When I first started my decluttering journey, I was overwhelmed, exhausted, and buried under stuff and guilt. I didn’t have a plan. I was just trying to survive one chaotic day at a time.
My partner and I were living in a three-bedroom house, and we had an entire room that we just called the “junk room.” It was like a junk drawer on mega-steroids. On top of this, we had clutter in every other part of the house.
The kitchen table was always buried, we kept re-buying things we already owned, and navigating the house felt like an obstacle course.
When clutter takes over more than just your space
My cousin came by unexpectedly one day, and I was too ashamed to invite her in. It felt easier to break all social conventions and turn her away than to let her see my house. At the time, I told myself it was no big deal. We’d catch up another day.
But we didn’t. She passed away less than a year later, and she never got the chance to step inside my home.
I wish I could say that moment changed everything for me, but it didn’t. I just packed the shame away in my mental junk drawer and kept going, too overwhelmed to do anything else.
Life was hard, and clutter made it harder
At the time, I was going to school full-time and working three jobs. I was dealing with physical and mental health problems. It was rough. If I had to give this period of my life a name, it would be my “doing my best and my best is not great” era (which was immediately preceded by my “girl, wtf” era).
Every time I walked in the door, I was overwhelmed by the chaos. It was not the relaxing haven I needed after fighting to survive out in the world all day.
Clean-clutter-panic-repeat
I spent countless hours trying to organize the junk room and the rest of the house, but it never made much difference. No matter how many times I cleaned and organized, the mess reassembled itself like the T-1000 in Terminator 2.
I was basically running an endless rotation of clean–clutter–panic–repeat. This was more or less the slogan for most of my decluttering journey.
Do you know how sometimes, when you’re overwhelmed by everything, your brain randomly decides that doing one specific thing will fix your entire life? (Just me?)
Well, my brain landed on the junk room. It declared — very confidently — that if I could just get that space under control, everything else would sort itself out. I’d feel calm and capable and live the rest of my life free of any and all stress. Amazing!
So, I got to work. At first, my game plan was to do my standard cleaning and organizing routine. I was deep into this process when I suddenly had an epiphany: I don’t need most of this stuff, so why am I spending so much time worrying about it, dusting it, and moving it to and fro?
I saw the problem, but I couldn’t let go (yet)
What happened next wasn’t some magical transformation. I decluttered some of the stuff, but I found that I couldn’t get rid of it all despite my epic realization.
Why letting go was still so hard
In hindsight, I think I was embarrassed that I’d accumulated so much junk and wasted so much money and time on it. Getting rid of it all was confirmation that I had indeed made a mistake, and I wasn’t ready to deal with the psychological weight of that.
Instead, I did some serious rationalizing about a lot of the clutter. What if I need this later? This was expensive, so I should keep it. What if my friend comes over and notices the gift she gave me isn’t here?
(Sound familiar? These are extremely common decluttering barriers)
I kept a lot of clutter, but the room was much more manageable, and I did feel lighter and less stressed.That experience taught me something: progress doesn’t always feel like transformation in the moment. Sometimes, it just feels like less stuck than yesterday, and that’s ok.
Downsizing in Phases
That lesson stuck with me, even if I didn’t act on it right away.
In fact, that first attempt to declutter the junk room barely scratched the surface. It took me years—literal years—to shift my mindset, change my habits, and slowly start letting go of what I didn’t truly want or need.
It happened in phases. Little decisions. Hard choices. Moments of clarity followed by months of “meh, good enough.”
How a smaller home forced a mindset shift
The real turning point came when we had to move. Our next place was 686 square feet, which meant we had to get serious about what actually mattered.
That move forced us to let go of a lot, and I was surprised to realize that I didn’t miss any of it. This made me a bit giddy, and it was the starting point for my mindset shift. I started slowly decluttering things we weren’t using.
Each time I dropped off a donation box, I worried that this would be the stuff I was actually going to regret getting rid of. But that regret never came. Every time, I just felt calmer and more comfortable in my home. It was awesome.
B. and I started talking about how nice is was living in a smaller space and how we didn’t miss the extra rooms or the extra stuff. When we decided to move again, it was to a 440 square foot studio apartment 2,500 miles away. My decluttering journey was going from metaphorical to literal.
Preparing for a ruthless declutter before the big move
A cross-country move is expensive, we were on a tight budget, and the new apartment was much smaller. These factors all added up to one obvious conclusion: We were going to have to ruthlessly declutter.
Every item had to survive this question to earn its place: Do I love or need this enough to pay to move it and then make space for it in a very tiny apartment?
The answer was an overwhelming “no” for most things. My guesstimate is that we got rid of about 75% of our stuff in preparation for this move.
We needed some extra money, so we listed as much stuff as possible on Facebook Marketplace. We did make some money, but the whole process was such a headache that I don’t recommend selling your clutter unless you’re broke AF like we were.
We used a U-Haul U-Box (95” x 56” x 83.5” = 257 cu. ft.) to ship most of our stuff to our new apartment and put essentials in our car. It was about $1,200 to ship the U-Box, and we made almost exactly that much selling our stuff.
