New Beginnings

Decluttering your home is the key to overall wellness and a new start to a healthier lifestyle. According to Joshua Becker’s “How to Declutter Your Home,” there are 10 creative decluttering tips that you can use to get started:

1. Start with five minutes at a time. If you’re new to decluttering, you can slowly build momentum with just five minutes a day.
2. Give one item away each day. Doing this would remove 365 items every single year from your home. If you increased this to two per day, you would have given away 730 things you no longer needed.
3. Fill an entire trash bag. Get a trash bag and fill it as fast as you can with things you can donate to Goodwill.
4. Donate clothes you never wear. To identify them, simply hang all your clothes with hangers in the reverse direction. After wearing an item, face the hanger in the correct direction. Discard the clothes you never touched after a few months.
5. Create a decluttering checklist. It’s a lot easier to declutter when you have a visual representation of where you need to start. You can use our decluttering checklist.
6. Take the 12-12-12 challenge. Locate 12 items to throw away, 12 to donate and 12 to return to their proper home.
7. View your home as a first-time visitor. It’s easy to “forget” what your home looks like to a new visitor. Enter your home as if you’re visiting the home of a friend. Write down your first impression of how clean and organized the home is and make changes.
8. Take before and after photos of a small area. Choose one part of your home, like your kitchen counter, and take a photo of a small area. Quickly clean off the items in the photo and take an after photo. Once you see how your home could look, it becomes easier to start decluttering more of your home.
9. Get help from a friend. Have a friend or family member go through your home and suggest a handful of big items to throw away or give to someone else.
10. Use the four-box method. Get four boxes and label them: trash, give away, keep or re-locate. Enter any room in your home and place each item into one of the following boxes. Don’t skip a single item, no matter how insignificant you may think it is. This may take days, weeks or months, but it will help you see how many items you really own, and you’ll know exactly what to do with each item.

Each step taken will allow for a new beginning in your own home or space and a new breath of fresh air. The overall wellness that is gained will be greater once you have decluttered your living space and start over for a new beginning.

The Healthy Nurse Healthy New Jersey team encourages you to apply the tips above to clear away the old to make room for the new! Write to us at healthynurse@njsna.org for a chance to WIN a Healthy Nurse Holistic Self-Care Package. Let us know how you intend to make room for the NEW in 2021!

Kiki Magno and the Healthy Nurse Healthy New Jersey team

References:

Babauta, Leo 2020: zenhabits.net

Becker, Joshua 2020: becomingminimalist.com

Savoie, Gabrielle 2020: 28 Decluttering Tips That Actually Work (mydomaine.com)