Latest / The Shivan Show with Shivan Sarna / Overwhelmed by Clutter? How To Lighten Your Space Without Stress | Heather Aardema

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Overwhelmed by Clutter? How To Lighten Your Space Without Stress | Heather Aardema · The Shivan Show with Shivan Sarna

• 0:00
  We blink and it's 30 years and we are still thinking about decluttering. Clutter is neutral. It does not make us a bad person. It does come with consequences. So many of us are so embarrassed. We don't open the door to friends who stop by and want to come in. We look around and we know it's weighing on us. It feels heavy and it's exhausting. Why am I having these thoughts? When we get to that root cause, then so much more becomes possible.
• 0:24
  So the idea that less is more is not, you know, you hear it all the time, right? But what if we could all enter the concept of a shame-free zone about less being more when it comes to clutter? So my special guest, Heather Artema. Hi, beautiful. Welcome to The Siobhan Show, Health, Wealth, Wisdom. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Siobhan. What I want to do right now is get you to teach us about what holistic decluttering is. Yeah.
• 0:51
  I personally have had so, so many experiences of shame, of stress, of overwhelm. Heather is an expert in helping all of us lighten up, live with less, but still be totally satisfied. What are the mind shit Jedi tricks that we need to do in order to accomplish this?
• 1:12
  Number one, clutter is neutral. It's neutral. It does not make us a bad person. It does not make us immoral. It does come with consequences. It's neutral. And so many of us are so embarrassed. We feel so heavy. We don't open the door to friends who stop by and want to come in. We talk to them out on the porch instead. Clutter is neutral.
• 1:36
  So the consequences though, clutter is like a cortisol drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. We see it, we perceive it, we feel it. It disrupts our sleep. When our sleep is disrupted, that means the next morning we wake up and it's harder to make decisions. It does have a physiological impact.
• 1:57
  it also has an impact on our psychology. So what I mean by that, it influences the decisions that we make. So if I walk into my house and it's calm and picked up and clean, it doesn't even have to be the whole house. It can just be the front area.
• 2:18
  then I'm going to go take my dog Lulu for a walk. I'm going to do something healthy. I feel good when I come in. If I come in and it's disheveled and kind of a mess, I'm going to go into my
• 2:32
  zone out with some chips for a while until I can become present again. And the research supports that. So they did a study where they took a group of people, split them into two, had one group work in a messy office, the other in a clean office. They were just filling out papers. And it didn't even matter what they were filling out. They wanted to see what would these people do when they came out of the clean office or the messy office.
• 2:56
  If you came out of the clean office, you're twice as likely to choose an apple as a thank you over a candy bar. Our surroundings impact how we show up in this world. They impact what we choose to do. They impact what we put into the world. I'm not surprised. I'm fascinated that they did research. I'm glad they did it because this is a charged topic.
• 3:21
  And then you get into the, I already touched on the generational issues, the caring of the older generation, which is very much important that I bring up in this podcast, in this show, because Americans of a certain age are not prepared. It is an epidemic that is coming for the assisted living moves.
• 3:43
  the nursing home moves, the downsizing. Some of you have started to deal with it. Some of you have dealt with it beautifully, but you compound health, money, the stuff. It is a perfect storm of purgatory. You can tell I've lived through it. So that's where the storage units come up. The pods come up. The truck rentals come up. The hiring handyman, the hiring heavy lifters, the assistants, the ladies who now charge $80 an hour to help you get,
• 4:12
  declutter an elder care scenario the recipes the books the books let's pause on books for a second i noticed something in your voice just there with the books i've had a mold journey multi-year mold journey impacted me uh greatly and for me the the books the
• 4:35
  were harder to let go of than my wedding dress. And you might be thinking, well, wait, why did you have to let go of anything? So mold likes anything that can absorb. So clothing, furniture, books, mold loves books. The mold was invisible. You couldn't see it. And I knew those books were making me sick. And I'm like,
• 4:56
  why is it so hard for me? I know they're making me sick. Should that make it easier that I should just get rid of them all? And what I figured out is that I had a lot of identity tangled up in those books. They had become my adult trophies. You know, the trophies you get when you're a kid for playing soccer or being on the swim team. Well, what do you get as an adult, right? For me, it was the books. Look at these books. See, I like these books. These books make me an interesting person. I had a lot of self-worth wrapped up in those books as well.
• 5:24
  And so understanding my story that was wrapped up in those books was very liberating because then I realized, oh, no, those books don't make me who I am. Those books don't say I'm going to be a successful person someday. No, no, no. Those books were nudges forward. They served me completely, even if I hadn't read them.
