When I first started decluttering
When I first started my decluttering journey, I didn’t know I had ADHD. I just knew I was overwhelmed, exhausted, and buried under stuff that felt impossible to deal with.
Looking back now, I can see how ADHD shaped my clutter struggles:
- Impulse purchases for dopamine hits
- Half a dozen abandoned project piles at any given time
- Constantly misplaced things and had to rebuy them
- Struggled to figure out how to even start decluttering
- Every declutter decision felt like a mini panic attack
- Couldn’t stick to any decluttering method I tried
I thought I was just lazy and undisciplined, even though in reality I was trying very hard.
Life was hard, and clutter made it harder
I was going to school full-time, working three jobs, and dealing with physical and mental health problems. Rough is an understatement.
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.
The junk room of shame
My partner (B.) and I were living in a three-bedroom house that was about 1,500 square feet.
There was clutter everywhere, and we even had an entire room that we just called the “junk room.” It was like a junk drawer on steroids.
I can’t even tell you how many times I walked into that room intent on taking care of things only to immediately get overwhelmed and walk back out. There was too much visual noise and no obvious starting point, so my brain simply said no.
I kept the door shut and tried to ignore the shame I felt about not being able to handle something that seemed like it should be simple.
Clutter took over more than just my space
But shutting the door didn’t help. Unlike with physical things, “out of sight, out of mind” didn’t work on my guilt over what felt like a moral failing.
Eventually, the emotional weight of my clutter problems seeped into my relationships.
My cousin came by unexpectedly one day. I was living in the house she’d grown up in, and my dad and I had completely renovated it. She was excited to see what the place looked like now and wanted a tour.
I was so overwhelmed with shame and sheer panic at the thought of her seeing the house. It felt easier to break all social conventions and turn her away than invite her in.
At the time, I told myself it was no big deal. We’d catch up another day when I had sufficient warning and could panic clean the house to an acceptable level for visitors.
That never happened, though. She passed away not long after that and never got to see the glow-up of her childhood home or spend time with me.
It was devastating.
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 because I was too overwhelmed to do anything else.
It took another year or so before I finally committed to dealing with the clutter.
My first attempts to get control of the clutter
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 very confidently declared 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 shame or stress. Amazing!
So, I got to work.
Clean, organize, destroy, repeat
I spent countless hours trying to organize the junk room, but it never made much difference. No matter how many times I cleaned and organized, the mess somehow reassembled itself like the T-1000.
One day when I was knee deep in junk and once again failing to make any improvements, I had an epiphany:
I don’t need most of this stuff, so why am I spending so much time worrying about it and uselessly moving it from one pile to another?
I saw the problem but struggled to let things go
I managed to declutter the easiest stuff, like things that were broken or that I literally didn’t even know I had. But I found it really hard to get rid of the rest, despite my epic realization.
There was a surprising amount of emotion tied up in these things even though I never used them and didn’t even really want them.
I did a lot of rationalizing as I decluttered.
I might need this later. But this was expensive! My friend gave this to me, so I have to keep it. Any day now I’ll turn into someone who uses a bread maker.
And on and on.
A win brought some optimism
I definitely kept things I should have gotten rid of, but the room was a lot better than before.
It was a huge win, but in typical ADHD style, my brain gave me zero dopamine to celebrate this achievement (despite its earlier assertion that cleaning this room up was the key to inner peace and lifelong happiness).
Still, I had visual proof that I could make progress on the clutter, and I felt a tinge of optimism that maybe I could keep this momentum going.
A mindset change stopped new clutter from coming in
That first real attempt to declutter the junk room barely scratched the surface of the problem, but it was the catalyst I needed to start thinking about my stuff differently.
I started to change my mindset and habits slowly over time. (Like seriously, so slowly. I integrate changes at the pace of a sloth on Ambien.)
I didn’t realize the “why” behind my impulse purchases (dopamine seeking), but I did realize that the initial excitement of the buy wore off quickly and then I was left with clutter.
This helped me cut back on buying so much random stuff.
Even though I still hadn’t made huge progress decluttering, I managed to turn the tsunami of incoming clutter into a still-too-big-but-not-life-threatening size wave.
How I learned to declutter
The real turning point came when we had to move. Our next place was 686 square feet — less than half the space we had before.
