How To Banish Visual Clutter For Ever!

For many children, especially those diagnosed with ADHD, Autism, and Aspergers, clutter can be a huge distraction. It can cause stress and anxiety and inhibit creativity and productivity.  In this post, we talk about visual clutter and how to reduce the visual clutter bombarding our children’s brains daily.

What is visual clutter?

Visual clutter comes in many forms. It’s present at home, in the mall, at work, at school, and just about everywhere. Some typical examples of visual clutter would be:

• TV
• iPhones
• Laptops
• Tablets
• Newspaper headlines
• Adverts
• Magazines
• Books
• Clocks
• Shop windows
• Road signs
• Consumer products
• Cars
• Desks
• Throw pillows
• Shoes
• Coats
• Nic-naks

These gadgets and products bombard us with messages every second of every day.

Our brain is trying to distinguish if these messages are:

• Important or urgent, do you need to deal with it now, or can it be left for later? Is it ok to be ignored?
• Life-threatening, Is this life-threatening? Do you need to protect yourself? 
• Something which needs to be remembered, are you going to need to remember and store this information for later?
• Feel-good messages, do these messages make us feel good, or are they triggering some negative emotion in us every time we read them?

All of these messages are known as visual clutter and can be quite overwhelming to people who struggle to live in a cluttered environment.

Are you adding extra visual clutter to your home? 

Some of us may have chosen to add “extra” visual clutter in the design of our homes by displaying ornaments that spell out words such as  “bathroom,” “love,” or “home” or choose to have busy and loud decor. 

I wonder how many times a day we subconsciously read the label on our shower gel, toothpaste tube, washing up liquid or moisturiser.

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How I began to reduce visual clutter

If your house is extremely cluttered, check out this post to help you start reducing visual clutter.

The decluttering guru  Marie Kondo suggests we protect our homes from visual clutter by encouraging us to remove labels wherever possible from daily products.

As a mother of two young children, I figured this would be almost impossible for safety reasons. However, off I went to give it a go.

I thought I’d start my experiment with the hand wash bottle, as I figured even my five-year-old knows that it is soap and won’t get it muddled up with anything else in the bathroom.

I carefully peeled away the label, full of hundreds of little words, and I was left with a clear bottle. To my surprise, it felt great not to read the words “Imperial Leather Hand Soap” every time I washed my hands. I decided to swap the generic bottle for a nice decorative foaming soap bottle like this one which my kids love to use.

Reducing visual clutter became addictive; I couldn’t stop once I started!

I removed the labels from my stuff first and started with small products such as lip balms, moisturizers, hand creams, mascaras, and items easily recognizable to me and that others did not use.

When I peeled the label off my expensive moisturizer, it looked no different from the other cheaper brands. I felt annoyed at myself for being drawn into the brand’s consumerism and advertising.  I suddenly realized that I’d been duped and had been paying through the nose for the pretty packaging. Every product looked the same without all the gorgeous packaging. I realized that I had been paying huge prices for the packaging rather than the product inside.

This revelation profoundly affected how I shopped; I immediately began to change the way I purchased luxury beauty products, which was a great weakness of mine.

It felt good and liberating, and the thought of the extra money I’d saved in my bank account gave me more of a thrill than purchasing the product would ever have.

How you can slowly reduce visual clutter

The next step in my journey toward a spa-like home was to carefully assess which communal items I could safely remove the labels without adding any confusion to a family who already has difficulty finding things!

Items I removed labels from :

• Hand soap was easily recognizable to all family members in my new hand soap dispensers
• Shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel. We now use these simple human wall-mounted soap dispensers for shampoo conditioner and shower gel.
• Body lotions.
• Face cream.
• Foundation.
• Mascara.
• Lipsticks.
• Lip balms.
• Teabags. Decanted into these OXO stackable storage jars
• Beans and pulses. stored in stackable storage jars
• Biscuits and crackers. in airtight containers for freshness
• Pasta and Rice. stored in airtight stackable jars like these
• Washing powder. stored in an Addis airtight cereal dispenser like this one
• Dishwashing pods. stored in airtight jars like this one
• Coffee. stored in stackable airtight jars like these ones
• Nuts. stored in a stackable container
• Cereal. Stored in an airtight cereal box like this one
• Candles.

Disclaimer

• I store foodstuffs in glass jars or plastic stackable containers, and laundry pods, etc. are stored in plastic containers out of the reach of small children.
• I only remove labels from bottles if they are easy to remove within seconds and are not dangerous to my kids.
• I never remove labels from cleaning products or anything hazardous.

The benefits of banishing visual clutter.

• I love having fewer packaged products in my home as I think it feels so much more tranquil and clutter-free and helps bring unity to my home.
• I no longer feel that I’m subconsciously re-reading the same words repeatedly in my home.
• My kids seem more relaxed and calm.
• The house appears tidier even when it’s at its worst.
•  As far as I’m aware, no one in the family has washed their hair with conditioner yet, but you never know in our house!

Other items that cause visual clutter in your home.

Besides the unnecessary labels, there are many other ways visual clutter creeps into our homes and makes us anxious and overwhelmed.

Most of these problems can be fixed by creating a routine to get yourself into daily habits to reduce visual clutter and the build-up of these items. Read how to get organized and create a routine for your home here.

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