• 5:45
  Because sometimes people say, Heather, I bought this thing and I didn't use it. And I feel so guilty about that. So I bought books that I didn't read and I still let them go. And the reason I was able to do that is I told myself the job's complete. How do we know that? Well, when I bought the book, I had a dopamine release. It felt good. My body has already benefited from the purchase of that book. That book does not need to do another thing. And now knowing that those books are making me sick, boom, get rid of them.
• 6:14
  A lot of the population does not get sick with a toxic mold. So I felt good donating my books to little library, like street libraries that you see and so forth. That's what I did. But yeah, those books, they can be those adult trophies. And so we get to give ourselves permission to say, can the job be done? Can the job be complete? That is so loaded, what you just said about our identities with books.
• 6:39
  Especially if you've ever had a book change your life, which we all have, I hope. And also, if your parents valued literature or education or the bookshelves were a primary visual growing up, which mine certainly were, someone else can benefit from that book that you pay forward.
• 6:57
  Okay. Exactly. And let's, let's talk about, let's say the books were really expensive. And so there might be a thought of, oh my gosh, I can't get rid of the book. It was so expensive. I'm never going to read it, but it was so expensive. What if, what if I couldn't, couldn't buy that book again if I wanted it or if I regretted it? What if I felt regret? And that can feel very scary to a lot of people.
• 7:18
  What you want to do is you want to get curious and say, well, why am I having these thoughts? Where are they coming from? Give yourself the chance to get to the root cause of your clutter in the form of the books in that situation. And because that root cause, if you can understand that root cause,
• 7:39
  That also can be eye-opening and liberating. And so, for example, let's say somebody's worried about not having enough money to buy the books again. Well, if we go back to childhood, maybe your parents weren't able to provide well, and so money was really tight. That could be a trigger. Or...
• 7:58
  That could be a big trigger for worrying about money in the future. And so what you do is you say, okay, as a kid, I did not have agency. And you give your seven-year-old self some love, your 10-year-old self, your three-year-old self some love. As an adult, though, you get to tell yourself, if I had agency to create that once, I'd
• 8:17
  then as an adult, I can create that again. If I decide that my life won't be complete if I don't have that actual book. As adults, we can make a lot more happen than we could as kids. When we get to that root cause,
• 8:32
  then so much more becomes possible. Okay, we're going to continue to get personal. Have you ever been bloated? Like really bloated? Have you ever had diarrhea or constipation or maybe have a combination of all of it? Maybe you have SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I have answers for you. The ones that I couldn't find for so many years.
• 8:51
  The website, my website, SIBOSOS.com, has a ton of free information, some premium courses you can take, small group coaching, and discounts on supplements and other health products. What changed everything for me was working with Dr. Allison Seebecker, and she is involved in so many of these projects. She is a true and legitimate SIBO expert. So if you'd like to work with us, you'd like to find out more, even just want to just take a little look and see if maybe that might be you.
• 9:20
  then check it out. You'll see the links in the description. And I hope you don't have SIBO, but if you do, I'm glad we found each other. I'm thinking about so many situations where that applies. So my mother was in China in class before she met my father. So she really did value those dishes.
• 9:37
  And I see, you know, Millennial Inheritance on Instagram and stuff and how people are talking about the rose pattern that may now have lead in it, discovery of lead in it. Just the sets, the gravy boats, the cisterns of soup, the ladles, all that. There is something that is called the endowment effect.
• 10:00
  I am afflicted with it. My mother was afflicted with it. My sisters are afflicted with it. We value something because we brought it into our lives. We made a decision once. We got the hit of the dopamine. We've pulled it into our lives. We've incorporated it into our inventory. And we think that it has more value than it actually does.
• 10:20
  Absolutely. And so anything that we own, we will subconsciously place a higher value on. So even something, let's say you paid $30 for a cute shirt and it's hanging in your closet and you haven't worn it for a while. It's part of being human. It's part of our biology to look at that shirt that we paid 30 bucks for and value it almost as if we had paid $300 for it.
• 10:44
  Listen, letting go goes against our biology when we're not conscious and present and intentional. So think about where we've come from for eons and eons. Our focus was food, shelter, and sex. That's what it was. And then we had the Industrial Revolution where there's a little bit of choice for the first time. World War II pulled us out of the Depression. And then we had this big multimedia advertising campaign.
