Ep. 221: Clutter Help: Why Nothing Has Worked: The 5 Types of Clutter Crippling Midlife Women Explained

I want to ask you something before we do anything else.

When you hear the word clutter — what comes to mind?

If you pictured a pile of mail. A junk drawer. A closet you've been avoiding since 2022.

I understand. That's where most people go.

But I want you to stay with me for a second. Because I want to try a different version of that question.

What about the mental to-do list that runs on repeat even when your body is completely still?

What about the calendar that has been overfull for so long you can't remember what anything resembling margin even feels like?

What about the emotional backlog…the grief, the resentment, the things that never got processed because there was never time — that lives somewhere under the surface of every single day?

What about the identity question you keep almost asking yourself and then pushing aside because it feels too big and too uncomfortable and you don't have the bandwidth for it right now?

That's all clutter.

And that is exactly what we're here to talk about.

So let’s get started

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Transcript

OK, so here's what I want to do today. I'm going to briefly tell you about where you can learn more about this very thing that we're talking about. So I've been writing over on Substack lately. And honestly, it's been a breath of fresh air. It's not Instagram, where everything is loud and fast and fighting for your attention. It's not a standalone blog that just sits there waiting to be found. I've got one of those too. Substack, it's more like a direct line. I write.

You go there to read it and it lands in your inbox too. And you read it when you're ready. That's it. If you want the longer conversations, the stuff that actually takes time to say properly, that's where I'm putting it these days. It's free to join and you can find a link to join down in the comments. But there, we're working on defining every form of clutter that accumulates in a midlife woman's life. We're gonna talk about why they happen specifically to women.

specifically at this stage. And then we're gonna walk through the three mindset shifts that are the foundation of getting out of any of them. It's not a place for tips, it's not a place for systems, and it's not another challenge either. I do have all of those things. But over on Substack, it's just a deeper, more personal conversational writing. And so what we're gonna be talking about here today is kind of more like a framework and one that actually tells the truth.

and you'll learn more about that over on Substack as well. I'm giving you a brief overview of this clutter that I'm unpacking every week over on Substack here today, okay? So let's dive in. So my Substack publication, it's called Midlife Clutter, Explained and Stalled. And that is a free Substack and it always will be. And it exists because midlife women have

really have been handed surface level solutions to deep structural problems for long enough. There's the bins, there's the planners, there's the challenges, there's the just start small advice. And none of it actually works because none of it addresses what's actually happening underneath. This space over on Substack, it does something different. It tells the truth first. Then it offers solutions that are built for the life that you're actually living right now.

in midlife and not some idealized version of it either. And know that there's no hacks that you'll find there. There's no cheerleading. There's no minimizing what you've been through either. There's just the honest, really an honest conversation, a bit of the actual frameworks that I use every day, and the kind of clarity that actually creates forward movement. So that's about the space. Now, let's get to work here today.

When most people talk about clutter, they mean stuff. And yes, physical clutter is real, and we're going to talk about that a bit too. But if you came here only for the stuff, I want to gently expand your definition of what clutter is. Because the women who struggle most with physical clutter are almost always drowning in at least two or three other forms of clutter as well. They just don't know it.

Different types of clutter, they're connected and they really feed each other. And you cannot solve one in isolation while the others are still running at full capacity and draining you. So here are the five different types of clutter that we're gonna be working with over on Substack. And again, I'm gonna tell you about each of them here briefly, okay?

So type one of clutter is what you think of, right? It's the physical clutter. It's the visible stuff. It's the piles, the over full closets, the counters that never seem to be clear or stay clear. It's the rooms that have kind of been catch-alls for everything that doesn't have a home or everything that you haven't had the time or the energy to make a decision about. Physical clutter is the one that most people can see and point to, which means that it's also the one that carries the most shame because it's visible to other people.

not just to you. But here's what I want you to understand about physical clutter in midlife specifically. It is almost never just about the stuff. Piles accumulate when decisions get deferred. And decisions get deferred when capacity is gone. And capacity disappears when you've been caring so much for so long without adequate support or relief. And so the root

is this, physical clutter is a capacity problem wearing the costume of an organization problem. And if you treat it like an organization problem, it will keep coming back. So that's type one, physical clutter. Type two is mental clutter. Mental clutter is all that noise inside your head that never shuts off. It's the to-do list that runs on this constant loop, even when you're trying to sleep.