The decluttering decisions were easier this time. Instead of the emotional weight of deciding I just didn’t want these things, I had a logical reason to back it up: There’s literally no room for all of this.
(Turns out “there is literally no room for this” is much easier for an ADHD brain to work with than an endless pile of emotional decisions to make.)
I was able to purge a lot of stuff.
Even though the keep/toss decisions came faster, I was still worried I might eventually regret getting rid of some things.
Regret? Don’t know her
But something amazing happened after about the second week of regularly dropping off boxes of stuff at the thrift store: I realized I couldn’t even remember what we’d gotten rid of.
I was shocked to realize this at first, but then I started to feel a little giddy. Maybe I could just let things go and it would be fine.
With each new donation we dropped off, I felt like I was holding my breath.
Would this be the box of stuff that I was actually going to regret getting rid of? But it never was. Every time we got rid of a box, I just felt calmer and lighter.
When we finally moved into the new apartment, I realized we definitely hadn’t gotten rid of enough stuff, but the clutter level still felt more manageable than it had in the house.
With some room to breathe and a bit of momentum from the downsize, I started to figure out how to declutter without needing the pressure of an imminent move to keep me focused and motivated.
From smaller to smallest
We decided we liked having a smaller space and living with fewer things. When it was time to move again, we picked a 440 square foot studio apartment 2,500 miles away.
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 declutter ruthlessly.
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. I estimate that we got rid of about 75% of our stuff in preparation for this move.
A system of sorts
There’s no way I could have done this in a healthy way if I hadn’t already built up confidence in my decluttering skills.
I would have been an emotional wreck and completely exhausted from the mental toll of all that decision making and fear of regret.
Thankfully, by this point I’d been decluttering regularly and had what I’ll generously describe as a system:
- Pick a room
- Sort stuff into 4 piles – keep, toss, donate, and “I can’t deal with this”
- Forget which pile is which halfway through and then have to resort
- Randomly run around the house putting things away
- Get distracted for 5 hours
- Run out of energy
- Step over messy piles of stuff for several days
- Finish decluttering
It wasn’t pretty, but I made progress with it.
When we settled into the new apartment with about 25% of our original belongings, it was amazing. This space is so much smaller than anywhere we lived before, but it feels much bigger.
We can find things easily. We have space to do our hobbies. Tidying up takes minutes, not hours. And there’s a night and day difference between coming home to the house with the junk room and coming home to our fully decluttered studio apartment.
I feel calm and happy at home now, and it’s my favorite place to be.
The new and improved ADHD decluttering method
Over the years, I naturally refined my decluttering method to make it more efficient.
When I found out I have ADHD, it made sense why the overall process worked for me and I found more opportunities to improve it further. Research about how ADHDers struggle to resist side quests helped me realize I should stay in one spot until I finish sorting through stuff.
That revelation immediately cut out step 4 (Randomly run around the house putting things away) and step 5 (Get distracted for 3 hours) from my early method.
Once I started building my process around how ADHD actually works, decluttering got so much better. Now it’s easier to start, stay on task, and finish before I get distracted or run out of steam.
Ready to start your decluttering journey? Here’s how to make it easier
Getting to this point was an emotional roller coaster. I started out overwhelmed and ashamed of my lack of discipline around clutter. Now I know why I struggled and why other people with ADHD struggle so much with clutter.
At this point, I’m not guessing anymore or trying random methods and hoping something sticks. I have a process that works with my brain, not against it.
If decluttering has always felt harder for you than it “should” be, there’s a reason for that. Most advice assumes you can stay focused, make decisions quickly, and follow through without getting overwhelmed or distracted.
That’s not how this works for a lot of us.
The method I created makes decluttering doable because it:
- reduces the number of decisions you have to make at once
- keeps you from bouncing between tasks
- makes it easier to actually finish what you start
If you want a step-by-step breakdown of the method, read How to Declutter When You Have ADHD: Use the Sort It Out Method. That’s where I walk through the full process and how to apply it in real life.
If you just want a simple way to get started today, grab the free Decluttering Checklist for ADHD Brains. It’s a quick-start guide you can follow when your brain is overwhelmed and you don’t know where to begin.
