You are listening to That Hoarder: Overcome Compulsive Hoarding, combating stigma since 2021. I wanted there to be a podcast about hoarding disorder from somebody who hoarded rather than a professional. That didn't exist, so I created it. And that's this podcast that you're listening to now. Subscribe to the podcast and find my social media links, episode transcripts, and every link that I mention at overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk. Finally, I am not a doctor. I'm just a hoarder doing her best. So do seek professional support if and when you need it. Hey, how are you? I am doing okay. I'm talking today about being more intentional, because being more intentional, or intentionality, can be really transformative when we, essentially, do things on purpose. Whether it's in terms of what we keep, or what we acquire, or what we discard, intentionality can make a real difference. But also it can make a difference to how we feel about ourselves, how we treat ourselves, and how we act in other parts of our lives as well. Because being intentional is sometimes about taking positive action, but not always. Sometimes it's about choosing not to, and being deliberate about that, and knowing when to do one or the other. And I'm going to talk about both sides of that, plus a few kind of in-betweeny areas where it's not always clear what the right thing to do is. And I'm going to talk about that in terms of how being intentional can change the actions we take, but also our mood and our attitude to ourselves. My word of the year this year was intentional, and having it as a focus, as a reminder, when I remember it, has really helped me to tune into what I actually want, where I actually want to be, and to take action to achieve that. It also allows me sometimes to not take action, to not achieve, but to not take action or not achieve without hating myself at the end, which is radical. How intentional we are in our daily lives, including relating to our possessions, can shift the way we see the world. I've been getting out into nature a lot this year, it's one of the things that's really helping my mental health. But I was aware early on that there was a strong risk that I would just get myself out into nature, feel resentful and come home again, however beautiful it was. And so I made a decision early on that there were certain things I was going to look out for when I was in nature, be it a particular flower, be it finding my favourite of something, which is my favourite tree on today's walk. And what that does when I'm out and about somewhere beautiful is it makes me notice how beautiful it is, and it makes me notice changes as the year goes on. Without that kind of intentionality, I could well have been walking through the same parks and the same nature reserves all year without really noticing which flowers were out when, what state the leaves were in and when, which animals were around, how big the ducklings were at any stage of the year. And being intentional about what I notice has actually helped me be pretty mindful on some of those walks. I'm not talking perfection, but it helps. And especially given that there can be a lot of impulsive behaviour in hoarding, whether that's a really strong urge to keep something or acquire something, whether it's digging our heels in to keep something when it's perhaps not the best thing. And something about intentionality is that it can help to bridge the gap between where we want to be and where our immediate urge is telling us to go. So when I talk about being intentional, what do I actually mean? Being intentional is about making decisions and acting with purpose and with consciousness and awareness. It's about making choices consciously and following through. Dr. Jan Eppingstall has talked a number of times on the podcast about increasing the distance between stimulus and response. And intentionality is a big part of how we do that. It creates a space between a trigger and how we act. And that space allows us to make a choice, make a decision about how we want to handle a situation. When you hoard, you have a lot of decisions to make. And when we are more intentional, it brings awareness to the decisions and our thought process and how well we can take action once we've made a decision. It doesn't mean we will make perfect decisions forever. It doesn't mean we will be the epitome of productivity and action. It means gaining wisdom in when to follow through and when to step back, when to push forward and when to give ourselves a break. When we are overwhelmed with our stuff, with our feelings, with our thoughts, it can be easy to feel like we're being carried away by a flood that we have no control over. Whether that's the surge if we buy something on impulse, whether it's looking around and seeing our possessions and feeling like this is too much, I don't… this is impossible. It can feel like things are happening to us rather than us being in the driving seat. But intentionality helps us to recognise that we have agency. And every time we make a decision while being intentional, we probably make a better decision, but also we get reminded that, oh, I do have some power. I do have some control over this situation. I do have some control over my urges. I have some control over how I live. And even if it's a tiny, tiny putting one packet of pencils back in the supermarket, it's a little tick in our brain in the box of, oh, I can make positive decisions based on what's important to me or what I really want compared to this immediate dopamine situation or this immediate panic situation or this immediate fear of scarcity situation. It reminds us that we do have some agency and control over our lives and the decisions we make. And this can be really profound. And that shift that can start to happen when we start being more intentional is a powerful one. It's empowering, but we're giving ourselves that power. It's that difference between being reactive and being deliberate. If we are walking down the street and we see that somebody has left out some boxes of stuff with a note saying free