Decluttering 101 for packrats

With the New Year just around the corner, it's spring cleaning time. Don't be surprised if rodents of various sizes scuttle out of your colleagues’ drawers. Most of us are guilty of keeping stuff 'just in case we need it later'. Before long our rooms and drawers in our workstations will be full of stuff that we are not even aware were there.

It may be difficult to part with items, such as gifts for example, that you may be sentimentally attached to. But if you are the kind of person who gets sentimentally attached to every greeting card, letter, photo or trinket you were given, and hold on to them for dear life, you are probably a packrat. Or you are probably one of those who are environmentally conscious, who feel guilty about not reusing items. This is all good until you run out of space or your living environment or workstation starts to look a little like ground zero of a nuke attack. Before long you could suffer a fate similar to the Bronx man, Patrice Moore who was buried alive in 2003 when tons of newspapers and magazines collapsed on him. He came out unscathed save for a leg injury.

By definition, a pack rat is a person who saves unnecessary objects or hoards things. The primal urge to be a packrat stems from the fear of being unable to provide for oneself or one’s family in the future. In more severe cases pack-ratting is referred to as hoarding. "Hoarding runs all the way from very mild to very extreme. The key is whether it interferes with your life," says Smith College US, psychologist and author of Stuff, Randy Frost. Severe manifestations of pack-ratting may be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, a form of anxiety disorder.

According to a University of California, Los Angeles study, compulsive hoarders display lower-than-normal levels of activity in an area of the limbic system, called the cingulate gyrus, which scientists believe contribute to impaired decision-making, attentional and other cognitive problems. For such compulsive hoarders deciding what to keep and what to throw away is next to impossible.

Pack-ratting may also be the result of an impoverished past. For example, kids whose parents have had trouble making ends meet can grow up to be pack rats. It may be a result of feeling distanced from parents while growing up. These individuals tend to associate 'things' with the love they were deprived of. Pack-ratting may also be a sign of insecurity, especially in volatile times, when familiar things have the capacity to keep one anchored. Take for example job insecurity; having familiar things around may be comfortable and to lose them could make one seem powerless. Scientists believe pack-ratting may also be genetic.

Genetic or psychological, cleaning is a daunting task for packrats especially if they are serious about decluttering their room or workstation instead of just shifting junk from one place to another. It's not easy being a packrat and it's even harder working or living with packrats. So, here are a few tips to curb that packrat nature in anticipation of the coming New Year.

The tried and tested method to letting go of useless items, recommended by pros, is to ask yourself when you used the particular item last and when you think you'll use it again. As a rule of thumb, toss whatever articles you haven't used in the past year and cannot imagine when you'll use again. If you are torn about tossing your beloved stuff in the dumpster, US psychologist, Dena Rabinowitz suggests putting them in a sealed box for six months to a year. If you don't use it during that time, you would have justified tossing it.

Don't keep your old toys in your parents' house if you don't know when you'll have kids of your own. Give it away and make some other poor kid happy. Another foolproof method is to take photographs of items you are sentimentally attached to. This way it'll be easier to toss the items because you’ll still have a photo to hold on to.?

Read and recycle all newspapers or periodicals weekly. Never keep more than two issues worth of newspapers lying around in the house. If you haven't read them by the time you get the next issue, you probably never would. If documents such as bills and letters need to be filed, do so on a daily basis. If you don't have enough drawers at home or work, try using boxes. Discarded A4 boxes work just fine and can be found in abundance in offices. If it makes things easier, you can even label them.

When you’re done with something, put it away immediately. Drop the clothes you take off in the laundry basket right away, don't leave them on the bed, couch, chair or even worse, on the floor. Make the phrase 'A place for everything and everything in its place' your motto. This way it'll be much easier to find what you want and you won't have anything unnecessary lying around. If a certain item doesn't have a proper place or home, it's easy for the items to become part of the clutter in the house or your workstation.

(Originally published in The Island. Retrieved from: https://archive.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=182140)