Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. All right, so I was looking through the topics that people have sent in the last few months, and I got a couple of them that are related that I'm going to address today because it's one of my favorite topics lately, and it totally relates to my New Year's resolution for 2025. Nina sent in the question, "Does a cluttered house contribute to weight gain, or does it also make it more difficult to stick to the Bright Lines and lose weight?" Someone told me that it does indirectly, of course, and Sarah wrote in and said," I'm doing a week's focus with my Gideon Games team. On the topic of decluttering our mind and environments, could you speak to a cluttered mind and space and how decluttering leads to clearer thinking or such? I find that the longer I'm Bright, I've been Bright now for two and a half years, the more I want to declutter my space, an organized space will hopefully encourage a more organized brain. I'll be clearer, more focused, and more energized. Anyway, any thoughts you have in a vlog would be much appreciated." Thank you, Nina and Sarah, for those thoughts.
I have been doing this. I have been so into this lately. I am decluttering 15 minutes a day, and I started it several months ago. I heard about this idea years ago. A friend of mine was doing, I think it's something called Fly Lady. I never looked into it myself, and I don't know whether it was cleaning 15 minutes a day or decluttering 15 minutes a day, but I think it was decluttering and my friend was all into it. It was really working for her. I've done 15 minutes a day on some other things. I tend to work the steps continuously, the 12 steps, and every year or two, I'm back on the fourth step, which is writing an inventory of your life, your struggles that you're having, just whatever comes out, you write. And I write for 15 minutes a day. When I'm working the fourth step, I do it steadily. I didn't use to my first fourth step when I was 20 years old, was done mostly through procrastinating for about six months, and then binging and writing in a frenzy the night before, I was supposed to meet with my sponsor and do the fifth step, which I don't recommend. It was a very stressful way to do my fourth step, and I've learned since then that slow and steady writing for 15 minutes a day is freeing. It's comforting, it's effective, and it's remarkable how much you can get done in 15 minutes a day.
So, I started decluttering for 15 minutes a day back in, let me see here. Here's a tracking sheet that I put together. During October and into November of 2024, I was focused on both decluttering and also using my red-light sauna. And as always, I put an X on the day if I did it, and I put a heart if I didn't do it. You can see I was pretty consistent for that stretch of time from October into November of 2024. And then I kept going the next month and I switched up my system. So, that decluttering was a yellow, sorry, decluttering was a pink X, and using my red-light sauna was an orange dot mainly. I stopped wanting to sauna every day. It felt like too much, too much time for one thing, but also just maybe dehydrating me a little bit, just I was worried about my electrolyte balance a little bit. I wanted to be sauna in three, four days a month, but then my sauna needed a new red-light panel or something and wasn't working, so I stopped doing that.
Anyway, you can see for this stretch of time, I was not nearly as consistent. I don't know. I don't know what percentage of the time for this 30-day challenge I succeeded, but it was like half or maybe even not quite half of the time. But yeah, it was a busy month, November. So, November into December, a lot was going on in my life then. And then when New Year's came, I had a 30-day challenge already set up to be decluttering for the month of January, and I was pretty consistent. And then I extended it all the way to finish the month of January because my New Year's resolution is to declutter for 15 minutes a day for 75% of the days of each month. So, I needed to track whether I got 75% of the days in January, and I did January 2025 ended, and I decluttered for 76% of the days. And you better believe I was tracking that, and I made sure to declutter for the last few days of the month in January so that I would not fall short of the 75% target.
So, what do I get out of decluttering? And what does the research show on a cluttered environment, a cluttered mind, et cetera. Research shows that it matters and it matters a lot. It matters both to our mood and our sense of well-being and happiness and calm versus stress, the sympathetic nervous system versus the parasympathetic nervous system. A tidy environment is conducive to rest, to relaxation, to parasympathetic nervous system, calmness, that rest and digest nervous system. A decluttered, tidy, clean environment is also conducive to happiness and well-being. So, there's a little strain of research in the positive psychology literature looking at how a pleasing environment that's not only clean and tidy, but also physically beautiful leads to an elevated mood. Some of the research in here is also around green space or even pictures of nature and how that elevates people's mood. What's around us in the physical environment absolutely impacts our well-being and our state of mind. A cluttered environment is stressful. It literally just jangles the nerves to be in an environment that is disordered and disrupted and messy and packed with stuff off, but it also affects cognition. It's distracting, and distractions impact cognition. So, they impact reaction time. They impact working memory capacity. They impact attentional focus. A distracted environment is harder to think in, it's harder to perform well in. If you're trying to get some work done in your office, just tidying up your desk would be a good first step. Try doing it for 15 minutes.
