"Hoarding: When Too Much 'Stuff' Causes Grief"

Psychologists Randy Frost and Gail Steketee are featured on the latest episode of Fresh Air. Their book, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things is now available in hardback. Below are some excerpts fromt he Fresh Air website.

Some theorists have posited that people with hoarding tendencies form attachments to possessions instead of people. Erich Fromm claimed that a "hoarding orientation" leads to social withdrawal. Hoarders, he suggested, are remote and suspicious, preferring the company of objects to that of people. Indeed, for some people prone to acute social discomfort, possessions can be stable and comfortable companions. Irene, however, defied this categorization. She had a wide circle of friends, some of whom I met in the course of my work with her. They displayed a great deal of affection for her, and she for them. She had a quick wit and a well-developed sense of humor. It was easy to see why people liked her. She laughed readily and was often amused by the ironies of her plight. One day, as she pondered why she had saved a newspaper ad for new tires, she fell into gales of laughter when she noticed the headline: SAVE THIS AD. She was also quick to shed tears when she encountered something sentimental, such as a picture drawn by her son when he was a toddler.

I have met few people who are as interested in the world around them as Irene, though I later learned that this attribute is fairly common in people with hoarding problems. As she talked, I could see the way each of her things was connected to her and how they formed the fabric of her life. The advertisement for the tires led to a story about her car, which led to a story about her daughter wanting to drive, and so on. A piece of the hoarding puzzle seemed to be falling into place. Instead of replacing people with possessions, Irene was using possessions to make connections between people and to the world at large.

As we were soon to learn, the hoarding phenomenon is composed of a number of discrete factors, some well hidden and unexpected. But the most obvious factor was the simple problem of accumulation: from a scrap of paper with an unidentified and long-forgotten phone number on it to a broken vase purchased at a tag sale, Irene had great difficulty getting rid of things. The value she assigned to objects and the reasons she had for saving them were many and varied. Irene's beliefs about what should be saved seemed isolated from everything going on around her. She was truly baffled that her son and daughter didn't share her penchant for keeping things. One day, as she went through the mound on her kitchen table, she found instructions for one of her son's toys. "I'll put it here in this pile of your stuff, Eric," she told him when he got home from school. Eric immediately picked up the instructions, walked to the wastebasket, and threw them away. She stopped what she was doing, looking surprised. Eric saw her and responded angrily, "I don't need it. I know how it works." She didn't say anything. A few minutes later, she found a bookmark. "Oh, this has all the book award people on it. Do you want it, Eric? I'll put it in your pile."

* * *"Churning"

Irene's TV room, where she and her children spent most of their time, was just off the dining room. One chair was completely clear; no other sitting space was apparent. Videotapes were scattered about — hundreds of them. Most of them were recordings of TV specials Irene had taped so that she wouldn't lose the information they presented, but none of the tapes were labeled. She lamented that there were so many, but she had no plans to reduce her collection. On one side of the room was what appeared to be a couch, completely engulfed in papers. In fact, all that was visible was a pile of papers four feet high, extending about five feet out from the wall and running the length of the couch. A coffee table was also submerged beneath the pile. One small corner of the couch, about six inches wide, was clear. This was Irene's sorting spot. She reported that she sat there for at least three hours every day trying to sort through her papers, but the pile was growing steadily despite her efforts. We asked her if she would show us how she worked.

Irene began by picking out a newspaper clipping from the pile. It concerned drug use among teenagers and the importance of communication between parents and teens on this issue. The clipping was several months old. She said she intended to give it to her daughter as a way of initiating a conversation about drug use. However, since her daughter was away at school, she would have to wait until she got home. She said she would put it "here, on top of the pile, so I can see it and remember where it is." She then picked up a mailing from the telephone company offering a deal on long distance. She said she needed to read it to tell whether she could get a better price on her long-distance plan. She put it on top of the pile so that she could see it and wouldn't forget it.

