‘Put down the duster’: Decluttering trends causing stress, say experts

One week it’s an airport security tray filled with carefully tessellated items that represent the owner’s personality, the next it’s a curated fridge shelf decorated with fairy lights and flowers. But is this the acme – or the nadir - of the organising cult?

According to some, the trend has gone too far. We are cluttering our mental landscape with our decluttering schemes, say the experts – and when the Association of Professional Declutterers and Organisers tells you to put down the duster, you know you’ve been spoken to.

“The constant need to keep up with these decluttering and organisational trends is causing genuine mental and physical stress,” says Siân Pelleschi, the APDO president. “People are losing the ability, in some cases, to distinguish between a fad and a method that can benefit their life. They’re experiencing overwhelm and feelings of hopelessness thanks to all these different organisational trends and methods.”

So concerned is the APDO by our increasingly extreme striving for a minimalist, well-ordered exterior in the hope that it will lead to total inner happiness that it is devoting its National Organising Week to the theme “back to basics”.

“Our goal is to reduce pressure on people to achieve perfection by emphasising progress over perfection,” Pelleschi says. “We want to highlight the importance of focusing on basic needs and functions rather than aesthetic appeal.”

Decluttering and organising has been a thing since long before the Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo made it a bone fide trend in 2019. But it has now reached heights of unparalleled intensity. The TikTok hashtag #Cleantok has more than 110.4bn views. Never before have household perfectionists removed so many things from packages only to put them in other packages.

The team behind the new Clean and Tidy Home Show at London’s ExCel say the increase in passion for extreme tidiness has been exponential.

“Our event is a cleaning event and, while that might sound dull to some people, attendance has almost tripled in the three years we’ve been going, from 6,000 to an expected 16,000 this year,” says Michael Rossi, the show manager.

Interest in the event is stoked throughout the year by its Shine Squad of cleaning and tidying influencers, who boast a total of 9.5 million online followers.

“When I walk round the event I see joy on people’s faces,” Rossi says. “It’s a very depressing world we live in, and if organising a fridge gives you pleasure then go for it.”

J’Nae Phillips, senior trend analyst, fashion columnist and creator of the Fashion Tingz newsletter, says these curated visuals are “a way for individuals to express their creativity and values in spaces that might otherwise seem mundane”.

“Sharing images of aesthetic airport trays and meticulously organised fridges on social media isn’t about reducing one’s identity to simplistic snapshots,” she says.

“Instead of being reductive, these posts serve as micro-narratives in which we actively reconstruct and recontextualise our identities to align with contemporary trends where online presence is a significant extension of self.”

But Cassandra Jay, a psychologist and psychotherapist and founder of Empowered Life Planning, which specialises in organisation for busy women, says the plethora of increasingly extreme methods for simplifying our lives is causing more stress and overwhelm than joy and creativity.

“Throwing stuff out to this extent isn’t mindful,” she says. “Instead, the pressure to get rid of all our possessions and hone it down to one perfectly colour-coordinated airport box leads to burnout – and also people pretending that this is what they’ve achieved and who they are, which in turns leads to more stress and alienation.”

Chris Wootton, owner of Poppies Cleaning franchise, which was the first business to professionalise fridge cleaning in the UK, has seen thousands of fridges and organisation inside them over the past 44 years, also questions the authenticity of the photos. “While organised fridges offer benefits like reduced food waste and better management, the time and resources required to maintain such excessive order are often impractical for most people,” he says.

Georgina Burnett, a TV presenter and celebrity home stylist, also expresses concerns about the deceptive nature of social media.

“It is, to say the least, very odd that we now aspire to present our lives as being so simple that it can be defined by what fits into an airport tray,” she says. “How did we get to a place where we want to be so one-dimensional as these photos imply?”