Become Mindful to Improve Your Hoarding Problem

Today, let’s talk about what mindfulness can do to help you conquer your hoarding issues. I mentioned in my previous post how it took me decades to finally overcome a lot of my tendencies and put my hoarding ways behind me. When I became mindful, I could at last start living my Things Can Be Different way of life, which is so much more fun and healthy.

The Graveyard of Good Intentions

As I dug through my hoarded childhood home, I found plenty of abandoned file box organizers, filing cabinets with empty drawers, unused photo albums, and empty storage containers. Underneath the piles of paper and plastic bags, I also found a copy of “Clutter’s Last Stand.”

Our home was the graveyard of good intentions.

I spent years paving the road to hell with my own good intentions because I was blind to my habits. More importantly, I was ignorant of the reasons I had developed those habits in the first place.

Free Your Mind

Well, my dear, it comes down to mindfulness. If you’ve done any kind of meditation, you may be familiar with mindfulness. If you haven’t, it may sound like new-age nonsense to you.

Yet it works.

Mindfulness is a tool that can help with hoarding and other conditions such as OCD. In Can’t Just Stop: An Investigation of Compulsions, Sharon Begley writes:

“An alternative to drugs or ERP [exposure and response prevention] is one that many people with OCD find to be both more effective and more tolerable: mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Originally a meditation technique, mindfulness entails mentally stepping outside yourself and observing the contents of your mind, dispassionately and without judgment or emotion. The ‘cognitive therapy’ part refers to the essence of mindfulness, namely, evaluating your own thoughts.”

Mindfulness Helps You Tackle Tough Emotions

Dr. Robin Zasio also writes about mindfulness in The Hoarder in You: “Being mindful when decluttering will also help you recognize and disprove your own cognitive distortions, the ones that are keeping you in a cluttered state, both emotionally and physically.”

Zasio continues:

“The truth is our stuff can keep us stuck in the past, which robs us of our present. Avoiding things because you want to avoid the emotions that come up prevents you from moving on and achieving your goals of living a healthy, balanced life, both emotionally and physically.”

In other words, you are extremely uncomfortable dealing with the feelings that get stirred up when you try to get rid of an object. Maybe it makes you feel wasteful, or like a failure who can’t finish projects, or like an ungrateful child who doesn’t treasure family memories. The easiest way to sidestep those emotions is to not get rid of something. And that’s how you wind up with a hoard. 

When you practice being mindful, you get better and better at tackling those tough emotions. You can figure out the underlying reasons for those feelings and how they get triggered, and you can finally do something about it to make things better. Mindfulness gives you that power.

The Success of Mindfulness

Dr. Randy Frost and Dr. Gail Steketee, who I mentioned in an earlier post, developed a program of cognitive behavior therapy that involves teaching hoarders about hoarding, having them consider why they keep certain items, and getting them to talk about what prevents them from throwing things away. Therapy participants also practice sorting, get training in organizing and decision-making, and start with small goals like getting rid of an item before their next therapy session.

The hoarder becomes more mindful of her motivations “and starts to learn different, healthier ways of thinking about objects, about herself, and about her memories,” according to Begley.

In a study done by Frost and Steketee, 43 percent of the hoarders receiving treatment were “much” or “very much” improved after 3 months. After 26 more weeks of treatment, the percentage of hoarders who had improved had increased to 71 percent. Those are mighty impressive percentages, especially considering how pernicious a problem hoarding is and how tough it is to overcome.

Do you have your own routines to encourage mindfulness? Have a mindfulness practice or tip that you want to share? Please post it in the comments or drop me a line.

Hope and joy,

Rachel