She followed a similar logic with the third item, which also went on top of the pile. This process continued with a dozen more objects. The clipping about drug use was soon buried. For each item, she articulated a reason to save it and a justification for why it should go on top of the pile. Most of her reasons had to do with the intention to use the object. Her rationale was that if she put it away in a file or anywhere else, she would lose it and never find it again. The result of all this effort was that the papers in the pile got shuffled and those on the bottom moved to the top, but nothing was actually thrown away or moved to a more suitable location. We have seen this process so often among people who hoard that we have come to call it "churning."

The churning we saw in Irene's TV room was driven in part by something we'd found in our earlier studies of hoarding—a problem with making decisions. With each item Irene picked up, she failed to figure out which features were important and which were not, in the same way that she struggled to distinguish important from unimportant objects. Moreover, she thought of features and uses most of us wouldn't. When she picked up a cap to a pen, she reasoned that the cap could be used as a piece in a board game. She couldn't throw it out until we had talked through whether this was a reasonable and important purpose for the object. The same problem arose with a piece of junk mail from a mortgage company. She couldn't get rid of it until she figured out what was really important (or unimportant) about it. Sometimes she could decide to throw things away, but the effort it took was enormous. Often the effort was simply too much, and things went back on the pile.

* * *Most hoarders are capable of discarding things if they can convince themselves that the object will not be wasted, that it will go to a good home, or, as in this case, that the opportunity it presented is no longer available. But the amount of time and effort involved in attaining this certainty makes it impossible to keep up with the volume of stuff entering the home. Eventually, most hoarders give up and simply let the piles accumulate again. Irene could have called the number and perhaps realized the opportunity it presented was lost. Then she may have felt comfortable discarding the number, but she would have learned nothing about how to give up on opportunities that have passed her by. One goal of the experiment was to teach her how to tolerate uncertainty regarding unrealized opportunities. We talked some more about this, and she agreed to keep going with the experiment. She put the paper back in the recycling box but couldn't keep from glancing at it every few minutes. Each time she did, she reiterated her urge to make the call and how it would make her feel so much better. Finally, she said, "Having the paper in sight, it's like a beacon. It pulls my eyes and then my thoughts. I'm going to cover it up so I can't see it." She covered the paper and never brought it up again.

The more experiments like this she did, the more her thinking about things changed and her ability to make decisions improved. In the beginning, Irene could tolerate very little of the work I asked her to do. "Can we stop now?" she asked just five minutes into our first treatment session after she had discarded one scrap of paper. But Irene persevered and worked very hard for a year and a half to clear out her home. Each step brought her more of a normal life. When her kitchen table was cleared, she and her children started sitting down to eat together. When her whole kitchen was cleared, she resumed cooking, and it began to feel normal to be in an uncluttered room. By the time we stopped working with her, the majority of her home was virtually clutter-free.

As I got to know Irene, it became clear that she was a prototype. She possessed all the characteristics we had been observing in other hoarders: perfectionism, indecision, and powerful beliefs about and attachments to objects. Possessions played a role in her identity, leading her to preserve her history in things. She felt responsible for the well-being of objects, and they gave her a sense of comfort and safety. In addition, things represented opportunity and a chance to experience all that life had to offer.

Irene's recovery taught us a great deal about how these behaviors can change. Most significant was the fact that she made every decision about what to keep and what to discard. Such freedom might have been a license to do little. Yet Irene willingly challenged herself to experience the distress of discarding cherished possessions. Had she not done so, she would not have succeeded. Each possession held a story. Often just telling that story loosened her connection to it and allowed her to let it go.

Excerpted from Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. Copyright 2010 by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

"How a Pro Helps Tackle Clutter"

Another worthwhile article from the Wall Street Journal, this one by Andrea Peterson and Jennifer Merritt ("Law and Order: How a Pro Helps Tackle Clutter").

If you're aiming to organize a chaotic and cluttered home, the most dangerous place on earth may be the Container Store.

At least that is what some professional organizers say. That is because most people leave that Mecca of boxes, bins, shelves and hooks (The stores carry more than 50 different types of CD holders alone.) without much of a plan. Armed with good intentions and a host of shiny new products, they often end up with just as much of a jumble. And even more stuff.

