Minimalism

If you’ve heard about minimalism, you probably know a big part of it is about living life with less stuff. Since embracing a more minimalist lifestyle starting in 2014, I’ve never looked back. Getting started with minimalism involves honestly assessing all the items in your life. What started as an intimidating process has now helped me become more confident, not just in a social context, but also in making decisions.

Minimalism has helped me in more ways than one. The minimalist lifestyle has also opened me to new and diverse experiences. Besides, becoming a minimalist has made my life a whole lot easier! 

Let me tell you not just one, but fifteen ways minimalism makes my life better. While some of them are in good fun, hopefully they inspire you to get started on living a more minimalist lifestyle.

15 Benefits Of A Minimalist Lifestyle

1 / Tidy Fridge, Less Spoiled Food

Look at your refrigerator. I mean, look inside it. Is it easy to see everything you have in there? If you haven’t been living a minimalist lifestyle, chances are, your fridge is filled with slowly rotting vegetables or leftovers from weeks ago. This is a sign that your refrigerator needs decluttering. Having an uncluttered fridge also means easier meal prep. It’s easier to see what you have and make plans for meals, so you have less spoiled food. 

2 / Less Misplaced Things

Okay, so maybe you’ll still misplace a thing or two. However, it won’t be such a chore to look for your sunglasses or car keys with minimalism. By assigning a space where you can place these small items, you know you can quickly locate them throughout your house. While you may still misplace things, at least you’ll have an easier time finding them in an uncluttered environment.

3 / Closet With Clothes You Actually Wear

“I might wear this someday.” This is the most commonly used line when people try to declutter their closets. If you can relate, perhaps you have clothes in your closet you’ve never worn or, maybe, you’ve only worn them once. Some clothes in the closet might not even fit you anymore. In comparison, a minimalist’s closet is filled with clothes that actually fit, in addition to clothes that you actually like wearing. 

4 / Getting Ready Takes Less Time

Another plus of having fewer clothes and belongings with a minimalist lifestyle is getting ready takes less time! With the non-essential items decluttered, and the essential items more organized, it’s much easier to get dressed and out the door. 

5 / No More Kitchen Cupboard Jenga

Let’s move to the kitchen. If you’re stacking up your kitchenware like you’re playing Jenga, you can see how that version of the game is less fun and more dangerous. By decluttering and organizing your kitchen cupboard, you create more ease and space.

6 / Clearer Workspace For Greater Focus

Keeping a clear workspace saves time and allows you to focus better on the task at hand. It’s a little bit like magic. It’s not just about clearing your workspace, but really more on the fact that by decluttering, you are allowing yourself to focus on your current priorities. This is one way that minimalism makes my work life so much easier to manage.

7 / Less Stuff, More Money

If you buy less stuff, you save more money. While this is pretty obvious, it’s not just about saving money. A minimalist lifestyle helps you realize your buying habits. It helps you question whether or not you actually need something. There are also instances where minimalism can help you make some money back. When you declutter, you can also sell certain items rather than donating or giving them away. Cha-ching!

8 / No More Storage Fees

With less stuff, there’s no need to pay for storage costs. About 1 in 10 American households use storage units, with the average rental length being 15.8 months according to Extra Space Storage (AARP Magazine, April/May 2021 issue). The cost to rent a storage unit averages $103.59 per month in New York City. With minimalism, you can say goodbye to those storage fees! 

9 / Garage Space For Your Car

If you’re not paying for a storage unit, perhaps you’re parking your car in the driveway because your garage is full of stuff you don’t really use. By keeping less stuff, you can finally park your car in the garage! 

10 / Lighter Laundry Days

As a minimalist, laundry days are easier. Before, I had this habit of prolonging laundry day by wearing clothes I didn’t like when I ran out of the clothes that I liked wearing. The resulting piles of laundry used to take me hours! Nowadays, laundry only takes about one to two loads every one or two weeks, and I’m done.

11 / Unexpected Guests, No Problem

Have you ever been stressed when your friends or family unexpectedly drop by to visit you? Here’s another secret. With minimalism, seeing unexpected guests is a lot less stressful! With an uncluttered living space, there is minimal to no clean-up needed when guests come by. 