to a good home on it, if we're reactive, we might get a surge and say, “oh my goodness, free stuff. I always wanted 12 candlesticks!” and take it. And we get carried away by a kind of mini high in the moment. And that is maybe momentarily thrilling, but then probably at some point we feel quite disappointed in ourselves and we wonder what on earth we are going to do with 12 candlesticks. And now we've got to get rid of them, but we can't because we now own them. And so that's really hard because we hoard. And so by being reactive, we don't feel great about ourselves at the end of it. If we allow ourselves to be intentional in that moment, we might feel the excitement of, oh, free things. And then we might think, okay, do I actually need 12 candlesticks? And then you might think, you know what, for my dining table, I have thought for years that two candlesticks on my dining table would be lovely. I don't need more than that. I don't know where I would put more than that. But this is something I've wanted for years and never got round to. So I'm going to take two of those candlesticks. And we come away feeling like I made a good decision there. And we get home and we have the thing we'd always wanted. Or we might think these are very pretty candlesticks, but I have loads of candlesticks and I don't burn candles because I live in a hoard and it's really dangerous. We might step back for a moment and think, okay, I'm excited because this is free, but this isn't something I want or need. Let me think through how it will feel when I get these home. And then we realise that we would feel quite disappointed in ourselves. And all of that is the difference between a reactive decision going, oh, free, let me grab them, and an intentional decision. And you'll see it's not just a difference in how many, if any, candlesticks we take home. It's about whether we feel full of self-respect and pride afterwards, or whether we feel a bit grubby and ashamed. When we're intentional, we pause for a moment and ask ourselves questions like, do I need this? Will keeping this or acquiring this get me to where I want to be? Does this fit with my values? Is it sustainable to bring more things home? Or is it helpful to me and the people I live with to let some of these clothes go? And rather than a panic reaction or a fear-based reaction, we pause and ask the question. Sometimes the answer's really obvious, but it's not what our original urge told us to do. We might still acquire the thing or keep the thing, but we've done it with thought and with care and with purpose and with deliberateness. Is that a word? Deliberality? And the other thing about intentionality that seems worth mentioning is that it's not a one-size-fits-all situation. It's about thinking and assessing and pausing and looking at our circumstances and how we feel and what we need versus what we want. But it recognises that we are human. It recognises that our capacity varies over time. Our energy varies over time. And it's about working with those cycles rather than trying to have very rigid rules that can't always apply. But the more practised we get at being intentional, the more we can start to notice things like whether our shoulders tense up or whether we feel unsettled at the prospect of something. And the practice of intentionality, the more we do it, the more easily it comes, and the more we even remember to try to be intentional. It takes a lot of intentionality to remember to be intentional at first! And still, I'm about nine months in, but it comes more easily than it did in January when I started. It helps us to manage internal pressures, urges and panic and all of that, and also external pressures, whether that's the influence of marketing or somebody trying to give you some stuff you don't need, or somebody trying to guilt you into keeping something. Do you have a business that would benefit from advertising to thousands of dedicated listeners with an interest in mental health and home organisation? Therapy services, professional organisers, self-help stuff or organising services could all be helpful for my listeners. So get in touch if you'd like to chat about the options or go to overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/sponsor. So what does intentional action look like in hoarding and dehoarding? A lot of us get stuck in this because a lot of the actions associated with both hoarding and dehoarding feel quite tense, they feel quite high emotion, they feel quite high stakes, and that's when we're more likely to go into adrenaline and panic and reactive decision making. We know on some level, to some degree, that we want things to be different, but the more we get overwhelmed or the more we panic, the more we shut down and the less intentional we are and the more reactive we are. And that's why starting really small helps with intentionality in dehoarding, just like starting really small helps with so many aspects of dehoarding. Is there a decision you can make today, a micro decision, a tiny decision, that you can really engage with intentionally? It might be about a single fork, it might be about one book, might be about one t-shirt, but pick something and go through a process of real pause and deliberateness about your decision making. Instead of being either mindless about something or panicky or urgent about something, be conscious, take a moment, pause, ask yourself, what do I actually want? I know where I want to be in the bigger picture, how does the outcome of this decision impact that? How do I feel at the prospect of getting rid of this? Let's look at that. And even the words we use with ourselves can help to shift us into more of an intentional space. I have talked before about how I try to shift the way I see dehoarding from rather than a chore that I have to do and resent doing, it's instead a way to make my life better, it's a way to make my life easier. And that shift in rather than I have to get rid of things, if we say I choose to get rid of some things and not, oh no, I've got to get rid of some stuff to get access to that cupboard, instead think, I