Let’s Go!
In this chapter you will begin your sorting and organizing sessions, applying what you learned in Chapter 5. You will also begin the task of learning how to let go of things that are keeping you from reaching your goals. Before we start, however, you need to take a moment and revisit your Practice Muscle. By now, you should have exercised your Practice Muscle enough so that you can work for 30 minutes at a stretch on sorting and removing things. If not, back up to Chapter 5 (page 58) and review the steps. You must get yourself to the point where you can work for 30 to 60 minutes each day. Unless you do, it is unlikely that you can achieve your goals. You can do it. It might help to review your goals and values to make sure they are consistent with the program. Go back to these every day as you spend time practicing sorting and letting go.
“For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned”—Benjamin Franklin
As you have no doubt discovered by now, letting go of your stuff can lead to distressing feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, guilt, and regret. Experiencing these emotions sometimes leads people to save possessions they should get rid of. To get control over your hoarding, you must learn to tolerate these feelings. In the same way that you strengthened your Practice Muscle, you can learn to tolerate these unpleasant emotions. All you need is practice. If you find them hindering your progress, start out getting rid of things that cause only mild distress and work your way up to more challenging types of items.
You may have already answered this question while you were learning about getting ready in the last chapter. If not, then you’ll want to think about beginning with a location that offers you several things. First, you want to start with someplace that will have an impact on your day-to-day life. This might be the entrance to your home, a hallway, kitchen, living room, and so forth. You want the clearing you do to be noticed every day and to allow you more freedom of movement and use of the space. Second, you might want to think a step or two ahead. Perhaps clearing a space on a table or couch would allow you to sit during sorting and letting-go sessions and would make the whole process easier. If all else fails in trying to find the best place to start, you can always just begin with the first place that catches your eye, or even wherever you are right now as you read this! Wherever you start, it is important to stick with it until the area is clear.
Avoid the trap of working on one area for a few minutes, then going to another area. Sticking with the area where you start until it is cleared will allow you to see the progress you have made and will go a long way toward keeping your motivation high.
Wherever you start, it is important to stick with it until the area is clear.
Once you’ve picked a place to start, you must pick a time. Pick a time during the day when you are at your best. Recall that Bill felt “sharper” in the mornings and selected mornings as his best time to work. Begin with a 30-minute session, and schedule one each day. What is most important at this point is that you stick to this schedule, regardless of how you feel or what else is going on in your life. That means giving this work highest priority. We can predict with some certainty that in the time leading up to your scheduled 30 minutes, all sorts of things will be going on that will make you want to put it off or not do it at all. Each of these things will seem legitimate, and a decision to put off your 30 minutes will seem perfectly reasonable. You must be ready to resist this tendency. It will be your major obstacle to making progress on this problem!
For your first sorting session, make sure you have the materials you need (see Chapter 9), especially your list of categories and locations. If you will be working with paper, have your filing categories and file folders handy.
Each sorting session should follow roughly the same procedure. You will pick something up in the area where you are working, and you will make three decisions about it, followed by an action (see Fig. 9.2):
Decision 1: Should I keep it or let go of it?
Decision 2: To what category does this thing belong?
Decision 3: Where should it go?
Action: Move the item to its final location.
Before reading any further, let’s try it. Pick up something, make these three decisions, and move the item to its final location.
OK, now how did it go? What were the complications? Write them here.
Complications:1. ____________________________________________________________
2. ____________________________________________________________
3. ____________________________________________________________
The complications you experienced with this sorting task are the things we will spend the most time on in the next few chapters. Solving these complications will require some creativity on your part. The more sorting and letting-go sessions you have, the easier this will get.
In the last chapter you learned how to prepare for and make the second and third decisions in the sorting/letting-go sessions. The first decision—whether or not to keep it—will be our focus for most of this chapter. Please remember that you are the one to make this decision. In this book we will not try to tell you what you should or should not keep; that decision is yours. We are more concerned with your ability to make that decision in such a way that you can achieve the goals you have laid out for yourself in Chapter 7.