12 / Cheaper, Lighter Travel

Traveling light means you can carry on your luggage and save money on checked luggage fees. By taking only what you need, there’s less weight to carry, and there isn’t a struggle to fit everything inside your bag. Go minimalist with your luggage, and you’ll have more bang for your buck when you travel. 

13 / All Your Pens Work

Isn’t it the worst when you pull a pen out, and it doesn’t work? A minimalist would have gotten rid of those dead pens a long time ago. By practicing minimalism, you can be sure that all the items you find in your home are ones you can actually use.

14 / Goodbye Overstuffed Drawers

Say hello to the standard household drawer. In most homes, it’s probably overstuffed with items like chargers, cables, papers, and pens that probably don’t work. With minimalism, there are no more overstuffed drawers! Drawers are tidy and organized with the things you use and need. 

15 / Less Of A Visual To-do List

Finally, when you’re a minimalist, there’s less of a visual to-do list everywhere you look. Instead of seeing projects and random things that need to be done, you can actually relax or concentrate on the task at hand. 

Minimalism will look different for everyone. But the small day-to-day actions and habits really do add up. As you declutter your life, you’ll find that with a more minimalist lifestyle, it becomes easier to do more of what matters every day.

When Anthony and I first began our minimalism journey, we had no idea what to expect. It felt challenging at first to declutter our things but it got easier as time went on. Over time, we realized that clutter goes far beyond physical things. Clutter exists in digital, emotional, mental realms, and the list goes on. And whether it’s physical or not, one of the most difficult categories to declutter is what I call aspirational clutter.

The Easier Stuff, What You Don’t Want

When we initially started decluttering, our efforts focused on physical things. The idea of going through all the items was overwhelming at the beginning. Also, the decluttering process definitely made the home situation worse before it got better.

It was difficult back then to get rid of things that would be easy now. One item at a time through playing minsgame, I steadily got more comfortable. I went from counting old business cards as items at the start to donating barely-worn clothing and basically-new appliances towards the end. We both did multiple rounds of minsgame that first year, and soon, we began decluttering organically and periodically as we saw fit. I got used to decluttering the things that were no longer adding value to my life, whether utilitarian or sentimental. It got to the point where I didn’t feel like I had many more things to declutter.

So I began focusing on the other areas. Cleaning up, organizing, and deleting old digital files that were no longer useful. Diving into emotions from the past I was holding onto so I could release them. Working to let go of unproductive mindsets and beliefs that kept me from trusting myself and building more confidence.

Aspirational Clutter, What You Do Want

Along the way, I realized there was a whole other category to declutter. One that was vastly different from the things I didn’t want anymore in my life. And that was aspirational clutter. It’s one thing to declutter items that you don’t want anymore. It’s a whole different game to declutter the things that you do want (or think you want).

Aspirational clutter is the excess of what we hold onto for our potential selves instead of who we are and what we’re able to do in the present.

Aspirational clutter can take shape in different forms. It can be the yoga mat you buy (the false first step) after envisioning yourself balancing on one foot under a tree on a beautiful spring day—even though you’ve never tried yoga before. It’s an idea in your head of who you could be if only you had this or that. Maybe it’s a belief that feeling happy all the time is the gold standard and anything less isn’t good enough. It could be a vision of what success looks like to someone else, not your personal definition of success.

Underlying Feeling and Weight

The underlying feeling of not-enoughness that results in holding onto the item or idea is what aspirational clutter causes. Aspirational clutter stems from a (sometimes unconscious) belief you are not good enough. Another form is the belief that you’re not doing enough as you are. So you cling to the physical item, idea, or to-do list item, even though it’s not adding anything beneficial to your life. You may feel a sense of failure, guilt, or shame whenever you see anything that reminds you of what you’re not doing.

There’s also an emotional and mental weight to the aspirational clutter, whether you realize it or not. It’s similar to when your coffee table is cluttered with many different items. You may not notice the stress that the physical clutter is adding because you’re gotten used to it. But once you’ve cleared the table is when you realize how much lighter and more focused you feel. Similarly, aspirational clutter adds additional stress so we’re not as able to focus on what’s going on now.