It's the 17 open tabs in your brain. It's the appointment you need to schedule. It's the conversation you need to have. It's the thing that you promised you'd look into, the decision you've been putting off, the worry you can't quite set down. Mental clutter is the cost of being the person who holds everything together. When you are the one who remembers the schedules, the needs, the follow-ups, the logistics of an entire household or family, your brain then never gets to rest. And here's what

makes mental clutter particularly difficult. It's invisible. Nobody sees it. And nobody accounts for it, probably not even you. Nobody asks you, and you probably don't even ask you, how much of your cognitive bandwidth is already spoken for before you've done a single thing on your list today. You've already burned through a ton of your cognitive bandwidth before you get to the list. And so the root.

is this, the root thing that you need to understand is that mental clutter is the predictable result of being the default manager of a complex life with no real off switch and no one, no one, probably not even you tracking the details. So that's type two, clutter type two, mental clutter. Then there's type three. This is the emotional clutter.

Emotional clutter is the backlog. It's the feelings that never really got felt because the timing was never right. The grief that got set aside because life kept moving. The resentment that built slowly and quietly over years of absorbing more than your share. And it's like loss, loss of identity, of relationships, of the version of yourself that you thought you'd be by now. All of those things, they were never full.

knowledge and so emotional clutter it doesn't stay neatly in its own lane. It's not like there's this emotional lane. What happens with emotional clutter is that it shows up in other places. It shows up in your body. It shows up in your decision making or your inability to make decisions. It shows up in the rooms of your house that feel heavier than they should. It shows up in the objects that you can't let go of even when you know logically that you should let go of it.

Women are extraordinarily good at continuing to function while carrying enormous emotional weight, which means the backlog can just grow for years, grow and grow and grow without anyone, including you, fully registering how much is even there until midlife. It kind of becomes this perfect storm. This is when the weight starts to become impossible to ignore. And so the root of emotional clutter is this.

Emotional clutter accumulates when life moves faster than the capacity, than your capacity to process it. And when the expectation is that you just keep going, just keep on going regardless. So that's emotional clutter type three. Type four is schedule clutter. Schedule clutter is what happens when your calendar becomes a container for everyone else's needs and there's not much left that's genuinely yours.

It's the commitments that you said yes to before you understood the cost. It's the obligations that multiplied one reasonable addition at a time until the cumulative weight became crushing. Schedule clutter is particularly cruel because it's often invisible even to the person living it. You look at the calendar and everything on it seems reasonable. You should be able to handle this. So why does your calendar still feel so unbearable?

because what the calendar doesn't show is transition time, the recovery time, the emotional labor attached to the commitment, the mental preparation required beforehand, and the debrief that your nervous system really needs after. And so the route that you need to understand when it comes to schedule clutter is this. Schedule clutter is the result of years of saying yes to things that mattered to others while not.

protecting enough space for what matters to you, including rest and recovery and just different nuances of your own life. So type four is schedule clutter. And now we've got type five. Type five is identity clutter. And this is the one that women don't expect, but it absolutely belongs on this list. And for many women in midlife, it's the one that's sitting underneath everything else. It's kind of always there.

woven throughout everything else. Identity clutter, it's what happens when you have been living so fully inside your roles like mother and wife and employee and boss and caregiver, the person who holds it all together, the logistical household manager. And in being so heavily immersed in all of those roles, you've lost track of who you are outside of all of those roles.

And so really this identity clutter, starts showing up as kind of this low grade sense of disconnection. A feeling that you've kind of been performing your life rather than living it. It's an inability to answer simple questions like, what do I actually enjoy? What do I want? What matters to me? Not to my family, not to this role or that role, but to me, the person.

It also shows up in the difficulty of making decisions about your stuff or your schedule or your boundaries. Because when you don't know who you are, you don't know what to keep and what you're ready to let go of. Identity clutter, it doesn't really ever hit this crisis mode. mean, we've heard the term identity crisis, but typically that doesn't really happen, right? So identity clutter, it's not really this crisis. It's this signal.