"It is the biggest mistake people make," says Laura Leist, president of the National Association of Professional Organizers or NAPO, a trade group. "They think if they buy something to put their things in that is going to solve the problem." (A Container Store spokeswoman says store employees—who receive more than 240 hours of training on storage and organization—can guide customers into making the right decisions about products.)

The most important part of organizing is actually throwing stuff away or "purging," Ms. Leist says. And that is where professional organizers say they can often be the most help, by gently and tactfully encouraging people to get rid of superfluous stuff.

Fantasy Closets

We've all seen magazines showing freakishly organized homes: closets with precision-stacked linens; alphabetized spices; orderly toy cubbies and designated bill-paying stations. Glossy shots like these inspired four lifelong pack rats to get organized—with a little help.

Professional organizers were asked to tackle everything from a home-office overloaded with piles of paper to a closet stuffed to the ceiling with a melange of baby clothes (the kids are teenagers), school artwork and even an old mattress and box spring. Testers in varied living situations—from a two-story house in the Atlanta suburbs to a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y.—were enlisted to hire organizers in our hometowns.

In general, we were thrilled with the outcome and were amazed at how quickly we saw results. Forced to justify what we wanted to keep, we were able to be much more ruthless in our purging. (Though, one of our testers did resort to hiding some purge-worthy note cards from her organizer's eyes.) Our organizers kept us focused and on task, and definitely got their hands dirty, digging into the depths of closets and lugging bags of trash. So we were able to avoid what Ms. Leist says is the second biggest de-cluttering mistake: getting distracted and tackling multiple projects at once, never making much headway in any. All this hand-holding didn't come cheap. Our organizers charged between $75 and $100 an hour (for a two-person team). We also ended up shelling out more money—one tester spent $400—for new storage items that our organizers recommended, but the experts we worked with were sensitive to our budget concerns. Two of our organizers came to our homes for an initial consult and then returned for the actual organizing-an approach that seemed to yield the best results.

Anyone can call himself or herself a professional organizer, though those with the designation of "Certified Professional Organizer" have passed an exam and have a minimum of 1,250 to 1,500 hours of hands-on work with clients. All of the organizers we worked with belonged to NAPO (Organizers are searchable by zip code at napo.net.) We also checked references from previous clients.

In Brooklyn, we found Amanda Wiss of Urban Clarity through word of mouth. We wanted help with an entryway cluttered with shoes, coats, newspapers and baby gear and two front closets that were packed so tightly we could barely open the doors. After an initial consult, Ms. Wiss sent us an email with a shopping list of low-cost storage items to buy from the Container Store (A great place when you have a plan.) When she returned for four hours of actual organizing, Ms. Wiss had us take everything out of the closets and put items into four piles: one for trash, one for things we wanted to donate or sell, one for storage and one for items we'd keep in the apartment.

'Delayed Decision-Making'

She had a terrific solution for our biggest eyesore: the mounds of paper, books and other clutter that marred our beautiful six-foot-long dining room table (and often barely left us enough room to fit two dinner plates.) She had us buy an attractive "in-box" for the day's newspaper and mail and create a "project" shelf in one of our nearby bookcases to house the magazines we were saving to peruse later, travel books for an upcoming trip to Italy and novels we're reading. "Clutter is just delayed decision-making," she says. And the best part is that we've been able to maintain the systems she put in place: Weeks after her visit, we're still clutter free ... relatively.

In Los Angeles, we hired Regina Lark of A Clear Path to tackle a room in a four-bedroom house that does double duty as a home office and guest room. Ms. Lark, who has a doctorate in history, started off by asking, "What's driving you crazy?" While she had us sorting through and purging the mounds of paper on and in our desks, Ms. Lark went through a closet stuffed with photo albums, stationery and office supplies. She had some novel ideas for how to deal with the deluge of memorabilia a family of four had acquired, including a poster the 13-year-old twins had made: Instead of letting it take up space in the closet, we should "take a picture of it and put it on your desk," she says. She also recommended that we "Keep one thing that is representative of a time period, like a picture or letter," instead of several mementos that will just collect dust and create clutter.