When we hold onto aspirational clutter, we think about other things when we are doing another thing. We expend energy feeling not-enough and feeling like we should be doing more. Ironically, we can mistakenly think that these are good things. We may think the clutter is good since they are often in the name of personal growth, an increase in social status, or some improvement.

Examples of Aspirational Clutter

Things that used to be aspirational clutter for me were old notebooks filled with my notes from past courses that I thought were important. There were also books that I held onto for later reference, but realistically, were more for who I wanted to appear as than an actual need.

Beyond physical things, I had hundreds of unread emails that I meant to read—of the latest news or research in a field. It wasn’t feasible to read all of them, but I held onto them because what if there was some piece of information in there that could really benefit me?

Aspirational clutter also included definitions of success based on others who were completely different than me. Additionally, I held myself to standards in the past that weren’t for me because I didn’t know who I really was.

Merging the physical, digital, mental, and emotional, was my aspirational list of what I wanted to get done for the day. I’d start each day with so much aspirational clutter that it probably would’ve taken me weeks to do all of the things. Therefore, I’d get two or three things done out of a list of ten things at the end of the day. It’s no wonder I constantly felt like I was behind and that I never had enough time. Even if I didn’t put the thing on my to-do list for the day, I still was thinking about it. I would be reminded of certain things and think about them while working on something else. I didn’t fully realize at the time just how much aspirational clutter was weighing me down.

An Ongoing Process

I’ve since gotten rid of old notebooks and many books. I’ve also unsubscribed from and deleted thousands of emails over the years. Examining my beliefs and ideas is something I’ve spent a great part of the last year doing. Nowadays, I’m much more realistic about what I’m able to take on each day and month. However, it’s an ongoing battle.

Managing aspirational clutter is an ongoing process because there will always be new interests and more things that I want. It’s part of the natural evolution of what it means to be human. As social beings, it’s difficult not to be influenced by others and by what we see. It’s easy to compare and feel like you’re not enough, especially with social media and advertising.

What’s Not Aspirational Clutter

Aspirational clutter doesn’t include the long-term goals you’re working towards or your vision of where you’re going. It’s also not something that you have a use for in your life. It can be tricky at times to tell what is what, but one distinction is whether it’s fully aligned with what you actually want—not what you wish you could be. The other distinction is if you have space in your life right now or an intentional plan for later.

If you have space for and make time in your life to do yoga, even if it is only periodically, a yoga mat is not aspirational clutter. When you have an intentional plan around creating space for a new hobby, it’s not aspirational clutter. I’ve compiled a list of questions I ask myself to help me identify what’s aspirational clutter and what’s not.

Intention is Key

Perhaps, after some reflection, you realize you do have space to take action on the thing. Or maybe you really don’t have the time right now. It’s okay to have ideas and physical items on the back burner for when you do have space. Whatever you end up deciding, setting your intention is key to releasing the aspirational clutter.

When you have a clear intention to postpone, the thing no longer has any weight or feeling of obligation. It can be beneficial to avoid the false first step until you have space in your life. That way, you won’t have un-used items sitting around for months or years reminding you what you aren’t doing.

One other thing to keep in mind is, not all ideas are meant to be yours. Just because you have an idea or a physical item that you want, doesn’t mean you need to keep it or do something with it. Even if something seems cool or interesting, it may not be a true fit for you.

Release the aspirational clutter so you can better focus on what’s going on now. However, pay attention to the ideas or things that come to mind again and again. There may be a reason they keep on coming back to you. It’s worth thinking about making an intentional plan of how and when you’d have space to act on these recurring items.

Another Way Forward

So how do you know what’s aspirational clutter and what’s not? And what are the steps you can take to deal with the aspirational clutter that’s weighing you down?

As mentioned earlier, identifying aspirational clutter can be difficult. Doing so requires a level of awareness and being honest with yourself. I know firsthand, easier said than done.