It's your life telling you that you've been living for everyone else long enough. And it's time to kind of find your way back to yourself. And so the root of identity clutter is this. It's what happens when decades of responsibility and adaptation and self-sacrifice that are all good things, but these leave a woman unsure where the roles end and she begins. It's just kind of this big gray area.

And so when it comes to these five types of clutter, all five of them are real. All five of them are connected. And in midlife, most women are carrying at least three, often all five simultaneously, which is why nothing surface level, no surface level solutions for clutter have worked. Because you can't organize your way out of an identity crisis. You can't declutter your way out of an emotional backlog.

The solution has to match the actual problem. And so then there's this accumulation factor because most of this clutter, doesn't arrive all at once, right? It builds slowly over years, one avoided decision at a time, one year of carrying this full mental load, one season of absorbing more than your system could manage. And so,

By midlife then, there's this accumulation and it has had decades to compound. And what felt manageable at 32 has become genuinely unsustainable at 47. And it's not because you've gotten weaker, but because the load has gotten heavier and the reserves have gotten thinner.

Midlife is also this time, it's the season of major role transitions, right? And these all often hit simultaneously at the same time too. There's kids leaving or becoming more complicated. There's parents aging, there's marriages that are shifting, there's career identity that's evolving. And the body, the body is changing in ways that nobody fully prepared you for. And each of these transitions, they require processing. And when multiple transitions, they all,

on top of each other, which they almost always do, the emotional and the identity processing required, it exceeds the time and space available for it. And so it all becomes this backlog. And there's this huge gap, and I'm not gonna sugarcoat this. Women plan, women remember, women manage, women solve the problems, women absorb, women adjust.

And when things get hard, it is often assumed that women will just hold the impact and keep right on going. Just keep right on ticking for years. And the anger that many women feel in midlife is not bitterness, it's actually clarity. It's the moment that you start realizing what's actually happening. These are the conversations we have here, right? I'm starting to shed a light on all of these kinds of things.

But it's this moment when you really realize that you need to stop asking, what's wrong with me? And you need to start asking, why have I been carrying so much for so long? The question is not the problem. It's actually the beginning of the answer. And then there's this body part that we have to talk about, because hormones, they affect sleep. They affect cognitive function and emotional regulation and energy in ways that are real.

legitimate and significant. And so the capacity that felt sustainable at 38, it may genuinely not be available at 48. And it's not because you are failing, it's because your physiology has changed. And again, this doesn't signal any kind of weakness or that anything has gone wrong with you. It's biological reality. And any solution that ignores that is going to be a solution that fails.

And so the external strategies when it comes to clutter, they don't hold unless the foundation shifts first. And so I'm gonna start to shift to that foundation here for you today. These three shifts, they must be made. They are not optional because these start to create that foundation and they build on each other, which is why the order, doing them in the order in which I'm gonna share them with you, it matters.

So the first kind of shift that we have to make is it's a mindset shift, right? Mindset shift, we have to move from self blame, blaming ourselves to what I call capacity awareness. We need to move from something is wrong with me, I should be able to handle this to this isn't a me problem, this is an everything I am carrying problem. This is a load problem.

You cannot solve a problem that you have been trained to blame yourself for. When you believe that the clutter reflects your worth, your capacity, your capability, your character, every attempt to address any kind of clutter, it carries the weight of shame, especially physical clutter. And shame is one of the most effective paralysis agents in existence. Clutter in every form is what happens

when the demands placed on a life exceed the capacity to meet them. I'm gonna say that again. Clutter in every form. It is what happens when the demands placed on a life exceeded the capacity available to meet them, that's it. That's the whole equation. It's not going to balance. If you think back to those days of the math balances in school, not going to balance. But like most women,

I'm guessing you had no idea this was even a thing, right? And here's why the clutter, the physical stuff that you see is still there. You're trying to solve a stuff problem. And so you're using step-by-step processes and you're following decluttering tips and hacks, but you've not dealt with the capacity problem. And so this is why your clutter is still there. I say it all the time, clutter is not about the stuff. It's about what's underneath the stuff. And that is why I help women

This is what I help women identify and then begin to manage. The truth is a capacity problem. has a different, completely different set of solutions than a character problem when you're the failure or when there's a stuff problem. So here's how to kind of use this mindset shift in reality. When you catch yourself saying, I should be able to handle this, just...

catch that thought and replace it. Replace it with this. This is too much right now, but why? Why does this feel like too much from now, especially if you're trying to deal with physical clutter? If you're saying, why did I let it get this far? I can't believe that this is what my home looks like, right? Recognize this has been too much for me, but why? What's underneath? What does all of this actually mean? And what does it actually need?

