Did you walk into someone’s house and find it stacked to the point of a messy hoarding?
Is your closet full of old clothes you haven’t worn in years and can’t give up?
Has your home, office, or garage become a maze of cluttered narrow hallways?
Please read this article if you answer yes to one or more of these questions.
Hoarding is a behavior that compels a person to excessively collect and keep items that others may consider useless or of little value. This behavior can lead to the excessive accumulation of items, causing chaos and impacting the individual’s psychological, social, and physical well-being. The problem occurs when hoarding seriously affects your daily functioning. Hoarding tends to be a solitary behavior that begins in adolescence by holding on to many items without the need or the space for them. Hoarding problems typically begin in one’s teenage years and worsen in older adults. The problem begins when people who have this behavior rarely seek help on their own because they are often afraid of letting things go.
Here are behaviors and feelings associated with hoarding.
- Desire to keep and store useless items at home or abroad.
- Storing old newspapers and books under the pretext of reading them later.
- Keep empty boxes, tools, and clothes on the pretext that these things may be necessary for the future.
- Accumulating and buying stuff without regard to their feasibility or the existence of space for them.
- Tendency to avoid any social activity.
- Exaggerated psychological and emotional attachment to things and people
- The delusional belief in the importance of these things in the subjective formation of an individual’s personality
- Associating their feelings of safety with accumulating things
- Disturbance in decision-making, whether by recklessness or procrastination
- Exposure to some symptoms of depression and the pursuit of perfection in their lives.
- Loss of ability to relate current life events to past experiences
- Persistent feelings of dissatisfaction, helplessness, and lack of enjoyment of life
- Bad mood, deterioration of will, and loss of ability to focus.
No one has been able to identify the leading causes of hoarding. However, studies have indicated the causes may be exposure to a traumatic situation during childhood, the loss of a loved or the rapid loss of property as well as some studies suggested they may have some genetic factors. Hoarders feel that what they hoard has sentimental value or is unique and irreplaceable.
Why Hoarding is Dangerous?
- Hoarding could make the person infected with respiratory diseases due to the accumulation of dust around.
- Exposure to some bacterial infections as a result of poor hygiene.
- Exposure to accidents and shocks resulting from crowding the house with piled things.
- Living in inappropriate places due to crowding, chaos, and organizational problems.
- Exposure to environmental hazards such as fire or the spread of insects.
- Exposure to some legal disputes such as eviction or eviction from housing.
How to get rid of hoarding?
- Communicate with friends and relatives and seek support to help change behavior.
- Develop organizational and decision-making skills.
- Get rid of unnecessary things gradually without pressure.
- Connect with the present and replace any negative thoughts associated with negative past experiences.
- Do meditation and yoga because it helps to organize thoughts.
- Joinihealing groups to eliminate this behavior through similar experiences.
- Seek help from a professional or life coach to help you get rid of feelings of anxiety when getting rid of this behavior.
It is necessary to explain. Collecting things is different from hoarding because people who collect rare collections of paintings, pictures, stamps, or cars are people who are deliberately looking for, categorizing, and caring for certain things. These are their hobbies, and they don’t create chaos and have nothing to do with compulsive hoarding.
If you suffer from hoarding behavior and need help, contact us to work together.
