Reddit reviews Scaling Down: Living Large in a Smaller Space

Welcome to the sub.

> I've never been very organized and I've been battling depression and anxiety.

My first question is: are you receiving therapy for your depression and anxiety?

I ask this because hoarding disorder tends to be highly co-morbid with those mental health issues. Something like 50% of people who live with the urge to hoard also have clinical depression and/or some form of anxiety disorder. Some therapists have found that if depression and/or anxiety are treated, the urge to hoard lessens significantly.

So if you aren't in therapy for those issues, I'd suggest looking into it. And if you are in therapy currently, be sure to let your therapist know that you're dealing with the urge to hoard so they can tailor your therapy accordingly.

Your first action, before you throw out a thing, is to start looking at your thought patterns and beliefs about acquiring/keeping/discarding items, and how you can start changing them. If you don't start there, then you'll simply re-hoard after you throw things out. I suggest you read the following links from our Resource List:

1. r/hoarding: How do you change your thoughts
   
2. Video: The Downward Arrow: a video demonstration of rethinking your items, with Dr. Randy Frost.
   
3. r/hoarding: Use A Dysfunctional Thought Record (DTR) To Change Your Thinking
   
4. r/hoarding: Shame, and Overcoming Shame-Based Thinking
   
5. A Little Table on How to Get Rid of All That Negative Self-Talk
   
6. The Non-Acquiring Card from 'Buried In Treasures'
   
7. r/hoarding - Clutter Blindness: What It Is and How to Fight It
   
8. This r/BestOf comment from u/stopaclock has great advice and exercises for the recovering hoarder.
   
9. Living Life to the Full - a Free, Guided Introduction to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - a free website that takes you through how to identify unhelpful thoughts and feelings, and develop new ways of thinking using CBT methods. Recommended for use by the National Health Service in the UK.
   
10. I'm Having A Hard Time Letting Go Of Things - What Can I Do? Someone trying to de-hoard gave away a saddle, and posted while she was in the grip of her anxiety from having done so. The r/hoarding community helps her work through things, and provides advice.
    
11. Tell the story of your possessions: u/Call4Compassion attended the 2017 IOCDF Conference, and gave a live demonstration of how she processes her feelings about an object as she decides what to do with it. She explains that in detail in the video, and in this post.
    
12. r/hoarding - Parting With Sentimental Clutter (taken from Unclutterer.com)
    
13. Self-Help Tools for Hoarders
    
14. r/hoarding - for those who are still undoing their hoarding. Great advice from a recovering hoarder.
    
15. r/hoarding - Perfectionism, and Experimenting with Reduction of Clutter
    
    
    I also suggest the following books:
    
    
16. Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding by Skeketee, Tolin, and Frost is the book for the hoarder looking for where to start. It includes strategies for changing unhelpful beliefs about one's possessions, and behavioral experiments to reduce one's anxiety and fear of discarding. Highly recommended because this book gives you an actual plan of attack, rather than a series of "tips".
    
17. Before the world heard of "hoarders", Sandra Felton was writing about "messies". A reformed hoarder herself, she wrote Messie No More: Understanding and Overcoming the Roadblocks to Being Organized, which (among other things) discusses how most organizational methods don't work for messies, and give practical advice on what can work for you, and how to implement it. Her entire series of books are gold for recovering hoarders.
    
18. Scaling Down : Living Large in a Smaller Space by Judi Culbertson. This book gets inside the mind of the reader who wants to do something about all the stuff they have, but worry they will give away something they may need later, something that was a gift from someone, something that reminds them of something good long ago, or a variety of other mind games 'stuff' evokes. The author also tackles the prevention issue so that the reader doesn't get back into the mess they just got out of. Best of all, the author does all this without making the reader feel like a loser or stupid for becoming a pack rat, hoarder, or procrastinator. Has step-by-step guides and is written specifically for the older reader (but can be helpful to anyone of any age).
    
19. Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding: Why You Save and How You Can Stop is another book written specifically for the self-admitted hoarder looking for where to start. The psychiatrist authors offer a series of skill-building exercises to help a hoarder identify why they hoard, so they can eventually clean.
    
    It's critical to "re-train your brain" in order to bring your urge under control. You started by acknowledging that you've got a a problem, which in and of itself is huge. Your next step is to focus on the things your brain tells you about your items--why you should get them, why you should keep them, and why you shouldn't part with them--and how to change those messages.
    
    This is a tough journey. Please feel free to come here for support.