• 11:12
  world that we entered into to keep those wartime factories full. And that's fast fashion and fast furniture and all the fast, fast food that are not good for ourselves or the planet. But it's natural for us to want to acquire. We think we're going to be safer doing that
• 11:32
  Acquire more, acquire more. It means I'll be safe. It means I can't die. We look around and we know it's weighing on us. It feels heavy and it's exhausting. Well, I'm going to declutter. I'm going to declutter. And then we get distracted.
• 11:47
  We'll distract ourselves unintentionally. We'll watch all of Netflix or scroll, or we'll go for walks. We'll read books. We'll call friends we haven't talked to in a long time. Those are healthy things. However, when we're using them to avoid the clutter, if we lean into the clutter, we can make an immediate impact on our health, our well-being.
• 12:08
  It feels scary though, because of these stories, because we haven't addressed the root cause. So what happens is we blink and it's 30 years and we are still thinking about decluttering. We're still moving things from room to room to room, thinking that it's just the mechanics. So a lot of people out there that are helping with the decluttering are talking about, well, you start with this category first. You start with the clothing. Well, what happens is we're like, okay, I'm going to start with the clothing and we're feeling energized.
• 12:34
  We take all the clothes out of the closets, the front closet, the back closet, the bedroom closet, and we put it on our bed and we see a mountain on our bed. And three months go by and we're sleeping on a tiny corner of the bed, a sliver of the bed, or we don't even have that. And we are sleeping on the couch because when we look at that mountain of clothing, we are so dysregulated.
• 12:57
  Our nervous system was never taken into account. Those systems act as if we're robots. We're not robots. We're human beings. We're human beings. And that's good news because we can learn to regulate our nervous system so that we can create safety in the body. Before we can create safety in our home, we create safety in the body.
• 13:19
  And part of that creating safety in the body is understanding what's the root cause of my clutter. Why do I have it? Is it okay if I share one of my favorite tools? Yes. Yes. Come here, Sadie. Let's listen and learn about the tool for decluttering. Tell me, tell me, tell me. Yes. It's really simple and it's really powerful. Write yourself a letter from clutter when you're in a regulated state. So not when you're feeling overwhelmed or embarrassed or ashamed.
• 13:47
  When you have paused, gotten present, maybe gone outside and sat outside and really gotten present, then you say, dear self. So for you, Siobhan, dear Siobhan, I am clutter, and this is what I want you to know. You may not know what to write right now, and that's okay. You just don't give yourself the excuse to get up and walk away or put it to the side. If you did know, what would you write? You could start there. Okay.
• 14:15
  So I have had the honor of hearing hundreds of these letters. It's one of the favorite things, one of my favorite things of what I do. And when they're written in a regulated state, there is compassion and love and awareness of what happened in childhood.
• 14:37
  Maybe somebody had to move around a lot because their parents' jobs moved them from place to place to place, and it was hard to make friends. So their things became their friends. So as an adult, maybe they named their things, they give their things names, but subconsciously that's the security blanket. Maybe it's hard now to make friends as an adult. So we get curious about what happened as a child.
• 15:01
  And there's always awareness, love, compassion, and permission. Okay, now as an adult, you know that you have agency that you didn't have as a kid. You have free will that you didn't have as a kid. And we love that kid. You know, that kid did the best he or she could. And so now as an adult with agency, we get to choose living by design instead of default. So what does that look like, living by design?
• 15:32
  Instead of default, well, default is just the hamster wheel doing the same old thing, status quo, and hoping for, fingers crossed, hoping for different results. But living by design, answering the question, what matters most to me?
• 15:46
  now in this season of life. We worry so much about what matters to other people. And we don't give ourselves the gift of saying, well, wait, what matters most to me? And I didn't either. And there's a lot of self-worth that was wrapped up in that. I've always had a lot of
• 16:04
  pretty awesome person. You are. You know, the messages you got, you know, if you're not perfect, you're not loved. Or if you don't do this well enough or life's easier for you than somebody else and shame on you for having life be easier for you. And so I...
• 16:19
  It's been a really raw, tender, beautiful journey to lean into my clutter, my physical clutter, my mental clutter, my emotional clutter, and really get to know myself well and see the beautiful person that I am that I guess I didn't see for decades.
• 16:35
  I'm so glad you're here in this moment with that beauty because as an outsider looking at you and knowing you, it is a truly beautiful being that you are. Let's all just be in the truth. The highest aspect of the truth is that we're divine beings on a physical planet having an experience of where we're trying to reconnect with our spirituality, which is the truth.
