After spending all day out at work whether in an office, a building site, a work vehicle or working outside, you would think coming home to Newbury should be a time to relax at the end of the day. However that couldn’t be further from the truth if your home is full of clutter making finding serenity quite impossible.

According to research by a leading psychologist, lots of clutter can make a significant difference to how you feel about your home, where you work and about your own self. Being surrounded by clutter can leave a person feeling; overwhelmed, stressed, anxious and depressed.

There are a number of reasons as to why so much mess can affect how a person feels:

1. Lots of mess can over stimulate the senses. Our eyes have more than enough to cope with from everyday life. When they have to deal with looking at piles of mess it can lead to sensory overload and  cause a person to feel exhausted and tired.
2. Your attention is taken up dealing with the clutter. If you’ve ever tried to work in a messy environment, your attention is taken up dealing with all the mess and not the real task in hand.
3.  Attempting to relax in a room full of mess becomes impossible. Instead of your brain being able to relax it is constantly thinking about all the mess it has to deal with. Eventually you feel the need to give in and get up and tidy the mess. At the end of that your day is gone and you are now physically tired to truly enjoy some quality downtime.
4. A perpetual mess tricks the brain into thinking that it hasn’t accomplished anything that day. It also makes you believe that you haven’t achieved enough as no matter how hard you have worked there is still so much you haven’t done. Leaving you without a sense of satisfaction or fulfilment.
5. You can waste a huge amount of time looking for things buried in a pile of mess. Minutes spent looking for; keys, wallet, mobile phone, a pen, an invoice or a cheque book,  can all add up. All the end of the day an hour or two can be lost just looking for things that should be easy to find.
6. An untidy house can lead to a feeling of guilt and embarrassment. It’s your job to tidy your own home and when visitors arrive an untidy house can leave you feeling ashamed and even lazy. It’s no surprise when you were a child that your mother always insisted that you tidy up your things in case an unexpected visitor arrived.
7. An open space and a tidy ship helps you to be more creative. It frees up your mind to think more freely, to be more creative and better at problem solving.
8. A feeling of tranquillity cannot be achieved in a messy environment. It’s also possible to feel anger due to having to deal with mess especially if it’s someone else’s mess. The mess becomes even harder to deal with especially after a long day of work. This is why parents can become very angry with children who won’t tidy up their own mess.

There is a strong correlation between clutter and changes to chemical imbalance in the brain due to clutter. This chemical imbalance can lead to stress. Women who live in a messy home have a higher level of the hormone “Cortisol”, which is directly related to stress. The next time you find yourself being unproductive then take a good look at your environment in your Newbury home and see what you could do to not only declutter your work space but also to unclutter your