Frequently we find that people who have trouble controlling their possessions keep things without thinking much about them. Recall from our previous chapters that this avoids the unpleasant experiences associated with getting rid of things. It’s easier just to keep it for a later time or “just in case” it might be needed later. To counteract this process, begin by picking up an item and simply describing aloud your thoughts about it. After you’ve spent a few minutes doing this, make a decision about whether to keep or let go of it. Try it now with any object that you can reach from where you sit.
As you do this, you may find that the decision becomes clear. After you’ve done this a few times, jot down the major themes or questions that helped you make that decision. Below are some examples that our clients have found helpful. Fill in the blanks with your own.
• How many do I already have, and is that enough?
• Do I have enough time to actually use, review, or read it?
• Have I used this in the past year?
• Do I have a specific plan to use this item within a reasonable timeframe?
• Does this fit with my own values and needs?
• How does this compare with the things I value highly?
• Does this seem important just because I’m looking at it now?
• Is it current?
• Is it of good quality, accurate, and/or reliable?
• Would I buy it again if I didn’t already own it?
• Do I really need it?
• Could I get it again if I found I really needed it?
• Do I have enough space for this?
• Will not having this help me solve my hoarding problem?
• ________________________________________________
• ________________________________________________
• ________________________________________________
• ________________________________________________
• ________________________________________________
You will find that refining the questions will speed up your decision-making. As you get more practice, you’ll be able to “zero in” on the specific questions that work best for you; then you won’t have to ask yourself every single one of our questions. Before going on, make the second and third decisions for the items you’ve practiced on and put them in their final location.
In addition to using the questions above, another way to gain control over what you keep is to establish a few simple rules for deciding what to keep and what to get rid of. For example, you might establish a rule for newspapers that if they are more than a week old, you will recycle them regardless of whether or not they have been read. For magazines, you might set the same rule at a month instead of a week. Or you might establish a rule for clothes that if you haven’t worn them or been able to fit into them for a year, they should be donated to a charity. Having these rules will greatly simplify your life, make your decisions much easier, and allow you to reach the goals you’ve laid out for yourself. Take a moment right now and write down a set of rules for keeping and getting rid of things. If you can’t figure out just the right rules, make a few guesses and use them for a week to see if they work for you. You can always adjust them. Even if you make mistakes and get rid of a few things you might regret, in the long run the loss will be worth it since you will discover what rules are best for you.
My Rules for Letting Go of Things1. ____________________________________________________________
2. ____________________________________________________________
3. ____________________________________________________________
4. ____________________________________________________________
5. ____________________________________________________________
6. ____________________________________________________________
You’ve probably had the experience of picking something up, trying to figure out whether to keep it, how long to keep it, where to put it, and so on—and in the end you just put it back where you found it. We’ve seen this phenomenon often enough in people’s attempts to clear their clutter that we refer to it as “churning.” Things are picked up and examined, but they simply go back onto the pile without any decisions being made about them. To try to get over this problem, we recommend the OHIO rule: “Only Handle It Once.” The idea is that once you pick something up, you should decide whether to keep or get rid of it, and if you keep it, you should put it away where it belongs and not back onto the pile. In reality, handling things only once is not always possible since the final destination for things may not be available. However, it is possible to reduce “churning” by making a decision and formulating a plan for where the object is to go in the meantime.
OHIO rule: “Only Handle It Once.”