I’ve come up with questions I ask myself that help me identify the aspirational clutter. Additionally, I go through a step-by-step process to release this type of clutter. Given the nature of aspirational clutter, the process is different from decluttering the things you don’t want anymore.

Life without all the aspirational clutter is a lot less stressful. We all have periods of time that are busier. But if you constantly feel like there are too many things to do and not enough time, there’s likely aspirational clutter weighing you down. If you’re feeling overwhelmed on a consistent basis, it’s worth asking yourself what is the aspirational clutter in your life. Know that there is another way forward, one that I’ve found to be more beneficial and where I’m more at ease.

Anthony’s Note: Thanks to Bridget Baker for this guest post! For more from Bridget, you can check out MinimalistMojo.com and her Pinterest.

Everything just feels like it’s falling into place. You’re focused, you’ve got clarity, and your relationships are working. You’re feeling it. You’re in the flow. Oh, look at you; you’ve got your mojo on! 

Then, something happens. These shiny new opportunities that are growing in your life start to turn into you being busier, having less time for creative pursuits, and feeling utterly overwhelmed. Your to-do-lists have to-do lists, and what seemed like a good idea has now become a source of stress and frustration. How’d you get here again? 

Clutter and chaos do not usually happen overnight. Piece of paper by piece of paper, your desktop papers turn into a mountain of documents. A closet of clothes that fit you and that you love becomes shoved to the gills with things you bought, thinking they’d make you feel better or that you just had to have to get that perfect work-from-home loungewear look dialed in. 

If you’re feeling like you can’t get your confidence back, it may be time for a lifestyle shift. If everything becomes important, then it’s hard to tell what really matters from what’s in the way. It ALL feels like a priority, and somewhere along the way, you lost your sense of self, your sense of joy, and your purpose. 

It may be time to embrace a minimalist lifestyle.

I bet you’re thinking: “What? How could only having 33 items of clothing or stark white walls get me feeling fabulous again?” Well, it’s not just about the “stuff.” 

Let’s start with what I mean by the term minimalism, first. While minimalism started out as a design movement in the 1920s, it became known as a lifestyle after the recession of 2008 forced many people to downsize and reevaluate their lives. Minimalism is not a religion, nor a cult, and does NOT mean you have to live like a monk with a fancy backpack and a digital nomad life. It IS a way to look at decluttering, organizing, simplifying, and living a more fulfilling life with less. This means less stress, less clutter, less overwhelm, or less of what you don’t want, so you can focus on and be available for more of what you DO want. 

You can embark on a minimalist lifestyle in several ways, but making the shift involves a letting go—from the physical to the mental—and strategies for staying conscious and aware of what you let into your life. I recommend starting with what you want first. If you’ve got lots of clutter in your way, it may be difficult to see what is important. 

When you’re feeling overwhelmed, the last thing you may want to do is to take the time to clean out your email inbox or declutter your closet. Take a breath, put it on your calendar, and make the time. Taking the time for you makes you more available to the people you care about. Living simply and being organized can increase your productivity, your well-being, and your joy. It may even make you more fun to be around!

Start small. Pick one area of your house, set a timer for an hour, and go for it. You may feel resistant at first or ashamed of how cluttered things may have gotten. Keep reminding yourself that step by step, it will get done. If you don’t have an entire weekend to devote to decluttering, don’t haul every single item of clothing out of your closets and purge all at once. It may be best for you to play a game like the mins game, or try some other popular decluttering methods, so you can take the slow and steady approach to get it done. 

What works for one person may not work for you, and there is no one set rule book for minimalism. If it’s in your way, you don’t love it, or you don’t need it, let it go. It really is that simple. It may help to crank up some music, enlist the help of a friend, and to celebrate the wins as you go, reminding yourself it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Also, you’ll want to create strategies to keep your space decluttered so that you don’t find yourself right back where you started. I left myself no out by moving into a travel trailer and selling all our furniture, rather than storing it, but that may be a little too extreme for you. 😉

Again, find what works for YOU and stick with it.

