How Decluttering Can Improve Our Mental Health

We may not realize it, but our surroundings or the space we occupy can greatly affect our mood and productivity. Ever since the pandemic began, we’ve been quarantined and forced to work from home, but home is usually where we go to relax and unwind after a long day. Our minds became confused with where we’re supposed to work and where we’re supposed to rest since they were suddenly merged together. One way to separate the two is to organize our space in a way that we are comfortable with.

Decluttering our space is a form of self-care. Ally Canita, a decluttering coach and founder of “Align Your Home,” believes that taking care of our home and its surroundings can help us develop a more calm and focused mindset. Ally gave us a short glimpse of her business, how she was able to pivot during the pandemic, and how her philosophy can help our mental health and how we navigate through our daily lives.

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How ‘Align Your Home’ came to be

Ally first began her career in marketing for the healthcare industry. She was a product manager and business executive who dealt with neurosurgery and hospital asset management. Ally also spent about 5 years in Malaysia working at the same company. Although she was satisfied with her job, there was something missing. There was something better out there, something that could contribute to her bigger picture. The idea of searching for her bigger picture prompted her to leave her job, which led to the start of Align Your Home in 2019.

Ally found that her specialty centered around organizing and decluttering. There is a huge industry in the United States that inspired her to bring professional organizing to the Philippines. Ally believes that “There is no one single approach to organizing or decluttering–and because people are different from each other, the root cause of clutter will always be different.” She realized that perhaps she could create her own approach while still being the Ally Canita that she wanted to be.

As a result, Align Your Home and Ally’s philosophy of decluttering were focused on keeping your space clean while at the same time promoting sustainability. She has always been passionate about the environment and providing sustainable ways to live, so she decided to integrate this with her work. Her initial plan was to teach others how to declutter their spaces, collect the things they didn’t need, and send them to recycling centers. However, the pandemic has become a much bigger obstacle than she thought. During the pandemic, it was difficult for her to execute her initial plans for her career. Because we were all limited to online platforms and mostly stayed at home, she resorted to advertising Align Your Home through virtual organizing workshops and online promotion.

A business brings with it responsibilities and challenges.  For Ally, starting Align Your Home wasn’t the easiest task. There was self-doubt about whether or not people actually needed what she had to offer. Especially because of the pandemic, her plans for the business were completely thrown off. Nevertheless, Ally realized that she needed to accept the fact that things couldn’t always go her way. Even though her career took a different direction than what she had initially planned, she knew she had to be prepared. It also helped her to look back at her bigger picture and ask herself why she was doing this in the first place. Going back to her main intentions wasn’t easy, but it definitely helped her a lot.

One of Ally’s main goals is to spread the word of Align Your Home to more Filipinos, especially now since we’re all stuck at home. For her, her business aims to “help people get clarity with their own intentions, and with these intentions, they are able to express them[sic] in a way that shows what they value the most. It’s basically alignment, aligning it to what is really important for you.[sic]” Align Your Home helps us realize that our space supports our intentions. It doesn’t only promote joy, but it stems from something within.  She said, “Our space has to support us, our goals, and our lifestyle. It really starts from within and then expressed through your spaces.[sic]”

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Space Care is Self-care

Having a messy space can often be very stressful, and it can definitely affect our mood or the way we carry on with our day. Whether we accidentally lose one of our belongings or we don’t have space to put new things, clutter can be quite troublesome. Through Ally's organizing methods and philosophy, we can learn how to declutter our space in a way that will help us have a better mindset.

Through her experiences, Ally developed Space Care is Self-care.. The title of this workshop implies that our living, working, and resting spaces affect our well-being. She believes that self-care is not just about pampering ourselves, but it’s also about the different ways we care for our mental health, our physical state, or even our relationship with others. The way we talk to ourselves, how we set up our space, how we care for our goals, and how we want to live our lives — all of these things have something to do with our self-care. Ally realized that at home, if something in her space was making her irritated or she felt like she wasn’t being mindful of her surroundings, then she wasn’t practicing self-care. Unlike Ally, most people are unable to recognize that our spaces have an effect on us. This is her doorway to showing people how cleaning up their spaces can help them develop a more focused and calm mindset.

The majority of Space Care is Self-care was developed through intensive research on positive psychology, neuroscience, and even some spiritual ideas. From this research, Ally found that humans are highly sensitive beings. We make sense of the world through what we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. Because we are sensitive to our surroundings, it makes sense that our spaces must be adjusted to what we are comfortable with. Some people may refute this idea and claim that they never had any problems with their space or that they have been living this way for a long time. Why do they need to be mindful? Ally believes that “at the end of the day, when they go home, they become irritated because of their messy space. It becomes hard for them to have a good night’s sleep.” In short, Ally hopes to spread the message of Space Care is Self-care so that people notice their spaces and how much it can affect them. She believes that if people are able to look at their homes and recognize their intentions for the space or recognize the effect it has on their mood, perhaps they would be more inclined to start decluttering.

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Sharing the gift of decluttering

A few weeks ago, Empath had a workshop with Ally for an event with Glam-o-Mamas. Glam-o-Mamas is a community of diverse and hard-working mothers. For a mother, taking care of children and watching over the household can become emotionally and physically tiring.  Self-care becomes very important, especially for a working mother who has a vast number of responsibilities. We asked Ally what’s the number one advice she would give to mothers who wanted to start decluttering. She said that as mothers, their space has to accommodate their lifestyle, so she encourages them to adjust their space to the needs of their family. This doesn’t mean that the mother has to accept the mess, but rather she must find a way to organize the house in a way that is convenient for herself and for the rest of the household.

Decluttering can be easy if we are the only ones occupying space. Living alone allows us to control where all of our belongings have been and where they should be kept. However, most of us live with other people. Having a messy space can definitely affect the people around us. Ally adds that “especially for relationships, pet peeves can be a trigger for a lot of people.” For instance, someone’s pet peeve could be that the other person doesn’t return things to the proper place. Another could be that one person is messy and the other is very neat. An argument may occur if the household’s needs aren’t addressed or if their space isn’t organized the way they want it to be. Because our space affects our mood, having an unwanted mess can lead to more arguments and conflict.

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Here are Ally’s top tips for people who want to start decluttering and organizing:

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Clear your mind - Having a focused mind is the first step to decluttering. It’s good to be clear about our intentions for a certain space before organizing it.

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Take tiny steps - Cleaning up our space can be tiring. When we organize our homes or throw out unnecessary belongings, we don’t have to do it all at once. It’s best to declutter in smaller spaces at intervals. If we do it all at once, we will associate cleaning with being tired, and we won’t want to do it anymore.

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Put things back where they belong - Space care should be full of intention. In our homes, things need to be accessible and easy to find in order to be efficient with our space. If not, we become stressed about losing our belongings or being surrounded by a mess. By putting things back where they belong, we immediately know where to find them again and they are less likely to be misplaced. It also helps to teach the rest of the household where each item should be kept.

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Staying at home

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has been going on for a while now, some of us are still not used to staying at home. This makes space care all the more important, and because we are stuck at home, we need to make the most of our space. Especially now that school, work, and social events are being conducted online, we need to ensure that our surroundings are suitable for our activities. Although decluttering cannot replace psychotherapy, especially when it comes to mental illnesses, a small step we can take to supplement the therapeutic process could be to acquire services from mental health professionals and psychologists who are trained to help. However, mental health services are not as accessible as we would like them to be. Through Ally’s practices, we can start improving our lives from the comfort of our home, one step at a time.

If you would like to know more about Ally and her business, click here to check out her website and her services!