is Counting Everything on That Table

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Cleaning feels good because a crowded room keeps asking for your attention, and clearing it stops the asking. The research also has a catch: a little mess can help you think, and tidying can turn into a way to dodge the thing you meant to start.

This post is for education, not therapy. If clutter has taken over your home and you can't get out from under it, that's worth real support, not a blog post.

"I'll tidy up first. Then I'll start."

You've said it, or you know someone who has. Some people clean when life feels out of control. Others look at the pile on the table and can't make themselves begin.

Those two look like opposites. They run on the same system, pointed in opposite directions.

What a cluttered home did to measured stress

Researchers followed thirty working families with young children. Each parent walked through their own home with a camera, talking about it. The researchers analysed the words. Some parents described a home full of unfinished jobs and stuff with nowhere to go. Others described a place to rest.

Then the team tracked the parents' stress hormone, cortisol, over the following days. Normally it falls through the day. That downward slope is the healthy pattern.

In the wives whose words described a cluttered, unfinished home, the slope was flatter. That pattern is linked to worse health outcomes. Their low mood also climbed as the day went on. The wives who described a restful home showed the opposite.

The result held after the researchers accounted for how happy the marriages were and how anxious people were in general. So it isn't just that anxious people describe their homes badly. Something about the room itself showed up in the hormone.

It showed up in the wives, not the husbands. The researchers tie that to who feels responsible for the state of the room. Whoever feels responsible is the one carrying it.

Why a room can do that

Work in visual neuroscience suggests that things in your field of view compete with each other. Put several objects in front of the brain and they suppress each other's signal. Your attention can push back and pick one out, but pushing back costs something, and you only have so much of it.

A full table is a pile of small demands, all arriving at once, all day.

When a little mess wins

So tidy up and think better? Not exactly.

In a University of Minnesota study, people worked in either a tidy room or a messy one. They were asked to invent new uses for a ping-pong ball. Both rooms produced about the same number of ideas. But raters who didn't know where anyone had sat scored the messy-room ideas as more creative.

The tidy room had another effect. It made people more conventional. They gave more to charity and chose the apple over the chocolate far more often. In a smaller test, people in the tidy room picked the smoothie boost labelled "classic". People in the messy room picked the one labelled "new". The drink didn't change. The room changed which choice felt right.

So the useful question is which room you're in. Where you want to be calm and steady, keep it clear. Where you want to make something strange, a little mess may be doing you a favour.

Check yours. If you write in the evening and cook in the morning, your desk is where you want the strange ideas and your kitchen is where you want steady hands. Many of us have it the other way round, because the kitchen is the room guests see. That's tidying for an audience instead of for the work.

Why the stuff is still there

If a cluttered room costs this much, why is it still there? "I haven't got round to it" doesn't hold up. Nobody hasn't got round to something for four years.

Start with scale. The archaeologists who counted every object in those homes reported that American households hold more possessions than any society in recorded history. That's a volume of stuff that no home was built to hold. You can take the blame off yourself.

Then three quiet pulls keep each object in place:

Losing feels bigger than gaining. Think of something you haven't touched in two years and wouldn't buy again. Picture throwing it out. Feel that small resistance? Giving up something you own registers as a cost.
Sunk cost. You already paid for it. The money is gone either way, but the brain files the thing as still owing you something.
Ownership adds value. Researchers gave one group a university mug and asked what they'd sell it for. They asked another group what they'd pay for the same mug. The owners wanted roughly twice what the buyers offered.

Put together, anything that comes in gets a small bonus for being yours. Anything that might leave gets a small penalty. Nothing that cost money is allowed to be worthless. Under those three rules a house fills up on its own, one reasonable decision at a time.

The researchers also noticed that things arrive through a dozen doors: birthdays, sales, school, gifts, kindness. Almost nothing has a way out. It's a house with an inbox and no outbox.

And you stop seeing it. Attention is a filter, and anything that never changes gets filtered out. That's how you walk past the same pile for a month. You're not bad at seeing your own house. The filter is doing its job.

Three things to try

Photograph the room from where you sit. The picture is the same room, but it arrives as new information, and suddenly you can see it. Clear what's in that frame, not the whole house. The competition is in your eyeline, so that's where the return is.
Ask what the surface is for before you decide what deserves to be on it.
Run the avoidance check. After you've cleaned, is the hard thing easier to start? Or did cleaning become the hard thing you did instead? Tidying a desk for forty minutes to avoid a four-minute email gets you a clean desk and an unsent email. That's a very tidy way of not doing it.

If clutter leaves you stuck, try the check first. It takes ten seconds, and it tells you which side of the pile you're on.

Keep the three steps on your phone. The free guide for this video is on the way. Read the free guide

Credit where it's due: the photograph trick comes from Mia Danielle's video on what psychologists know about clutter.

Studies behind this post

Saxbe, D. E., and Repetti, R. (2010). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Vohs, K. D., et al. (2013). Psychological Science.
McMains, S., and Kastner, S. Visual competition work, Princeton.
Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J., and Thaler, R. The endowment effect mug experiment.

Tell us on YouTube

Which one are you? The person who cleans to cope, or the person who freezes in front of the pile? And which surface will you photograph first?

Read next: Are messy desks a sign of high IQ?