In Manhattan, we wanted help setting up after a move to a new, bigger apartment. We settled on In Order to Succeed because the company specializes in relocations. When Robin Reid Hunt arrived for a four-hour session she toured our seven-room apartment and immediately went to work making suggestions; adding hooks in the hallway for coats (so we could reform our prior habit of tossing coats on dining-room chairs) and a second rod for the closet in the children's room to expand room for clothes. Then we tackled our biggest issue: the kids' toys. Here is where we wish we'd had a consultation first—and the opportunity to buy some new storage items before Ms. Reid Hunt did the actual organizing. The organizer did dive in and help us purge and categorize toys, but we knew we needed to buy a new, bigger storage unit.

We did end up buying something similar to what was recommended after our session, but by then we were on our own to do the final set up.

In Atlanta, we needed serious help. A deep basement closet was packed with baby clothes, lamps, mounds of memorabilia from a decade living in Moscow, including nesting dolls and old newspapers, a mattress and even a papasan chair wedged up near the ceiling. Another closet was stuffed with files, luggage, pet food, cases of canned tomatoes and more old newspapers. We knew we had some serious editing to do. One of the best things about the company we hired, Chaos 2 Comfort, was that it recycles or donates purged items for you. Our two-person team was very sensitive to our feelings, suggesting we take a break when we felt overwhelmed and advising us to keep those items that had real sentimental value. In the end, we had five garbage bags full of clothes and toys for our organizers, Susan Fox and Teresa Taylor, to take to a local homeless shelter.

But that night we panicked: In our zeal, we had accidently tossed the blue sweat suit one of the kids had lived in as a toddler—and we wanted it back. So we sheepishly called Ms. Taylor. Thankfully, the items hadn't been donated yet.

"Too Much Clutter at Home? Spring Cleaning Tips"

More clutter liberation advice from the Wall Street Journal's Sue Shellenbarger ("Too Much Clutter at Home? Spring Cleaning Tips"):

People hang onto stuff because it has sentimental meaning, or shields them from anxieties about not having enough, experts say. In my case, I become attached to the hopes and memories I associate with my stuff. Old, unused board games are more than board games in my mind; they represent my love of quiet family evenings together. To me, our art-supply cabinet crammed with old stickers, glitter and paper signifies how much I enjoyed equipping my children, when they were small, to plunge into arts-and-crafts projects on a whim.

Once you realize the stuff is just stuff – not memories and relationships – it becomes easier to discard or donate unneeded items. In “Unclutter Your Life in One Week,” author Erin Rooney Doland recommends taking digital photos of sentimental items, then giving them away. If you inherit Grandmother’s china but don’t want to use it, she suggests keeping a teacup as a memento and donating the rest. And “if your dresser is filled with T-shirts from college, cut them up and make them into a quilt,” she writes. Other people automatically toss stuff if they haven’t used it for six months or a year. Still others imagine that they are moving; the thought of boxing, loading, unloading and unboxing hundreds of pounds of stuff is enough to turn them into avid de-junkers.

Organizing expert Julie Morgenstern suggests writing “treasure guidelines,” or criteria for keeping stuff, and taping them to the wall of your work area. Ask yourself, “If this were gone tomorrow, would I miss it?” she says. For example, you might not miss the books that have been standing on your shelves for years; but even though you only wear a black cocktail dress once every five years – you might still miss it, she says.

Setting aside a whole afternoon or day to clean isn’t realistic for many jugglers. To find time to de-clutter, some experts recommend snatching 5- to 15-minute blocks of spare time to tackle messy spots one-by-one. Others advise seizing on 15- or 20-minute periods and setting a target–such as collecting 27 items they don’t need any more – then strolling through the house with trash bags, collecting stuff to donate or discard. Some families with older children build a 10-minute cleanup time into their after-dinner routine, setting a timer and requiring everyone in the house to take part.