As to whether it can impact someone's Bright Line Eating? journey for all the reasons that I just said. It can. Of course, I once was working with someone, I was sponsoring her in a 12-step food program, who was a hoarder of a pretty extreme variety, like a pretty extreme form of hoarding. Her space was so packed with stuff that it impacted her ability to cook in her kitchen. She couldn't move around in her kitchen easily. She didn't have counter space to chop vegetables. She didn't have really much space to weigh her food, like when we started working together, she had to clear off a little tiny square of space to fit a digital food scale on, and she couldn't cook because the stove was cluttered with stuff and she just couldn't, couldn't, not cook. She could assemble meals in the kitchen, but then she would have nowhere really to eat. She had to clear off a chair and she had this one place to sit, but it was really difficult for her to just execute the functions of Bright Living from a nuts-and-bolts perspective. She did not stay Bright.
Now, I'm guessing that's not your circumstance, right? There's a bell curve for everything. I understand that she was several standard deviations apart from the mean in terms of the degree of clutter in her environment. But even smaller degrees of clutter in the environment can make it more difficult to execute. The actions of Bright Living, the habits are going to be easier to entrench and establish in an environment that's conducive to structure and order. I mean, it kind of makes sense. It's sort of like this phrase that my friend Sage Levine always says, and I'm sure she wasn't the first one to say it. I don't know who said this originally, but the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. There's a lot of truth to that. I mean, I don't think it's categorically true across the board in all circumstances, obviously, but you can learn a lot about someone from watching little slivers of their behavior. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And so, it kind of makes sense that it's going to be way harder to have order to your meal structure, to your daily structure, to your habits, to your morning routine, to your evening routine if you don't have order in the physical environment that you're trying to instantiate. All of that in the physical environment in a way is going to kind of energetically and physically leach its chaos into your time, into the way you spend your time into your food life, right?
So, what do you do if you want to do something about this? What if you feel more cluttered than you'd like to be, whether it's to a small degree or a large degree? What are you going to do about that? Well, there's the "Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up" approach. I like that book a lot. I've gotten a lot out of that book. She recommends doing it all at once, like set aside a week or two, several days, however long it's going to take and go through your whole house at once. You can read her book. There's a lot on YouTube and so forth about her method. She really advocates the one fell swoop approach. Do it all at once. If you're not going to do that, consider the Fly Lady approach and try the 15 minutes a day. What I did was I made a list with my daughter. My daughter Maya is 13, and she is really into this decluttering thing. As a matter of fact, she wishes we could spend all day decluttering. She's like, please, can we have a whole day to declutter? She's so adorable. So, we made a list together, a digital list in my phone that she can share. It's a Google list that she has access to as well. And we listed the spaces in our home that we wanted to declutter and we add to it because things occur to us that we didn't think of before, but things like the gift wrap paper area where the ribbons and the gift bags and the wrapping paper live, the medicine cabinet in the kitchen, the medicine cabinet in mommy and daddy's bedroom, the hall closet, the drawer in mommy's office that is stuffed with papers. The drawer in the kitchen, that was the catchall drawer that had the pens and the glue and the measuring tape and the paperclips, and it was a mess. That drawer just had all kinds of stuff in it. The kitchen cabinet with all kinds of cabinet and drawer with all kinds of baking goods and utensils and stuff like that. The back mudroom closet with boots and coats and all that stuff. You get the idea. On and on and on. All these areas, mommy's jewelry, etc. So, we made a list of all of these areas that we'd like to declutter, and then we tackle them one at a time. That drawer in the kitchen, that was such a mess. It took us, I think it just took us one session. Now, there were a couple of us going at it, and we sorted the pens and got a sheet of paper and used the pens. We threw out anything that didn't work. We probably threw out half to two-thirds of that drawer, and then we organized the rest and put it back in the drawer. We wiped down the surface before we put it back. So satisfying. And oh my gosh, the medicine cabinets. Here's the trick to organizing medicine cabinets, expiration dates, that stuff is expired, baby. It's expired. Our spices cabinet expired. We threw away two-thirds of our spices, like old yuck, dead, not delicious anymore. Get rid of it. It's so satisfying to throw out all this stuff that we don't need to own. Then just to throw, organize it again in a nice tidy fashion. We've been going and going.