That question leads somewhere productive. The self-blame doesn't. And one of the keys is going to be to understand yourself and your cluttered languages. And I've got a free guide that's gonna help you do that. You can find it at clutterlanguagesguide.com. If you have not yet downloaded that, it's free. If you have not yet downloaded that, pause right here, right now, and go do that. Clutterlanguagesguide.com, okay?

because that's gonna help you know, is this an identity, a future identity? Am I hanging onto this stuff because it's this future identity that I never quite stepped into or is it my past? Is it the fact that I'm having to acknowledge that certain roles and certain times in my life have passed and I have to close the door, but hanging onto this stuff, it makes it so that I don't really have to close the door. This is the stuff that that Clutter Languages Guide is gonna help you with. Make sure that you have it, okay?

So mindset shift number one though is to move from blaming yourself to recognizing that your ability to manage clutter of any kind depends on your capacity at that moment to deal with it. And a lot of times we don't have extra capacity. A lot of times, again, women are operating at full and over full capacity, okay? So that's mindset shift number one. Here's the mindset shift number two. We need to move from this thought.

If I just got organized or clear the pile or get through this week, it's going to be fine. And we need to move to this. The clutter is a symptom. Until I name the root, it's going to keep coming back. The symptom fix cycle is exhausting, specifically because it never ends. You clear the counter and it feels better for a few days or maybe a week.

or you cut something from the cowl and you get this breath of breathing room until there's a new commitment that fills that space in. Every form of clutter has a root and until these roots are named and addressed directly and honestly without sugar coating anything, the clutter is gonna keep returning. Maybe in a different form and maybe in a different space and probably from a different, and probably in a different visible format.

but the same source is going to be there. It's understanding the root. Again, this is why those organizational bins don't work. Not because they're a bad idea, but because a bin addresses a symptom. And the symptom is not the problem. So, before you reach, here's how to put this into practice in real life. Before you reach for the next organizational fix, ask, what is this clutter actually telling me?

here in the first place? Why is it hard for me to let this go? What is really going on? What purpose is this or are these things serving? Because keeping it is serving a purpose. Name that route, identify it, and then you'll know what the solution actually needs to be. Asking questions. This is how we diagnose the problem. In everything that I teach and coach women with, I say,

all over the place. I feel like a broken record. But I always talk about how important it is to diagnose the problem, not to treat the symptoms. Symptoms are putting a band-aid on something that is never going to heal. And it's why it doesn't work. You're not going to have more solid mornings that serve you.

when all you do is think, you know what, if I just had a more structured morning routine, it would all be better. There's a lot more happening under the surface. And it starts by asking the questions, right? What do I need my mornings to look like? What do I want my mornings to work like? What am I doing now that isn't working? What makes my mornings feel stressful? What are the friction points? If just a few things could be easier, what would I choose for those to be? It's,

It's getting underneath. need to figure out what is working and what's not. And we need to be able to figure out why aren't these things working and what would work better instead. That's that diagnosis versus solution and symptom treating. We don't want to treat symptoms. We want to fix the problem. So mindset shift number two was to move from fixing the symptom to identifying or naming the root.

Mindset shift three is this. We need to move from shame to clarity and then forward motion. We need to move from the thought that says, I've tried everything and it never sticks. Maybe I'm just not fixable. Maybe this is just what I have to tolerate. Maybe this is just the way that it's gonna be. We have to move from conversations like that, from thoughts like that to I've been trying to fix symptoms without understanding the root.

Now I'm starting to gain a different understanding. Now I can figure out what will actually move me forward. Again, I'm gonna point you back to clutterlanguagesguide.com. That's gonna be the best starting point that I can give you. That's why I created that free resource. Because clutter creates shame. And when shame is part of the equation, the clutter is gonna stay.

