Is your Stuff making you feel worse?

Every once in a while I catch the show “Hoarding: Buried Alive“and on a couple of different episodes they’ve mentioned that the person has Fibromyalgia. It got me thinking about how we try to fill the void that Fibromyalgia puts in our lives. Fibro takes so many things away from us and we have to be really careful that the ways we choose to fill the voids that are left aren’t making us worse.

It’s easy to fill the void with things like shopping, it makes us feel good for the time we are doing it. We pick up that new (or used) item and we feel good. Then we bring it home and it becomes one more thing that fills up space. Eventually, our space becomes so cluttered that it causes us anxiety which just makes us feel worse. We are trading our long term health and sanity to feel better in the short term.

I’m not a big shopper but I do understand shopping therapy. It feels good to get something new, to find something that I think might make feel better. I do it, I shop online or sometimes I head to a store. My usuals are clothes or arts/crafts stuff. I like to paint and I have enough canvases to last me a year (if I started painting regularly again, which I haven’t been doing much of since I got sick). We love wine too and always have a ton of it in the house. Why? It’s not like we can drink more than a couple of bottles at a time. And books! I love books and they are everywhere. I’m no hoarder, my husband would ensure that wouldn’t happen. He can’t stand clutter (and honestly neither can I), but it doesn’t mean we don’t have stuff. Heck, there are times that I’d love to downsize our house just so we can’t have as much STUFF as we do have.

Do you collect stuff? Do you shop to feel better? Is your stuff making you feel worse? Take a look around your house, would you feel better, feel less anxious if you had less stuff? Perhaps it’s time to minimalize, to get rid of some stuff. Maybe have a yard sale before it gets too cold outside (make a little extra money to pay for all those damn meds). If you are like me and you love books, then you might want to check out Paperback Swap, and use it as a way to get rid of some of your extras (and at the same time get the opportunity to get some new ones you haven’t read).

Simplify your life. There’s a reason I keep my office door shut, it’s the one room even I don’t want to see. It makes me anxious to look at it. When I go in there, I just think about how bad I want to clean it up. How much paperwork I need to file, etc. I need to do those things, it would make me feel better to do them and I know it. But, it’s just one more thing on my “to do” list, so I avoid the room altogether until I feel good enough to deal with it. I’m working on getting rid of a few things I don’t know. I have a ton of books on Paperback Swap so that later I can get more books (when I’m ready to read them), and then I’ll trade those eventually too. I’m posting some things on Ebay. And a month or so ago, we put a about a half dozen boxes of stuff out by the side of the road (it was all gone in 2 days). I’m terrible about holding onto things, thinking “I’ll have a yard sale later” or “I’ll take it all to charity” and then it just piles up. In the end it doesn’t matter how you get rid of it, but it does feel better and much less stressful to finally get rid of it. Put it out by the road, or post it on Craiglist or FreeCycle and give the stuff a home, and give yourself a better, more simplified and less stressful life.