When you move what doesn’t work, what doesn’t inspire you, or what doesn’t have room in your life out of the way, you can get your mojo back. Your confidence increases, and you can shine, free of the pile of clutter—physical, or proverbial—that’s been standing in your way. The world needs that special magic that you’ve got to offer, and when you simplify your life, you can take better care of yourself and do more of what you love. And, let’s face it, we all need each other these days more than ever.

Six years ago when I started learning about minimalism, I didn’t know what to expect. Sure, I heard about how minimalism makes your life easier and less cluttered. However, I didn’t truly understand how minimalism would impact me—the specifics, you know? The concrete ways of how getting rid of things, creating space, and minimalism as a whole could lead to living a more intentional, fulfilling life. But over the years of exploring and sharing what I’ve learned here, my experience has validated that minimalism is a fundamental building block for creating consistency in personal growth, and building better habits.

Minimalism is both an effective tool and one of the best places to start if you know something in your life needs to change.

I get the disconnect though. It’s a bit of a leap to believe that simply donating a few pieces of clothing translates to more space and your life magically getting better. The math doesn’t quite add up—but it’s the space that is slowly built over time, even the seemingly inconsequential things that have allowed me to be more consistent than ever.

Consistency is where the magic happens. Small, steady improvements change the entire game. And minimalism creates space for consistency. That’s where it all comes together.

Consistency is impossible without margin.

Anthony Ongaro

The Importance of Margin

Life is unpredictable and inconsistent. I mean, look at the year we’ve just been through. 2020 really put a lot of us through the wringer. When we sat down at the end of 2019 to dream up what the next year would look like, I don’t think any of us would have painted this picture. And just in case any time travelers happen to be reading this, buy stock in Zoom and Peloton at the end of March 2020. You’ll thank me later.

Even outside the wildly unexpected global pandemic, things happen. Unexpected delays, events, or tasks can result in not enough time, energy, or resources to do what you set out to do.

So when you’re running late, feeling overwhelmed, and you can’t do that thing you’ve committed to doing—it’s not because you’re not good enough or need to work harder or faster. If you have too many things in a box, and life suddenly hands you another thing to put in it, it’s not because you’re not a capable put-stuff-in-a-boxer. However hard you push, it’s not going to fit in the box. You’re not going to have space for an extra thing if the box is already full. That’s just how it works.

Minimalism is what helps you create the space to be consistent across different areas of your life. If your schedule is slammed full, the odds of you being able to consistently have time and energy get to the gym to work out will be lowered.

Minimalism and Attention

The minimalism effect even goes beyond the calendar and physical space. Minimalism also impacts attention space. I’m talking about the energy bucket that’s drained from us when we’re super focused on creative, analytical, or detailed work. If we’re not careful about protecting our attention space and what we spend that on, we can end up with less energy to spend on the things that are personally important to us.

With decluttering clothing in particular, it’s easy to see how it translates to less time choosing what to wear since you will have fewer options to choose from. Removing an item from your life means that you’re not organizing or cleaning it. You’re not even thinking about items that are no longer in your life. This also applies to attention space. The fewer things you do, the better you can do those things.

But this is where it can get kind of tricky. Because sometimes our subconscious can over leverage our attention as a defensive measure. It’s one of the ways we can self-sabotage and prevent ourselves from giving our full selves to the few most important things.

There are many reasons why it may be scary to give our full selves to something. What if we do that and it’s not good enough? What if it ends up not working out? That can be a scary proposition, and so it’s sometimes easier to be incredibly busy and distracted with lots of things going on. The clutter helps to hide those underlying insecurities and feelings of not-enoughness.

If it were easy to simply commit to just doing one or two things over and over again until we got to mastery, then we’d all choose that path. But instead, many of us feel societal pressure to do more and more. Many of us deal with limiting beliefs that get in our way. Minimalism helps reduce the noise, increase our awareness, and save more energy for what’s truly important.

Minimalism as a Practice

The final way in how minimalism builds consistency is that it’s meant to be a consistent practice that ebbs and flows as your life changes. Minimalism isn’t mean to be an end goal. There’s no pressure to reach an end goal where you’re finally a minimalist and now you’re done. Your life is going to be change; your needs and interests are going to shift.