There are two basic steps in effective decision-making. The first is to make a decision, and the second is to follow through with it. Once you have made a decision to keep or let go of a possession, it is critical that you follow through with the other decisions and the final action immediately. You may have experienced this as a complication with your first sorting task above. One of the most common problems in the homes of people with out-of-control clutter is that even after they make a decision to let go of something, it sits by the door or in the car for so long that the person no longer trusts his or her decision and has to think about it all over again before feeling comfortable letting go. If you make the decision to let go of something, you must decide on its category (to discard, recycle, donate, or sell), decide where it should go, and get it there right away. On the other hand, if you make a decision to keep something, it is equally important that you select its category and location using the plan you made in Chapter 9. Then, get that item to a destination that is out of the way and not contributing to the clutter. If your home is very cluttered, you’ll need to decide on an interim destination. The key is to move the item from the middle of the living area to an appropriate area that is out of the way.
If you’re like most people with hoarding problems, the process of sorting/removing stuff is going to be uncomfortable. You might have emotional reactions like sadness, anxiety, guilt, or anger. You might experience a lot of thoughts about responsibility, perfection, or identity. You might feel a sense of grief and loss that comes from excessive emotional attachment to possessions. Recognize that these reactions are all fine, and although they feel bad, none of them need to get in your way. Sometimes when we’re talking to people about hoarding, we get a question like, “But what am I supposed to do when I feel anxious?” Sometimes the best answer is: nothing. Sometimes your emotions just need to be tolerated, rather than fixed. A lot of the time our urge to “fix” our feelings comes from a worry that these feelings will stick around for a very long time, or that they will get worse and worse, or that they will cause our functioning to break down in some way. Often, these predictions aren’t accurate, as we’ll discuss below. So as you notice yourself feeling emotionally distressed, try acknowledging the feeling without acting on it. You can feel anxious, sad, or angry, and keep going.
So far in this chapter we have discussed strategies for improving the effectiveness of your sorting and letting-go decisions. Now we come to a much harder task: examining the basis for your decisions to save so many things. We cannot tell you which possessions you should keep and which ones you should get rid of. However, our experience with this problem has shown us that often, people’s beliefs about their things are out of sync with how they want to live, but these beliefs have never been closely examined or evaluated. In the next few chapters we will help you develop ways to examine these beliefs and make them more consistent with your goals and values in life. This is the part of your program that will be the most stressful and difficult, because to evaluate your beliefs, you have to experiment with getting rid of things you would not ordinarily discard. You will have to risk not having something when you need it, getting rid of things you like, and so forth.
The purpose of this experiment is not to get rid of your stuff or to declutter, but to learn what is most important to you and how to change your perspective about the things you own. We are suggesting that you become a scientist studying a very important subject: you. So what does a scientist actually do? Almost all scientific activities can be boiled down to two main steps. First, a scientist makes a prediction about something, like, “If I mix chemical X with chemical Y, the result will be an explosion.” Next, the scientist tests that prediction by actually doing the action to see if the prediction came true. So the scientist actually mixes chemical X with chemical Y to see whether the mixture explodes (in this case, for the scientist’s sake, we hope the prediction was not true!). So we’d like you to try the same process. First, you have to come up with a prediction, and second, you have to test it to see if the prediction comes true.
Let’s try a simple one. Pick something like a newspaper, magazine, piece of clothing you haven’t worn in years, an empty container, or anything of the sort. Write what it is in the space below. Now answer the following question: How would you feel if you let go of this thing? That means right now, before you’ve had a chance to read it, wear it, use it, and so forth. Write how you would feel on the line below. Also, try to rate how bad (distressing, depressing, anxiety-provoking, etc.) that would be on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 10 (unbearable).
What is the item you identified? ________________________
How would it feel to let go of this item? __________________
How bad would that feeling be? __________________ (0–10)
How long would it take to get over that feeling? __________________
What bad outcome would happen if you let go of the item? __________________
How difficult would it be for you to recover if that bad thing happened? __________________ (0–10)
You have just made several important predictions about your attachment to objects. We can now state the prediction as, “If I let go of this object, I will feel __________________,” “On a 10-point scale, the strength of my feeling will be __________________,” “It would take __________________ amount of time for me to get over that feeling,” “If I let go of this object, the following bad outcome will happen …,” and “If that bad thing happened, it would be __________________ (on a 10-point scale) difficult for me to recover.”