• 17:00
  And the physicality is part of it. And it's not that these things aren't important. It's just that perspective and the appropriate energy in which to observe them and utilize them as a tool of enjoyment or practicality or transportation or learning. But when they start to override the balance of
• 17:25
  it becomes a burdens instead of a blessing. Yes, and you just talked about the truth. And there's a beautiful book, The Top Regrets of the Dying. And the number one regret is I didn't live a life that was true to me.
• 17:42
  This is an opportunity for everyone, is that we get to say, what is blocking me from living my truth, from living a life that's true to me? And whatever is blocking you is clutter, whatever that is. It can be stuff, it can be thoughts that we're not smart enough, we're not good enough in some way,
• 18:02
  it's easier for other people. When it comes to our health, we'll never get better. It's interesting. You talked about all the supplements, you know, in your mold journey. Well, me too. And then I realized having these supplements out constantly is a constant reminder. Subconsciously, I was making it mean that you're always going to be sick.
• 18:18
  And you understand the multi-decade experience this can be for people. And so I'm actually less is more even when it comes to supplements. And or less can be, you know, less but better. So, you know, don't buy the supplements on Amazon because, right, that's we don't know about the quality. We don't know that that that makes me nervous. Can we do less but better? Can that be a way to honor ourselves and our path and our humanness?
• 18:43
  It's something that I think a lot of people deal with and is like a static in the background. And then when you do get into it and you do have that purge or that you live lighter, you work with Heather, you take your programs, you learn the skills that are available to you that actually do work. The space that for me, it created in my consciousness was that things that I wanted to do
• 19:13
  do like this podcast, like this show, all of a sudden bumped up. This became very buoyant and easier to accomplish because I would take whatever it was, this list of things I had to do in terms of the closet, whatever it was. And I'd be like, okay, well, once, and this is so classic, once that's done, I'll do this. Once that was done,
• 19:40
  It really did. It created that space. And I made more progress in that opening that happened afterwards than I had in months, if not years. Yes. And not just you. We see this time and time again.
• 19:58
  People well into their 80s are opening up space and writing books or becoming coaches, certified coaches. One woman, Anna from Sweden, she's just 87 years old and so excited about her next season of life. It's not over. It's not over. She doesn't want it to be over. She went and she decluttered.
• 20:21
  She decluttered, she created that space and she became a coach. And then I have people showing me their books, like, look at this book. Yes. And we don't need to do that. If that feels light, using the space in that way, excellent. Maybe using the space and rocking on a rocking chair is...
• 20:40
  On your back porch, noticing the birds, that's just as worthy. It's not do, do, do. We don't have to keep doing that if that doesn't speak to us. It can be, wow, I've learned to be with myself. This journey can be so sacred when we're present.
• 20:59
  Who would have thought decluttering, right, could be a sacred journey? It can. And everyone's invited along. How can someone learn about how they connect with you, find your work? Tell us, tell us, tell us. So School of Living Lighter is the website. We've got a lot of free resources on that website, essays, things like that. I'm also on YouTube, Heather Artema, on YouTube and Instagram, Heather Artema.
• 21:26
  So either through my name or through School of Living Lighter is really how to find this lighter way of decluttering, this lighter way of being. The path we take is one that really honors our humanness and doesn't treat us as robots. Yeah, it's a different way of showing up.
• 21:48
  I also want to invite everybody to just to do it inch by inch. It's a cinch. It can be a slow and steady. It could be weekends. It could be scheduled in. It could just you can customize it to you. But I know, right, I know for me when I did take this journey on, not by being forced to do it through a move, which I've done multiple times.
• 22:12
  And then you're paying to move the stuff. And it's at least $5 a pound, by the way, is a rule to look at there, right? So I invite you all to be on this journey to find out more about Heather and her work. Summit in the Works, book coming in hot. I'm excited to share this with you. Thank you so much, Heather, for your work and your mission. Here's to living lighter.
• 22:34
  Ah, well, we're lighter together, aren't we? Thank you, Siobhan. So that's a wrap on today's episode. Thank you so much for being here. It genuinely means everything to me. If something in this conversation sparks something for you, share it with a woman or a guy in your life who needs to hear it. That's how this show grows. That's how we heal the planet together. And that's how we really connect.
• 22:55
  For more resources, free tools, and everything we talked about today, head over to sivansarna.com. That's S-H-I-V-A-N-S-A-R-N-A dot com. It's all there waiting for you. And until next time, keep asking the questions, keep finding the answers. You deserve the full picture and the very best. Namaste.