Cluttered - 15

For the past week, my room and phone - two major parts of what I refer to as my living spaces - have been cluttered. I managed to reach 500 tabs, the maximum tabs allowed in safari, because I haven't managed to iron out my flow for bookmarking and effectively organizing resources. My phone (as referenced in Clean - 5 below) has way too many applications on it, though I have been working in that. Most notably, though, has been my room. After opening up and sorting through some bins of stuff that I "temporarily" (read: indefinitely) stored in the basement and not putting things where they're supposed to go, my room is in terrible shape. Holiday presents from friends and family are taking up new space, too.

I've noticed a significant change in myself, and I am almost certain that it is due to this clutter. I have suddenly become significantly less motivated, less organized, less happy, and less energetic. It has been a bit paradoxical: I am unmotivated and unhappy, so I don't want to clean my living spaces up, making me more unmotivated, more disorganized, and more unhappy. They've never been perfect, and have generally been cyclical in nature - I will clean up, relax my rules, let it get messy for a short time, then clean up again - but I've come to expect a general sense of order, because that is the average state of them. This worsens my condition further: I am presented with an unpleasant surprise every time I return to any of those living spaces.

My mood has gone quickly downhill over the past few days, when the messiness has gotten much worse. I spent three hours on the couch yesterday feeling miserable and bored for absoluetly no reason, and the day before that I lied on my bed for a few hours and almost deliberately entered the state described in Near-Unconscious Consumption - 9

I am convinced of two things:

1. the state of my living spaces is correlated with my mental state and
2. the negative impacts of disorder (and disorder itself) increase exponentially-ish.

It has been actually extremely surprising, seeing how much I have changed mentally over the past week. It's possible that my feelings stem from some other factors, such as the fact that I'm on winter break from school, that it is finally winter (see Seasonal Affective Disorder) or that a major holiday has just passed, but having experienced my own feelings when I enter and spend time in my room and on my phone, I find it hard to believe otherwise. I'll have to collect some data on myself, to see if this adds up - survey myself on my own feelings of organization, mood, and rate how clean I think my living spaces are.

(please ignore any typos made in this document; it's written on mobile, at 2am, without spellcheck.)