We asked Helen to try this exercise. Here’s what she wrote:
What item did you identify? Credit-card advertisement
How would it feel to let go of this item? Scary
How bad would that feeling be? (0–10) 9
How long would it take to get over that feeling? I would never get over it
What bad outcome would happen if you let go of the item?
I would need a new credit card and I wouldn’t have the right information.
How difficult would it be for you to recover if that bad thing happened? (0–10) 8
So, are you ready to test your predictions? Remember, to learn about your attachments to possessions, you are going to have to experience unpleasant things. This experiment will tell you whether your assumptions about how bad it would be are accurate. Put the item you’ve identified into the trash (or recycling, etc.) and get it out of the house so it is clear that getting rid of it is final. Do it right now before reading any further. Come back to this spot in the book.
I feel ________________________________________________.
My distress rating (0–10) is __________________.
Was it as bad as you expected? If you are like most people, you probably anticipated something worse than what actually happened. If it was as bad as you expected, or worse, the experience can lead you to examine these feelings more closely. Some of the approaches described in the next chapter can help. You might want to write down your observations about this experiment and what you have learned so far.
To complete the experiment, rate how you feel about getting rid of this object on the scale of 0 to 10 each day for the next week.
Day 1: ____ Day 2: ____ Day 3: ____ Day 4: ____
Day 5: ____ Day 6: ____ Day 7: ____
At the end of the week, give some thought to what this means. If you are no longer bothered by not having this thing, what does that tell you about your original attachment to it? If you are still upset about losing it, let’s examine those feelings closely as you read through the next few chapters.
One of the things we know about anxiety and distress, particularly of this sort, is that over time it goes away or lessens. You can use that process (which psychologists call “habituation”) to change the way you feel about your possessions. By simply putting up with the distress for a period of time, you start to feel better. The distress goes away, you become stronger, and you don’t feel as bad the next time. In fact, you can do this in a very structured way by creating a list or “hierarchy” of items to let go of that starts with easier items and works up to the hardest ones. Getting rid of the easiest items first builds up your tolerance and makes it easier when you get to the harder items later on. Try filling in this form and then start with the items lowest on the hierarchy.
Getting rid of the easiest items first builds up your tolerance and makes it easier when you get to the harder items later on.
With each sorting and letting-go session, you should be testing out your assumptions like a scientist. Testing-it-out exercises can be set up in all sorts of ways. The exercises you come up with should be guided by what you learned about yourself in Chapter 6. For instance, if a major reason you save newspapers is because you think you can’t afford to miss what was in them and that doing so will somehow change your life dramatically, check it out by throwing away a newspaper and keep track of how much it changed your life during the following week. Go over the results carefully to determine whether your life has changed dramatically for the worse.
Below is a form you can use to create your own testing-it-out exercises. Remember, the key here is that you are learning something about your relationship to the things you save and whether your beliefs about your things are really accurate.
Testing-It-Out Exercise for Letting Go1. Testing-it-out exercise to be completed: ____________________
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
2. What do you predict (are afraid) will happen? _______________
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
3. How strongly do you believe this will happen (0–100 percent)?
____________
4. Initial discomfort (0–10) ____________
5. What actually happened? _______________________________
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
6. Final discomfort (0—10) _____________
7. Did your predictions come true? _________________________
_______________________________________________________
8. What conclusions do you draw from this exercise? ____________
_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
To recap what we have covered in this chapter, your daily sorting and letting-go sessions should last at least 30 minutes. During that time you should apply what you have learned about organizing in Chapter 9, and making decisions, following through, and running experiments and exercises in this chapter. This will not always go smoothly. You will undoubtedly run into problems, mostly the “bad guys.” Learn how to cope with them in the next chapter.
Your daily sorting and letting-go sessions should last at least 30 minutes.
