3 Ways your Brain is Stopping you from Decluttering

Have you ever thought, "I'll declutter this whole room on Saturday..." only to find yourself knee-deep in shoes 2 hours in completely ready to cry and give up? Me too. Turns out our brains play tricks on us that are not always as useful as they are trying to be. Check out the video video below where I discuss the impact of Status Quo Bias, the Endowment Effect and the Planning Fallacy - three ways your brain stops you from doing important things… like decluttering.

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Bias 1: The Status Quo Bias

We have a preference for things to stay because this makes us feel safe. We want to have everything we need around us a home and to keep this ‘status quo’. It makes sense. But it also makes life harder - hard to clean, hard to avoid arguments with your family or with your partner. And so, while in one sense, it might be preferable to keep things as they are really it can really take a toll on your well being.

This is something we can overcome by changing the way we think. For example, you might be very used to seeing DVDs stacked by the TV - you used to watch them all the time. But now you have Netflix and Amazon Prime - there really is no need to keep them anymore.

The magic question: do you still have your DVDs because you like them and use them, or is it just because you’ve always had them?

Bias 2: The Endowment Effect

There is a weird affect caused by owning something, that just by the fact that it belongs to us means that we consider it to be of higher value - financially and emotionally. It was one of the things researched by a famous group of psychologists and economists in the 1980s-1990s and brought about a very interesting experiment. After splitting their participants into two groups, they offered plain mugs to one half. They asked the mug group how much they would sell the mug for, and the mugless group how much they would be willing to buy a mug for. They found a big discrepancy in price! This was replicated over and over again with different objects, leading them to conclude that there was an ownership bias to the price, or the value of something… just mere ownership. So how do we beat this one?

The trick here is to imagine the act of purchasing the item again - picture it on the shelf in the shop. Take it out of it’s normal context as part of your possessions and examine it for what it really is.

The magic question: If I saw this in a shop again today, would I buy it?

Declutter mugs psychology endowment effect

Bias 3: The Planning Fallacy

“I’ll get it alllllll done this weekend”… Narrator: “She did not”

This third weird brain quirk is something that even psychologists who know all about this still perform on a regular basis. It’s an overly positive bias as we look into the future. We're very, very optimistic about what we can achieve in the time we have, almost like putting the blinkers on and not thinking about all the other crazy stuff that has to go on in normal everyday life. You may have had the situation where it's half term break, the Christmas holidays or even lockdown and you think now is the time you’ve been waiting for to get everything done. Unfortunately, a few hours in you get overwhelmed having completely overestimated your energy and forgotten about all your daily responsibilities and distractions like calling mum or making dinner. It defeats you.

So this is where you can make a smarter plan - get a take away or cook up a big dinner the day before to take the pressure off. Get your family involved or call over a friend to help. Don’t declutter the same weekend as a birthday celebration (remember those…).

The magic question: What might put a spanner in my decluttering plan?