Clutter

4 Emotions That Compound Clutter — and How to Overcome Them

Boredom, overwhelm, shame, anxiety — learn how to overcome these emotions that often interfere with staying organized.

By Michael A. Tompkins, Ph.D., ABPP, Updated on May 7, 2025
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 It’s easy to blame persistent clutter on poor organizational systems, busy schedules, and impulse purchases. But the truth is that emotions — big, difficult ones — help to create and intensify disorganized homes, cars, and offices. For people with ADHD and/or hoarding disorder (HD), these emotions often make it feel impossible to tackle clutter and stay organized.

From boredom to shame, here are the emotional states tangled up with decluttering, along with strategies to calm or circumvent these feelings so you can stay organized.

Unpacking the Emotional Web of Clutter: Disorganization Solutions

1. Shame

Does your disorganized home spark feelings of humiliation and inadequacy? Fear of rejection and criticism due to clutter are common, and they may be so overpowering that you feel driven to escape the task of decluttering and organizing, leaving the problem to grow.

Solution: Shift to self-compassion

Acknowledge your feelings of self-loathing and treat yourself with the same kindness that you would offer a friend in a similar situation. Keep on hand a few positive phrases that you can easily read when shame appears. Remember that no one is devoid of clutter, and that yours doesn’t define your worth. Recognizing and challenging your shame will open the door to taking small steps toward a more organized space.

[Read: Making Peace With Your Clutter]

2. Overwhelm

When organizing a cluttered space, how do you know when to start, take breaks, and call it a day? Executive function weaknesses, common in ADHD and hoarding disorder, make it difficult to identify the logical and explicit steps required to declutter and organize living and working environments. Often, the result is procrastination and task abandonment.

Solution: Grab a Hula Hoop

Lay a hula hoop over an area that needs organizing and commit to cleaning only the space within the hoop. Set a realistic amount of time to organize (preferably under 30 minutes). Don’t have a hula hoop? Use tape, string, shoelaces, or any other method to clearly mark the boundaries of your focus. By concentrating on a single area, you’ll see a more obvious transformation, which will help maintain motivation. Take it a step further by covering ancillary areas with bedsheets or drop cloths.

The key to reducing overwhelm is to break down tasks into manageable parts, whatever that looks like for you. That may mean setting timers and taking breaks, identifying specific to-do list tasks, and/or separating items to organize into a box that you can chip away at little by little.

3. Anxiety and Fear of Regret

When decluttering, do you become anxious about discarding items you may later want? You may have once regretted cleaning out an item of sentimental value, or something you ended up needing after all, and so you avoid making that mistake again by keeping everything. The fear of regret is often strong in individuals with HD, who believe that they cannot tolerate any remorse from unwisely discarding possessions.

Solution: Recognize that regret won’t last forever

Regret is an emotional state that, like all other emotions, passes with time. Chances are that you’ve felt regret before, but you don’t feel the same intensity of regret today as you did in the moment. You are more capable of tolerating and coping with difficult feelings and mistakes than you know.

[Get This Free Download: 22 Clutter-Busting Strategies for Adults with ADHD]

4. Boredom

Boredom is a catastrophic and even physically painful state for people with ADHD, who have steeper and higher mental effort hills to climb. Any task that requires lots of mental effort to initiate and sustain — like decluttering, organizing, and maintaining tidy systems — will be experienced as boring and aversive.

Solution: Gamify It!

  • Set a timer for a short period (e.g., 10-15 minutes) and see how much you can clean or declutter in that time. You can make it a race against the clock or try to beat your previous record.
  • Create a bingo card with different cleaning tasks in each square. Mark off tasks as you complete them and aim for a full row, column, or diagonal.
  • Turn cleaning into a scavenger hunt by making a list of specific items to find and put away.
  • Create an upbeat playlist and challenge yourself to finish your task list before it repeats.
  • Team up with a friend or family member and turn cleaning into a cooperative game.
  • Treat yourself to something you enjoy, like watching a movie or having a special snack, after finishing a certain number of organizing tasks.

How to Deal with Clutter Anxiety: Next Steps

The content for this article was derived from the ADDitude ADHD Experts webinar titled, “Clearing the Chaos: ADHD-Informed Strategies for Tackling Clutter and Hoarding” [Video Replay & Podcast #510] with Michael Tompkins, Ph.D., which was broadcast on June 18, 2024.

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