"Ditching 800 Pounds of Clutter"

Because I found it so personally inspiring and useful, as a service to my readers I'm going to flaunt copyright law and reprint Sue Shellenbarger's column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal in its entirety. I hope you find it as useful as I did.

(WSJ, please don't sue me - I'll take it down immediately if you ask.)

"Ditching 800 Pounds of Clutter" by Sue Shellenbarger
Copyright ©2010 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The notion of a top-to-bottom spring cleaning seems quaint in an era when many families, including mine, can't even tame their dust bunnies—let alone a garage full of clutter.

Many people either hate cleaning or can't find time for it, based on the frequent emails I receive on the topic. Weekly hours spent on housework since 1976 have fallen 20% among married couples, 34% among single women and 16% among single men, according to a long-term study of 9,000 families at the University of Michigan. While no one measures clutter, "the number of possessions owned by the average person has risen dramatically" in the past 50 years, says Gail Steketee, dean of social work at Boston University and co-author of several books on hoarding.

A clutter-filled home can be a source of stress—and can spur squabbles among couples.

But how do you fit a thorough spring cleaning into a time-pressured schedule? To look for answers, I ran a six-week experiment. I surveyed 10 books by cleaning experts and picked the three approaches to managing housecleaning time that seemed most likely to fit into a busy schedule. Then, I divided my four-bedroom house into three zones and tested each approach in a different zone for about two weeks, while keeping up all my usual activities—working, cooking for and spending time with my family, hosting weekend guests, seeing friends and doing volunteer work. My house is a worthy laboratory; a packrat by nature, I have avoided doing a top-to-bottom deep cleaning and de-cluttering for longer than I care to admit. (OK, for two years.) Normally I only spend a couple of hours every week or two, vacuuming, tidying up and scrubbing bathrooms.

I learned a lot from this experiment. It is possible to squeeze spring cleaning into a busy schedule without taking time off. But it is important to approach the job with a little forethought—planning in advance how to organize storage space, doing tasks in the most efficient order, and pacing yourself to avoid burnout. Plunging in without thinking, as many non-cleaners do, I wound up doing a lot of things backward, wasting time.

The rewards were worth the effort. After getting rid of 800 pounds of recycling and trash, hauling two SUV-loads of donations to Goodwill Industries, and dropping off 17 boxes of books at the public library, I am exhilarated by the newfound open space in my house, which seems bigger and more serene. One formerly standoffish neighbor is now more friendly. And I am more thoughtful about how I acquire, use and dispose of stuff.

Based on a diary I kept, here is what I learned:

The Multitasking Method: This method, called "a five-minute room rescue," is recommended by experts including author Marla Cilley, founder of Flylady.net, a Web site on cleaning. It entails seizing upon spare moments and attacking one messy room at a time in five- to 10-minute spurts. Starting in Zone One of my house, the family room, kitchen and office, I did two or three room rescues each weekday after work and several more on weekends, setting a timer to keep me on track.

It takes flexibility to switch back and forth between tasks this way; non-multitaskers would be miserable using this method. But it worked for me. Knowing I only had to clean for five minutes helped me break through my habitual avoidance. I was surprised at how much I could get done in five minutes—vacuuming and dusting my family room, for example.

But the two weeks I had allotted weren't enough time to finish Zone One using this method. The problem: I made the mistake of thinking that cleaning is, well, just cleaning. But in fact, the spring cleaning I undertook entailed three distinct processes—cleaning, organizing and de-cluttering; each requires different skills and time commitments, says Julie Morgenstern, New York, an organizing and time-management consultant. Cleaning is quick physical work, removing dirt and grime. Organizing is a mental process. And de-cluttering, deciding what is obsolete and letting go, is both mental and emotional, and takes longer, she says.

Trying to clean without de-cluttering first, as I did, is inefficient. When I tried to do a five-minute room rescue in my messy office, I couldn't wipe off the file cabinets because they were covered with piles of paper; all I accomplished was to spread them around. Had I de-cluttered first, sprucing up Zone One using this method would have been a slam dunk.

