Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Nature of Things

A++, would read again.

As I've been saying about autism and depression for years: it is possible for a psychological disorder to simultaneously be over diagnosed yet have its treatment methods underutilized. In some ways, people with real clinical disorders are the large print versions of everyone else, making it easier to see problems and test solutions. Proving exercise helps clinical depression* is easier than proving exercise helps you when you're having a bad day, but it's easy to see how the knowledge transfers.

Stuff fits into that rather well. I watch Hoarders as a motivational tool, and they continually present you with truly awful cases- people who are are about to lose their children, spouse, or home due to their hoarding- but don't really explain why, beyond "it's a disease." Stuff goes into the psychology behind it: hoarding is associated with a constellation of other issues, including:

• slow decision making
  
• uncertainty in relationships with people and highly variable relationships with people
  
• emotional deprivation in childhood (far moreso than physical deprivation, which surprised me)
  
• intelligence (which is not the impression you'd get watching Hoarders, but of course the people who need to accept expensive 11th hour help in exchange for parading their problems on TV are not a random sample)
  
• over anthropomorphism of objects
  
• the construct of your stuff being an extension of you.
  
• fear of waste/belief that being wasteful accrues you bad karma
  
• fear of mistakes/fear of being wrong/perfectionism
  
• greater than baseline need to prepare for eventualities
  
• a lot of time spent thinking about using your stuff, relative to actually using it
  
• a need for completeness
  
• unwillingness to suffer short term pain for long term gains (possibly because they don't believe the long term gains will materialize)
  
• ability to minimize the immediate term pain of not cleaning by filtering things out
  

Not surprisingly, I see at least a few issues in me, my family, my friends, the people across the street, etc. This is where it would be really useful to find the hoarding equivalent of exercise, but the book doesn't cover that, apparently because it doesn't exist yet. We're only just beginning to understand hoarding and how it differs from OCD, and treatment is in its infancy. If the hoarding was brought on by specific trauma you can often help by treating the trauma, but many cases are not. They did mention the downward arrow technique as a tool, which looks neat.

Pulling back from the content a bit, the book was extremely well written, well organized, and easy to read while still conveying the weight of the subject matter. Highly recommended.

The Magic Rope

I used to have mail that had been moved, unopened, through three apartments. I couldn't just throw it out- it might be important, it might need to be shredded- but if I tried to set time aside to go through it, it didn't happen. Finally I recognized that for some reason going through the mail was difficult for me and I needed to respect that, even if I didn't understand it. So I made a new rule: every day I would handle the mail that came in, plus one more piece. I could do more if I wanted, but I only had to do one. Some days I'd go through dozens of letters, some days I'd hit something difficult on the first letter and stop there. It took me months, but I eventually got through all of my mail. Now I'm not quite so strict about it: I don't file every day, but I scan incoming mail every day and file it by the end of the week.

I've been trying to apply this to cleaning the apartment without much success. One room is not equivalent to one piece of mail, and it's too hard to track how many "cleaning units" I generated in a day. I could use photos, but that's a lot of overhead. Today is day 4 of 16 of blissful unemployment: if I'm going to get the place clean, it's now or never. I think I've found something that might work: the magic rope. Here are the rules:

1. I've used some clothes line to mark off a small area of my living room. That's my unit: it needs to get clean and stay clean. Part of the goal is to concentrate the rewards of cleaning: left to my own devices, I will jump randomly about the house putting away whatever I see next, so even though I've done a lot of work, no one area looks better enough to provide a reward. According to Stuff, this is pretty common for hoarders.
   
2. Every time I die in Resident Evil 4, the line moves a bit further out.
   
3. I can't return to RE4 until the new clean zone is in fact clean. If I want to get in the zone, I need to preemptively clean ahead of the line. This has the bonus of fighting eye and tendon fatigue.
   
4. If I'm well and truly Done with cleaning for the time being, or dying really fast, exceptions can be made. Better to stop in the zone where I'm capable of recovering quickly than push myself into burnout.
   
5. There are a few exceptions: dishes and litter box need to be done daily, and it's better for the fish if I cycle their tank slowly. A reasonable amount of urgent cleaning outside the zone can be substituted for moving the magic rope.. Non-urgent cleaning may be done to my heart's content, but doesn't count towards regaining access to the playstation. Weirdly, as soon as I placed the line, I was immediately filled with the need to pick up certain things outside it, some of which were excellent long term projects (moving my vast collection of tights from the messy, impossible to search drawer to the newly purchased shoe organizer) but were not as important as vacuuming the cereal off the floor in the clean zone.
   
6. My plan is to go through the house twice: once with the goal of putting away messes, and once for a deep clean. This will prevent the issue where I spend half an hour in a futile attempt to get the cat hair off the couch and then ragequit. According to Stuff, this is also a common pattern for hoarders.
   
7. Depending on how it goes a third, reorganization based pass may be necessary.
   
8. An item moved from inside to outside the cleanzone needs to end up in a better state than it started, but not necessarily its final state. For example, tossing a shirt to just outside the zone does not count, but moving my CSA box from the door to the kitchen does
   

I'm trying to figure out how fast the line should move. It's more important that it be sustainable than that I be finished by the 13th, since I can always continue at a slower pace afterwards, but it would be nice if it was finished. My apartment consists of bedroom #1 (the one I actually sleep in), bedroom #2 (the one I use for storage and is gonna be a bitch to clean, especially since its the cats' room by default), the bathroom (will take absolutely no time in the mess pass but a lot of time in the deep clean pass), the kitchen (small, and very messy, but probably not that difficult), and the living room (less work per square foot than the spare bedroom, but bigger). Counting the living room as two rooms, that's six rooms, so if I do one room a day, I'll finish the first sweep on Sunday. That strikes me as ambitious but not impossible, especially since the bathroom will take almost no time. In fact... there, I just cleaned everything off the floor, including vacuuming up the loose kitty litter. It's still a huge deepclean task, but the light clean is done, and now the bathroom is officially clean zone, albeit an island of clean zone separate from the mainland, like east Pakistan.

Okay, so there's five room equivalents. Since maintaining the existing clean zone will be more and more time consuming as it grows, I should be adding more territory earlier in the day, which means more than 1 cleaning unit today, so I might as well make it the whole living room...which does not strike me as realistic. We'll see how this goes. Maybe the deep clean happens after the new job starts.

Best laid plans...

Found quantum friend to loan me a carpet cleaner. This is a rather useful thing when you have a cat who suffered from Serious Digestive Issues, but it means I need to get my floors entirely clear by Thursday. Magic Rope is gonna have to move fast.