You walk through the door after work. The hallway light has been broken for three months, a mountain of “I’ll wash it tomorrow” clothes is piled on the chair, and on the kitchen table sits the box from that blender you bought back in February—it’s November now. You suddenly feel a wave of exhaustion roll over you, even though you haven’t done anything physically demanding today. Sound familiar?

This isn’t just “I’m lazy, I need to clean.” This is your brain screaming: “There’s way too much work for me here—even when I’m just sitting still.”

When Chaos Becomes an Invisible Enemy

Back in 2010–2011, American psychologist Darby Saxbe from the University of Southern California conducted a study that people still quote whenever the topic of home environment and mental health comes up. She asked married couples to keep diaries describing their homes in their own words using terms like “cozy,” “restorative,” and “peaceful”… or conversely, “cluttered” and “full of unfinished projects.”

The results were brutal. Women (who more often carried the emotional perception of the home) living in “cluttered” and “unfinished” spaces showed significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms and chronic fatigue. And—most importantly—they displayed elevated cortisol levels in the evening.

Why does this matter? Cortisol is your stress hormone. In a healthy cycle, it should drop at night to allow you to recover. If your cortisol remains high, your body physically cannot switch off “stress mode” even when you are sitting on the couch. The effect was weaker in men regarding self-reported mood, but the physiological stress was still clearly present. In other words, the place that is supposed to be your safe haven was turning into another biological source of stress.

Why Your Brain Reacts This Way to Mess

Just look around for a second. Your eyes register dozens of objects at once: an open closet, three remotes on the couch, yesterday’s pizza box, a cable sticking out of the socket. Every single one of these items is a tiny, unfinished task. Your brain treats them like an unsolicited to-do list.

A 2011 Princeton University study (McMains & Kastner) demonstrated a very simple biological fact: when your visual field is overloaded with task-irrelevant objects, your visual cortex gets overwhelmed. You literally focus worse on whatever you’re doing because a percentage of your neurons are busy filtering out the junk to distinguish what matters. It is exactly like having 47 browser tabs open—your computer doesn’t crash immediately, but everything starts lagging, the fan spins louder, and the battery drains faster.

It’s Not About Aesthetics. It’s About Control

The most interesting discovery came later. People living in chronic clutter often feel a low sense of control over their lives in general. Objects become symbols: “I can’t even finish things at home.” That starts a vicious cycle—the more chaos exists, the less energy you have to clean, leading to more shame and helplessness.

Remember the Zeigarnik effect? This is the psychological phenomenon where the brain keeps unfinished tasks in working memory much more actively than completed ones. It creates a state of cognitive tension. Now, multiply that tension by 50–300 unfinished little things surrounding you every single day. Your brain never gets the “task complete” signal.

Why Women and Men React Differently

Saxbe noticed something curious: women more often described their homes with emotional language and showed stronger physiological reactions to clutter (cortisol spikes). Men were more likely to say “it’s fine, I’m used to it.” But when researchers measured objectively—cortisol went up in men too.

This is crucial for the guys reading this: You might not feel annoyed by the mess emotionally, but your body is still reacting to the chaotic environment with a stress response. You just tend not to notice or admit it until the exhaustion hits.

What to Do If You’re Already Stuck in This Swamp

Don’t try to do a full three-day deep clean—that is the fast track to burnout number two. Psychologists who work with procrastination and depression recommend starting with “micro-completions.”

• Close one single drawer completely. All the way.
• Take out one bag of trash right now. Just one.
• Put one item exactly where it’s supposed to live permanently.

Why does this work? Every tiny completion is proof to your brain: “I can control at least something.” This releases a small hit of dopamine and breaks the paralysis loop. That works better than any motivational quote.

There’s also the “visible progress” trick—keep one shelf or one corner perfectly clean. Your brain latches onto that little island of order and gradually wants to expand it, rather than being overwhelmed by the whole house.

Bottom Line Without the Sugar-Coating

Your home isn’t just the place where you sleep. It is an external extension of your nervous system. When it’s a mess, you are living in low-grade constant stress—even if you are so used to it you don’t notice anymore.

This isn’t about becoming a minimalist or channeling Marie Kondo. It’s about stopping the slow leak of energy and stress hormones you’re paying for things you’ll probably throw away someday anyway.

Sources:

• Saxbe, D. E., & Repetti, R. (2010). No place like home: Home tours correlate with daily patterns of mood and cortisol. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(1), 71–81.
• McMains, S., & Kastner, S. (2011). Interactions of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in human visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(2), 587–597.

And yes, that friend who always calls their desk “creative mess” needs to see this too. Whenever they finally find their phone under the pile of papers.