The decluttering process is a series of decisions and choices on what you want in your life and what you don’t. When you first start decluttering, the items you declutter may be smaller and it may go more slowly. As you go on though, you’re actually building your decision muscle and confidence. It will get easier and easier to decide. Minimalism as a practice is about paying attention and actively deciding what to declutter and what to keep as your life evolves.

At the core of it, I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to be a minimalist. You will have more time and energy to go after what’s important to you. You will have greater awareness and confidence to face the small discomforts and the unpredictability of life. This work is ultimately what Break the Twitch is about—identifying and stepping into small discomforts, slowly building the muscle that allows us to do it better and better over time. That’s personal growth, and it’s what I’ve been doing steadily since embarking on this journey six years ago.

Happy Break the Twitch Day, everyone. For those of you who don’t know what that even is, I’ll explain. It all started six years ago.

The Back Story

On November 14th, 2014, I decided to do something that unbeknownst to me, would change my life in drastic ways. It wasn’t anything particularly distinctive. I had registered dozens of domain names over the years. But this domain (the one you’re reading right now) ended up being quite different.

Two months before, a friend invited me to come to SimpleRev, an event he hosted that invited people from all walks of life to gather around the principles of simple living, minimalism, and sustainability.

It’s the event where I met many of the friends I have today, and after getting up to share my experience during ‘participant storytime’, I heard, “Hey! You should write about this.” (Never underestimate the power of encouragement in your life and the effect it has on others).

The Twitch

At that point in our lives, Amy and I had been married for about two years and we were both working in fairly demanding jobs. I was working as the Marketing Director of a nonprofit, and Amy in corporate finance. We had bought our first home together about a year earlier and were still in the process of figuring out what all of that was supposed to look like for a couple in their late 20’s.

Looking back, it’s easier for me to understand what was going on—but at the time, I was struggling. I knew I was not being mindful of my spending, but it felt like an impossible habit to break. In trying to juggle so many different projects in my work, hobbies, and home life, it was inevitably impossible to manage it all effectively.

I realized that the frequent one-click purchase pattern I had recognized months earlier was not an isolated spending problem, but an intention and attention problem. I began to see that many of the small daily actions I was doing were more impulsive Twitches than intentional actions.

Small Steps, Big Changes

Over the last six years, we’ve done (and tried) a lot—but here are some of the highlights of what has happened since then.

We became a one-car family. We quit our jobs (at different times) and became self-employed. I wrote a book and gave a TEDx talk. We produced a 30+ episode video podcast with 250k downloads, and built a YouTube channel with 4.5 million views (and counting)! We got rid of 80% of our belongings, starting from things as small as old business cards to barely-worn clothing, to most of our furniture in our big move across the country a year and a half ago. We’ve helped bring an intentional community of kind, wonderful people from all over the world together. We also prioritized our health, began exercising regularly, and cook the majority of our food at home. Don’t worry though, I still eat and enjoy ice cream.

But, these things didn’t happen all at once. They came through small changes and considerations, consistently showing up (some days better than others). It took taking one small step after another for six years—even when the next step wasn’t perfectly clear.

The big changes all came from the topics we talk about here on the site—minimalism, habits, and pursuing creative endeavors. All tools that allow us to love our attention and continue working towards using it well.

While the tagline has changed a few times since that day in 2014, there has always been a thread running through our work at Break the Twitch, and that is intentional attention. Exactly how that shows up varies, but whether it’s minimalism (removing distractions), habits (directing attention and action), or creative flow (the result of minimalism and habits), it all boils down to loving your attention and using it well.

Coming Together on Break the Twitch Day

This year, we decided to celebrate this milestone publicly, and invite you to join us in some intentional reflection. It doesn’t have to be anything at all, but you can spend it doing something analog, journaling, meditating, or just existing screen-free for an hour. We laid out some helpful guidelines over on the Break the Twitch Day page where you can find out more.

We’re grateful for your readership, for being a part of this intentional community, and for venturing forward with us for the next six years and beyond. Cheers.