How your environment affects your well being

The dishes from last night litter the sink.

There are boxes on the floor from the day you moved a couple things from here to there, and they still need to be sorted and organized.

Your week has just begun but you already feel tired, cluttered. Your mind races back and forth from the items scattered around your house to the work you have to complete today.

You want to get rid of things but you have no idea where to start, or you already started and there are random boxes sitting around and you have no idea what to do now.

You feel cluttered and unclear on what you are doing and why you are doing it.

You aren’t alone.

This feeling is your well being short circuiting, and it isn’t because you didn’t get eight hours of sleep or eat your veggies. There’s another factor that plays into your mental and emotional well being: your environment.

Martin Seligman declared that “Well-being cannot exist just in your own head: well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships, and accomplishment [;] well being is the pursuit of how one feels in the context of their environment, relationships, and with themselves.”

Your environment, the clutter of your house or office, directly contributes to your well being. Yep, your racing mind isn’t just a result of that late-afternoon coffee. It’s a result of the chaos you are navigating in your physical environment.

KonMari—maybe you’ve heard of it—is Marie Kondo’s method to tidying up. Her method goes beyond bagging waste and clutter in our houses though. And it isn’t quite minimalism either. It a method that focuses on “curating items to design a life we love, whether that is with many items or just a few.”

In Marie Kondo’s method, she talks about a sensation called “spark joy,” and it’s about looking at items, sometimes feeling the objects, and determining which ones spark joy. Those jeans that you used to force yourself into may no longer spark joy. That one shirt may be a reminder of a past self and therefore not joyful. When we take out all of our belongings, it allows us to confront our attachments to them, and clearing them out is a symbolic way of letting those attachments go—even the emotional ones we didn’t realize we were avoiding.

Marie Kondo uses her method to tap into our deeper desires to create a life where our items bring joy. Do we want to host gatherings? Well, how can we arrange the objects in our houses to facilitate that? Does it mean the chairs are always arranged in a circular pattern? Does it mean there is a fire pit in the backyard? Does it mean the games that live in the closet under a box take a more prominent position?

Ashley Barber, a KonMari consultant in Houston, Texas, talks about how KonMari transformed her life. When Ashley—a fitness coach—discovered her workout clothes no longer sparked joy, this made her curious. That was the moment that not only allowed her to rearrange her house but also her profession.

While we oftentimes focus on the vegetables we eat, the exercise we do, and how much sleep we get, there are other factors impacting our well being and the way we show up in the world. One of those is the environment we live in, how it’s organized, and whether it is bringing us joy.

This spring rather than tossing everything in the trash can. We challenge you to go slow, envisioning the way you want to live your life.

Notice what sparks joy—that’s where you’ll find the magic.