Shame will never allow for forward movement. Shame equals paralysis. Shame creates paralysis every single time. What you need is clarity, understanding. Because again, when you have those things, then you, the clarity, the understanding, they create options.

When you understand that clutter is a capacity problem, not a character problem, you can stop asking all of those same questions that have been spinning and spinning and spinning and keeping the clutter there for years or decades. And you can start asking really useful questions. You can name the root. You can know where to aim your energy. When you release the shame, you free up the bandwidth that was just

consumed by all of that self-blame and shame. And then the bandwidth becomes available for actual progress. The women who make real lasting progress on any form of clutter are not the ones who finally found enough motivation or enough discipline or cleared out enough weekends to do the decluttering.

They're the ones who finally got honest about what was actually going on and then they moved. Not perfectly, not all at once, but consistently from that honest foundation. And so to look at this and use this in a practical way, it's important to know that clarity is not the destination. It's actually.

the starting point and the only starting point that's gonna effectively allow you to start to break apart clutter of any kind. Once you know what's actually happening, you don't need to fix it all today. You just need to take one honest step from a place of understanding rather than shame. And that step is gonna be different from any step you've ever taken if you've not had that understanding.

And that step will be one that sticks in a way that the shame driven attempts never did.

So know that everything I've shared today, it's just the foundation. In the pieces that I write over on Substack, we're gonna talk more about each one of these five clutter types individually. We're gonna look at how they show up in real midlife women's lives. We're gonna talk about the specific roots behind each one and what it actually takes to address them.

Now, I will warn you, none of these things are gonna be quick fixes, but I will promise that all of it will be honest. But honestly, you've been around long enough to know that if the clutter has been strangling you for years and years, decades maybe, it's not going to be a quick solution. And I know you're not looking for quick solutions because again, you've been around long enough and I know you're smart enough to know that quick fixes aren't the ones that work. That's why we're stepping away from these.

But know that everything that I am, the way that we are unpacking this over on Substack, it's all gonna be built kind of on this foundation that we laid today. It's the root of capacity, not character. It's where we talk about understanding the actual root, diagnosing the actual problem, not treating the symptoms. And it is clarity, not shame. And these things,

These really make up the lens that midlife women need to use when it comes to pretty much everything. So make sure that you have downloaded my Clutter Languages Guide, clutterlanguagesguide.com. Make sure that you go down in the notes below and that you subscribe to my Substack Writings. Midlife clutter explained and solved. That's gonna be what we are doing.

So grab both of those things. Make sure that you are subscribed in both of those areas. And I would make sure that you are also following this channel right here because we're gonna be talking about all of this as well. I talk about clutter once a week right here, just like we're doing now. But the second thing to do is share with one other woman at least that you know needs to hear this. You know who she is. Send her this episode. It's for her.

Now, when you get over on Substack, the third thing to do is go read the essay. The pinned essay is called, Why Midlife Clutter Isn't the Problem. And know that if this episode that you've been listening to here resonated, that essay is going to feel like the missing piece that is starting to help everything kind of start connect and to kind of help everything click into place. So subscribe here, join over on Substack, share and read the pinned essay.

essay. That is where to start and know that we're going to be building from here, right here and in more depth over on Substack. So know that midlife clutter in every form, it is not in any way evidence of failure, even though you have probably been telling yourself up to this very point that it is. But what it actually is, is evidence of a life that has been very full. A woman who has been capable and responsible and present.

It shows a person who has been carrying weight, real weight, for a long time, often without relief or adequate support, and who has kept going anyway, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. The piles, the visible piles that you are looking at, they are not proof that anything is wrong with you, and the noise that is going on in your head, it is not proof that something is wrong with you.

the emotional backlog, the emotions that kind of feel so often like they're right in your throat, or the overful calendar, the quiet question of who you actually are underneath all of those roles, none of those unsettling things are proof that anything is wrong with you. It's actually proof that you're human and that you're a human with biology and that you've been overloaded probably for a long time.

And that distinction, that understanding, it changes everything. And so, we'll talk again soon and I'll see you over on Substack. Have a great day.