Clutter Is Making Your Life Harder Than It Has To Be (Here's How I Let Go) | #178

If you have more stuff than space and a running feeling that the chaos is keeping you behind, this post is for you. In Daily Dose of Dawn #178, resilience coach Dawn Super shares her personal journey from borderline hoarder to minimalist — and the surprising truth she discovered along the way. The real reason we hold onto clutter isn't the stuff itself. It's the stories our brains tell us to justify keeping it. Here's how metacognition, a turkey baster, and imagining a house fire can help you finally clear the space — inside and out.

Watch the Video Here or Read the Script below

Is clutter making your life harder than it has to be? Do you have more stuff than space? Are you looking around all the time feeling like you're behind because of the chaos?

If that sounds like you and you want to think about this for a few minutes and you're interested in some strategies to help you overcome this hurdle in your life, welcome in to your daily dose of Dawn at Dawn — videos designed to expand your thinking.

I'm not a doctor or a mental health professional, but I am someone who was a borderline hoarder and became a minimalist. And I'm going to talk a little bit about what I went through to get here. And you can put that through the YOU filter and see what you can apply into your own life.

When you're able to do metacognition, thinking about your thinking, and you're able to do introspection — where you look inside yourself to see how you can do things differently — then that enables you to change behaviors that were shaped by trauma without looking at your trauma. So it's not "I keep these things because I have daddy issues." It's "I keep the thing because I feel like I might need it" and I've told myself this story that I might need it and I'm believing that story. And our brains can really jump through some serious hoops to reinforce our limiting beliefs.

And one of the ways this manifested for me is a story about a Christmas tree. We bought the tree and didn't realize we needed to take it straight home and get it into water. I don't remember what we did, but we were out for a while. So we put the tree in the stand and it was not collecting the water.

Okay. So that Thanksgiving, I had gone through my kitchen drawer and was getting rid of things I didn't need. And I had been making my turkey in a bag for the last several years. So I threw away my turkey baster. And now fast forward to December. I've got this tree that won't suck up water. So I need to get the water out of the tree stand. And how could I do that? With a turkey baster I didn't have.

This was over a decade ago now. And I did come up with another solution. But after that, when it came to deciding if I was going to keep something or not, my brain would reference stories like that. Oh yeah, even though it's something simple, when you get rid of it, that's when you need it most.

And looking back at the ridiculousness of that now — like you can get a turkey baster at the dollar store, it's not a hard to obtain item.

So if clutter is an issue for you and you're saying things like "I just don't have time to go through this stuff," then realize that you might be avoiding something. And one trick that I would do is tape up the box and stick it in the garage. And if I didn't touch it in a year, I just threw it out. And the harder that sounds to do, to just throw it out, the more attached to things you actually are.

And attachment to things isn't necessarily bad. I mean, we like our stuff. The question is, if you lost it all, would you still be okay? Like, how attached to it are you?

One of my clients said someone was going to help them go through their stuff, and they said, "Just let them go through without you." And they had a lot of fear over that. And one thing that really helps me is just imagining that all my stuff was lost in a fire. And it helps me detach from the item. Most items are completely replaceable. If they're photos, hopefully you've got digital copies and they're stored online somewhere.

But we can't take any of this stuff with us after this earthly experience. Like literally nothing comes with us. So all that stuff you have in storage, why? Start asking yourself, why do I need these things? I can't take them to the great beyond. So if I'm not using them and I can't give them to someone else to use, why keep them?

And when you have less things and you can see all your floors and your house is cleaner, your mind is more clear. You really start to see the true benefit to not keeping clutter.

Need more help with clutter? This one is powerful:

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