That declutter was the most aggressive we’d ever done. It taught me a lot about what we truly needed and what we were only keeping out of habit, guilt, or “just in case” thinking.
What I learned from downsizing and living small
Downsizing wasn’t something I did on a whim. It was a process filled with trial and error, unexpected emotions, and a lot of growth. Living small has changed the way I think about space, stuff, and what I actually need to feel at home.
The tips below will help you learn how to start downsizing and decluttering when overwhelmed.
Downsizing lessons
These are some of the biggest lessons I learned while preparing for a major move on a tight deadline and drastically downsizing our home.
Selling clutter is stressful
Selling a ton of stuff on Facebook Marketplace / Craigslist / LetGo is an awful experience for an introvert. It’s full of canceled meetups, scammers, and people who aggressively demand you give them the item for free.
I don’t recommend doing this when you declutter unless you really need the money. We were broke, so it was a necessary evil. If you can afford to skip it, skip it.
Don’t try to declutter in one go
When we first decided to move, we started decluttering and selling items that same day. I was buzzing with motivation.
But after a few days of going full throttle, our house was a wreck. We couldn’t find anything, I felt claustrophobic from the stuff everywhere, and just walking down the hall was an extreme sport.
This is why I don’t recommend decluttering your whole space at once. It’s too much. You don’t want to run out of steam and then be left with a disaster zone. If you aren’t on a deadline, slow and steady is the way to go.
Decluttering is a skill that improves with practice
Decluttering gets easier the more you do it. When I first started, it was difficult parting with things. But what happens is you declutter and drop off your donations, and you start to realize that within a few days you don’t even remember what you got rid of or care that it’s gone.
The more you declutter, the more you reinforce this realization the easier it is to get rid of things next time.
It’s ok not to be ready to part with some stuff
I moved some of my stuff across the country — which cost me time, energy, and money — only to declutter it within a few months after the move.
Things like gifts from people I was moving away from, writing I’d done in high school and college, clothes my ideal self would wear but my present self didn’t feel comfortable in, they all made the move because I wasn’t ready to part with them at the time.
Don’t force yourself to get rid of things you truly aren’t ready to let go of yet. That kind of pressure often leads to regret and makes it harder to keep going.
Instead, declutter easier things (think: old papers, broken items, duplicates, the bread maker you haven’t used in a decade), and once you’ve got a stronger decluttering instinct, then review the tough items again.
Small space lessons
Small living has its own set of quirks and a bit of a learning curve. Here are a few things I’ve learned from living in 440 square feet since 2020.
Be open minded about where you store things
When you live in a small space, you will inevitably face a situation where you need to store something and it doesn’t fit in the “right” place. It’s fine to store things in weird places, especially if it’s backstock (i.e., not something you use regularly).
Here are a few weird-but-functional setups in our apartment:
- Costco boxes of diced tomatoes and chickpeas are under the sofa
- Air purifier filters live in the space between the bookcase and the wall
- Crochet yarn is in an over-the-door shoe organizer in the bathroom
- Off-season clothing is the “stuffing” in our living room pouf
Curate based on the space you have
I remember complaining to B. about how I couldn’t fit all my clothes in my closet even though I own way fewer clothes than everyone else I know. It felt unfair.
But it really doesn’t matter how much stuff you have in comparison to other people; it only matters how much stuff you have in comparison to the amount of space available to you. If you can’t make it work, you have too much.
You don’t need a lot of space to feel comfortable
My partner and I love our small studio apartment because we have the space to do everything we want to do (and we have a lot of hobbies!). This wasn’t true in our much larger three-bedroom house. It’s about how much stuff you have, not how many square feet.
Figure out the minimum amount you need of key items
Before the big move, we had so many bowls, plates, and coffee mugs. You’d think we were social butterflies hosting regular feasts, not two introverts who rarely have people over.
I genuinely can’t remember what my reasoning was for owning that many place settings. Now we have four of everything (except silverware), and it’s the perfect amount for us.
I’ve applied that same logic to other categories too, like towels, underwear, and workout clothes. The trick is to figure out how many you actually need based on how often you use them and how often you’re realistically willing to do laundry.
For things like clothes and towels, I recommend adding a cushion of 1-3 extra items to your base number. This covers “just in case” scenarios, like having to change socks because you stepped on the hairball your cat strategically left next to the bed.
Ready to start your own decluttering journey?
You don’t need a cross-country move to get motivated. You can start with one drawer. One shelf. One honest moment of, “Do I really need this?”
Decluttering is messy. Sometimes it’s emotional. Sometimes it’s boring. But over time, it gets easier. You start to feel more comfortable and relaxed in your home, and it takes away so much stress.
You’re going to be stunned at how much of the noise in your brain turned out to be from the clutter in your space. It’s so cliche but also so true: You really do feel like a weight’s been lifted when you declutter.
Eventually, you might even find that you love decluttering. That’s how it was for me. Now, getting rid of clutter is my #1 way to cheer myself up on a bad day. (If it’s a really bad day, decluttering + a glass of red wine works miracles for me.)
So start where you are. Clear one drawer. One bag. One shelf. And if you want a little extra help, grab my free checklist. It’s the same system I used many times before decluttering became automatic for me.
