Many have heard about hoarding and most people think that it only affects certain individuals, while most are safe and are not affected by any way. But in fact, hoarding is much more prevalent than people think. Consider your own surroundings at your home. Can you see something, which doesn’t need to be there? Like piled magazines, newspapers, notes. Maybe you have many pairs of shoes, from which you only ever wear three or four. What about items, which you’ve bought, but have never used? Almost all people would be at fault by now.
The problem of hoarding has to be dealt with, even if it is not that serious at the moment. The best way to deal with a certain issue is to prevent it from the get-go. And even if something doesn’t look as important right now, it may cause some headaches in the future. There is a recent example that can be given. We had to move some months ago and while Chicago is not the most hectic city in the world, we still had to plan accordingly. We found a nice moving company, planned everything, rented boxes to fill and when the time came to start pack we faced quite the situation. The boxes were more than enough, but we soon realized that many of them were filled with stuff we had not seen for years and barely used. Why would we ever want to take them with us in our new home? So many clothes and bed sheets had no use to us. Many other things we had to drop as well. It turned out that we didn’t even need so many boxes and our new home even felt kind of empty in the beginning as our closet was no longer filled with clutter.
And that is the big problem – clutter. Oftentimes we don’t think about stuff we bring home. We see a good deal at the store and buy something we may never even use. Not only is it pointless, but we actually don’t save any actual money, but actually even lose some. Then we also store so much amount of paper that we don’t need, that it may actually look overwhelming to deal with. Many magazines, which we will never read again, documents for items (warranty cards and such), which are way past their relevance, books that only gather dust and so on. Even notes that just pile up. So many things with which we don’t want to deal when they come up.
A good general advice would be to go around your home and look for things, which you have not used in a while. Check your wardrobe, the cabinets, your closet – everything that you don’t think will be useful, should just be tossed, gifted or donated. Many things, which are of no use to us, may be useful to others. Many clothes, which we won’t ever wear again, can actually be worn by people who need them. You get the overall idea.
Hoarding is an issue that is very common, but almost no one thinks about it. Yes, it is not the most serious thing in the world, it probably won’t harm you per se, but it hinders the management of your free space and even limits the use of certain things, which may be way more useful to other people. And even though it is sometimes hard to throw stuff, for which you have given your hard-earned cash, the reality is that you should look at it as liberating yourself and not losing even more money. Your whole mindset should be shifted in order to deal with the problem before it goes out of hand.