Now you might say, how are you going to do this for a whole year? You don't have that many drawers, Susan. And it's true. I don't. Some areas have taken multiple days. I think the hall closet took us at least two days, maybe three at 15 minutes, a stretch. What I'm also doing for a lot of the days that I do my decluttering is I'm decluttering my email. And that I think is kind of what's going to keep me in the game for a whole year is digital decluttering. Some days I do my voicemails, and that'll be a whole 15-minute session just to get caught up on my voicemails. But the email situation, oh my goodness, I'm not down to, I've got two email accounts, my professional and my personal, and they're both overgrown weeds. I'm terrible with email. It's really one of my weaknesses as a human being, and I don't necessarily stress about it that much. I feel like society just sort of foisted this. I don't know. I want to be better at email, but it's well below being a moral good person to me is responding to email. I don't know, because you emailed me, doesn't mean that I have to email you back is kind of my philosophy, but I know that that's problematic, especially with certain workplace relationships where people need an answer about stuff.
Anyway, God bless me in my email. But yeah, email decluttering. Digital decluttering is going to keep me in business for the whole year because it keeps going, right? I'm working through the backlog, the old stuff, and then the new stuff just keeps on coming in the front. So yeah, so digital decluttering is a thing, and it counts as my 15 minutes. Sometimes I'll go get the Bright Line Eating mail and bring it in the house, and then it's been sitting on the counter for several hours or days. I'm terrible with mail as well. David opens the mail, God bless him, but the Bright Line Eating mail will be sitting there and it's clutter all of a sudden. I mean, I don't know how long envelopes have to sit on a counter before they're counted as clutter, but pretty quickly I'm like, oh, it's clutter. So, I start a 15-minute timer. I open the mail, I process it, I respond to people, I throw away the envelopes, boom, there's my 15 minutes of decluttering. The 15 minutes of decluttering often becomes just keeping up on stuff time, which is great, which is fair because that's stuff I avoid. I remember when David and I moved to Australia in 2003, we had to sell all the furniture in our house, and we downsized a full-size house down into the suitcase that we took on the plane. As we were going through our office, we had a reasonably small, like a 1400 square foot, three-bedroom, one bath house, and one of those three bedrooms was our shared office space, and the other was a guest room. And in that shared office space, David had been giving me the mail that was addressed to me putting it on my desk at that point, 2003, we'd been married for four years, I guess he didn't really realize that I don't really do anything with mail typically. When we moved and we had to sell my desk, there was this mail behind the desk that had fallen back there, and there was a check in there for some $500 for some such. It was expired. This check in, it was like had to be deposited by two years ago or something. He looked at me with this look of like?well, anyway, since then, David opens the mail in our family. But yeah, when I get the Bright Line Eating mail, he's not going to respond to some sweet, Bright Lifer? who sends me a thank you card, right? I've got to open that mail.
Anyway, yeah, decluttering, more decluttering. But I guess my point of telling you that story of that check that fell behind the desk is I'm not someone who keeps up on things. Normally, when I first stopped eating sugar and flour, my habit was to let my laundry accumulate until every last thing in my closet had been worn and was stinky and was on the floor in piles to the tune of seven loads of laundry worth. I would go three months without doing a load of laundry. It was disgusting. I would just start pulling clothes from the bottom of the pile thinking that, well, they'd been sitting there for long enough that they probably were clean. Now, I don't what they were aired out or something. I don't know what I was thinking, but that was my relationship with my physical environment. The dishes had piled up. I mean, if I hadn't been living with David, I would've basically become a hoarder myself, I think. And that was my food addiction. I mean, for sure. That's what that was. I really appreciate now having 15 minutes a day where I'm motivated to get that X on the calendar to just go handle some stuff that's lying around that needs to be handled. Sometimes it's physical decluttering and sometimes it's opening mail or going through email or something like that.
I highly recommend decluttering. I highly recommend it. It feels amazing. As I go through the bookshelf in my bedroom, the bookshelf in the living room, and I just get rid of stuff, I feel so much freer. I guess the last thing I'll say is that I use the Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up the Marie Kondo method of I get an object. what I'm asking myself is, does this bring me joy? Does this bring me joy? If my heart doesn't go "yes" to this object, I just get rid of it. I don't need to own anything that doesn't give me joy. I'm starting to have a really loving energetic relationship with the things that I own. I've chosen them and they feel me, cheese. I don't know if they feel me choosing them, but there's a positive energy exchange there that really enhances my well-being. It's amazing how less is more and more is less. Both are true, and getting rid of things is incredibly liberating, and it will help you stay bright. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