really want access to that cupboard, what can I get rid of to enable that? If we start with I have to, that creates a kind of resentment and resistance. If we start with I want to, or I choose to, or I allow myself to, then we have agency, we have power, we have control over this decision we're about to make, we're not doing it out of panic or fear or overwhelm. We're doing it because we're going to take a moment and think it through and work out what the best thing to do is, given the resources and information we've got at the time. So even if the outcome of the decision is the same, maybe you'd have got rid of it either way, maybe you'd have kept it either way. The process is different and often the way we feel about ourselves at the end of it is also different. And so some of that intentionality might include being intentional about boundaries that we set for ourselves. Because I have gone down a few clothes sizes, I am for the first time in years allowing myself back in charity shops and that is really a potential danger area for me. And so I'm really intentional about I can go in there but all I can buy is clothes in my new size, that's all, that's my boundary. I would like to say I have therefore never bought anything else in a charity shop, it's not true. However, going in with that intention still limits the rest of what I do, even if I do slip ups from time to time and grab a couple of books. Maybe the intentional boundary we set is about how much time we're going to spend on dehoarding or about how many items we want to sort through or how many bags we want ready to donate. But boundaries, when we're intentional about them, mean more because we know why we've set them. It can also look like rituals or habits we create around hoarding, acquiring, dehoarding. Maybe a dehoarding session always starts with a cup of tea or a meditation. Maybe we reward ourselves at the end with a phone chat with a friend. If that's planned and part of it, everything becomes more intentional, there is more of a pause, there is deliberateness, you feel less out of control. And being intentional this way helps us to avoid the trap of keeping things or acquiring things by default. We might have tried dehoarding for a long time and have certain things that we just unconsciously pass over with a kind of, oh well obviously I've got to keep that, and we never think it through any further than that. And being intentional can be a way to make ourselves go, but do I actually have to keep that? Why do I think I have to keep that? Does that stand up to scrutiny? And maybe it does, but maybe it doesn't. When we're intentional, it avoids inertia, it avoids everything standing still just because that's the habit we're in or that's the pattern we're in. So maybe you've always gone, well I can't get rid of old birthday cards, that would be rude. And so when we get to the three boxes of old birthday cards, we don't think, shall I actually go through them and see which ones I want? We just go, oh no, I have a rule about that, you don't get rid of old birthday cards. And then when we're intentional, we might think, I never look at these. Maybe I want to keep the one from my grandmother, maybe I don't want to keep the one from that person I cut out of my life, maybe most of them are irrelevant to me now, maybe I'll keep these three, maybe I'll keep these 10. But we're posing a question we might not have posed for a long time, and that can be enlightening in itself. So we're checking in with ourselves, we're moving maybe more slowly, but definitely more deliberately, and we're making decisions from a place of grounding and calm, not from a place of panic and fear. Now that's not to say you do this entirely in a state of zen bliss, but sometimes being intentional is about allowing ourselves intentionally to feel discomfort, and even that feels less awful when it's a choice we made than when it's something we feel like was flung on us. So some useful questions around that are, am I choosing this or has it become a default? Do I actually want this? Do I actually need this? How do I want to feel about myself or about my home after I've made this decision? But being intentional isn't always about doing. Sometimes intentionality is about making a positive choice to not take action, to not do. I have a potentially difficult day coming up on Monday, it's an anniversary of a horrible thing, and I don't know how I'm going to be, and I've been building up to it for a bit, and I've been thinking about how I can approach it intentionally, and ultimately what I've come to is that the day before, the Sunday, and the day after, the Tuesday, I am intentionally making plans. I am seeing people who love me, I am doing things I love, but on the day itself, on the Monday, I am intentionally not making plans. I don't know how I will be. I don't know if I will want to curl up in bed and wake up on Tuesday, or I don't know if I will want to be out of the house and doing something that takes my mind off it or I don't know if I will want to be crying or dancing around to sad music or what, I don't know. And so my plan for Monday is to follow my own lead, and that is an intentional plan, because I don't know if I'm going to need to be curled up in bed. So I don't want to make plans and then end up curled up in bed, and on top of feeling miserable because it's a horrible date, I will also feel like a massive failure because I cancelled seeing a friend and I didn't get anything done and all I did was curl up in bed. So if instead, allowing myself to make a decision on the day that may include being curled up in bed, then if that's what I need to do, I don't end the day feeling like I've failed as well as feeling miserable. And this may be a kind of unusual example, and it's not something I can allow myself to do daily or even several days in a row, but that's why I have also intentionally made plans for the days around it. But for me to get through Monday, my intention is to do what I need to do on that day, whatever that looks like, and because that's purposeful and because that's a deliberate