Mental health and wellness - more money, less weight and an organized life!

In a recent de-cluttering mood, I decided to clean out my wallet , amazing what you find in amongst all those receipts. I had a ticket I had purchased for a Lotto draw a few weeks ago, I took it to the newsagents and guess what? Yep it was a winner $30.65. So whilst this is not going to see me retiring on a tropical island, I did take it as a sign that I was on the right path.

Have you ever felt like the clutter in your house, office, workplace, wardrobe or garage was getting you down? How did it feel when you finally did something about it?  Did you have a sense of relief? Did you even feel lighter or happier? Sometimes we find ourselves feeling overwhelmed by the 'clutter' in our lives and this has an impact in ways we don't even imagine; it can even have an impact on our mental health and wellness.

I realized I had been feeling this sense of overwhelmed for a while and I was letting the mental list of de-cluttering jobs really weigh me down. One of my patterns is to take the 'all or nothing approach', where I won't or don't start until I have time to do the whole job. Now given that my life is pretty full and I wanted to sort through my whole house and garage this approach was not working so well for me, let's face it that would take me a substantial block of time. The outcome of this was that I just never got started, the clutter remained and so did the frustration.

Eventually I decided that even though my home would never have been seen by others as a mess, the toll it was taking on my own metal health and wellness was certainly not congruent with living an outrageously healthy life. I realized I needed to start breaking things down into smaller bite sized pieces, small tasks that I could accomplish in a short period of time and start to feel good about making progress.

The first thing I did was clean out my fridge and pantry - what a relief. I was embarrassed at all the out of date products we found in the pantry, which had to go in the bin, it felt so wasteful. As a result we have decided we will not keep too much in the pantry at all from now on. It is so nice to go to the pantry and be able to see what's in there. The fridge is a weekly task we do just before we go shopping it serves 2 purposes, firstly we  get rid of anything that needs to go and secondly we know what we already have and avoid buying more than we need.

The next task was the linen cupboard, I thought it would take me ages however it took very little time and I was able to donate our excess sheets and towels to a local charity for recycling. Each time I do one of these tasks I find myself going to open the cupboard just to look at how nice and neat it is, to be honest I often take other members of the family with me so they can admire my handy work, and get the clue to keep it tidy, I hope!
So how about taking a step by step approach to de-cluttering your life and, in doing so, improve your mental health and wellness. There is even some evidence to suggest that the clutter in our life may also contribute to holding onto clutter on our bodies - excess weight. How much more motivation do you need!