The Scorched-Earth Approach: Variously labeled the "Trash-Bag Tango" by organizing expert and author Peter Walsh, or the "27-Fling Boogie" by Ms. Cilley, the method I used in Zone Two (my bath, laundry and living rooms) has you seize upon a slightly longer block of time, of about 15 minutes, and set a de-cluttering target—such as removing 27 unneeded items. Then, grab two trash bags, for donations and discards, and stride through your house bagging stuff until you reach your objective. Working on "clutter caves," as cleaning expert Don Aslett calls the worst junk stashes, I didn't even have to walk around. My laundry room cabinets and toolbox produced enough stuff to hit my quota, from identical sets of socket wrenches to tattered rolls of gift wrap.

This method cleared a lot of space fast, and its emphasis on quantity draws you to the messiest parts of your house. But don't try this method if you are expecting dinner guests; Zone Two got worse before it got better. Doing the Boogie produced a tidal wave of trash and misplaced items I wanted to re-store elsewhere—such as the printer toner cartridges I had inexplicably stashed in the same drawer as my son's track spikes. These items sat around in bags and boxes for days while I figured out what to do with them.

This brings me to my next big mistake: I failed to begin my de-cluttering "with the vision you have for the life you want ... and for the space you want," including setting specific uses for each room and storage area, as Mr. Walsh of Los Angeles advises. Because I didn't do this advance planning, de-cluttering left me in temporary chaos.

Nevertheless, this method felt like a game, and I could easily see enlisting the rest of my family in the "fun."

The Project Management Method: Inspired by the title of one of Mr. Aslett's books, "Lose 200 Lbs. This Weekend," this approach requires some work in advance, assembling a list of dejunking supplies such as boxes and bags, thinking about which items you don't need and researching places to receive donations and discards. Thus prepared, I plunged into a weekend whirlwind of de-junking my garage and closets, a process the book promised would give me a "taste of freedom, space and dominion."

This method did produce astonishing results—not all of them good. In two days of de-cluttering, I far surpassed Mr. Aslett's target, losing 800 pounds of trash alone, based on weighing my Ford Explorer on the vehicle scale at our recycling center. Hundreds of pounds more of various items went in separate loads to Goodwill Industries and our public library. The process did give me a satisfying sense of control.

But de-cluttering was more tiring and draining than I expected. I agonized over cleaning out our family art-supply cabinet. With my kids now in college, we hardly need stickers, glitter and sidewalk chalk; but I love my memories of their using those supplies when they were small. "It is very hard to make those decisions," Ms. Morgenstern says. "You get attached."

I got over it, but the experience did make another of my spring-cleaning mistakes abundantly clear: Trying to de-clutter for longer than two to four hours at a time. Although working for eight hours on Saturday and five on Sunday seemed reasonable, I was wiped out afterward. In an interview later, Mr. Aslett told me I took his book title too literally. "When I say weekend, I don't mean Sunday too!" he said. "Two days is too much for some people." De-junking for too long can make you "tired and disgusted and mad," says Mr. Aslett, of Pocatello, Idaho. "You get careless and toss stuff out, and you will regret it."

Home from college for the weekend, my son pitched in to help with a final round of basic cleaning, including sweeping and wiping down walls and shelves—a process that takes only a short time in Zone Three, because the de-cluttering is done.

Since crawling across the spring-cleaning finish line earlier this month, I have been reveling in the benefits. My neatest and tidiest neighbor noticed my departures for the landfill with my Explorer packed to the roof, and dropped by for the first time to compliment me on a garage that is now nearly as sparkling and capacious as his. I am saving money, because I found stuff I thought I had lost and was planning to replace, such as snorkeling gear and moss-remover for my lawn. Laboring over my stuff has taught me to handle and recycle possessions with greater care. And I have to admit: Parking my car at night in the space actually designed for it, the garage, is beyond cool.