conscious choice, that feels more empowering than spending the day feeling bad about however it is I need to get through it. This podcast started as an outlet for myself, but hundreds of thousands of downloads later, it's somehow become much more than that to a lot of people. I hear from people that me talking about my experiences and interviewing specialists and experts is helping them too. Hearing those stories makes the time and cost absolutely worth it. But if you want to help to ensure that the future of the podcast is sustainable, you can donate to help with costs. To send a one-off or recurring donation, just go to overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/donate. Thank you. In terms of hoarding specifically, a lot of us carry a lot of shame and guilt and regret, and that generally doesn't help us to feel good about ourselves, and that generally doesn't help us to make positive decisions about our lives and our stuff. On top of that, rest is important. Stopping is important. It's as much a part of the cycle as doing. Partly so that we can keep doing, if it's going to be sustainable, but also partly because we're humans and we deserve rest, whether we “earn” it in inverted commas or not. We can get so obsessed with productivity and achieving and hustling that we forget the very human need to rest, and instead we see it as failure. We forget the very human need to sometimes not do, and we see it as failure, which makes us feel like we are failures, and none of that is conducive to good emotional health, and none of that is conducive to making great decisions. There is a big difference between choosing rest intentionally and giving up or giving in. We give up when we feel defeated and lost. We rest as a positive intentional choice when that is what we need to do, when that is the best thing for us to do. It's strategic, but it's also compassionate to ourselves. It's treating ourselves nicely. It's treating ourselves well, and we deserve that. We can also intentionally be just good enough. We can intentionally say, you know what, I've got incredibly high standards for myself, and it's exhausting, and it means I spend far too long fretting about every decision. Maybe today's intention is to be okay at something. I did an episode about half-arsing things, allowing ourselves to half-arse things. I will link to that in the show notes. And I don't know about you, but I can panic at the idea of intentionally choosing rest. I can think, what if this is me giving in? What if this is depression? What if this is something more negative, and I'm trying to kid myself that this is positive and compassionate, but actually I'm sinking? And part of intentionality is questioning that really honestly. Part of it is putting it in a context. So my context for Monday is that I'm anticipating it will be a hard day, and also I've made different positive choices for the day before and the day after. We can ask ourselves, am I choosing to stop because I’m respecting my limits, my limitations, my exhaustion, my energy? Or am I choosing to stop because I'm avoiding, or I'm afraid, or I'm overwhelmed? We can ask ourselves, at the prospect of taking a break, how do we feel? Do we feel relieved? Do we feel stressed? And whatever that answer is, prod a bit more. Why is that? Is that guilt? Is that exhaustion? Is that messaging that we should always be on the go? We can ask ourselves, have I genuinely been pushing myself really hard lately? Or am I in an absolute spiral and I'm overwhelmed and fearful? We can really pause and say, what is the most caring thing I can do for myself? What do I really, really need right now? Is it more important for me to give myself permission to not do any dehoarding this afternoon? Or is it more important to me that I regain access to my bath? And all of this helps us to not burn out, which is important. Marathon, not a sprint, all of that. This is a lot. Dehoarding a home is a lot. And burnout is a killer. And it really gets in the way of achieving long-term progress. And taking a break can give us renewed momentum for starting again. It can help us to remember why we're doing it. It can give us the space to remind ourselves why we're doing it. But also, when we rest intentionally, when we stop intentionally, that's a positive choice and we feel better about ourselves. If we stop because we made a positive, informed, purposeful choice, than we feel about ourselves if we stop because we collapse in exhaustion. We just feel better about ourselves. We have to be aware and really interrogate sometimes. Am I procrastinating? Am I avoiding? Am I blocking this out? Or am I being caring to myself? Am I investing in myself? Or am I overwhelmed and I've no idea what to do? But when we make a positive choice to stop, it can help us make a positive choice to start again. It can remind us that we are a valuable whole person and there's more to us than this. It can remind us to take care of ourselves in other ways. And anything that nourishes our emotional health in those ways can help to contribute to improvements in the way we view our possessions and the way we view our homes in the long run. So I've been talking about how being intentional can help us to take positive action. And I've been talking about how being intentional can help us to stop in a healthy way. But there's a lot of grey areas and confusing areas as well. And one of those is that we might be trying to talk ourselves into saying, I'm being really intentional about keeping this. When in fact, it's the hoarding part of our brain that wants us to keep it. And the question to always ask is, am I making this decision from a grounded, thoughtful place? Or is there a degree of attachment or anxiety or panic or fear that's informing this decision? And if so, maybe I need to examine it a bit closer. We can ask ourselves, am I keeping this for positive reasons or because it feels impossible to let it go? When I see the item reduced in price in the shop, am I being really practical in deciding to bring it home? Or is there a degree of grasping and panic? We can ask ourselves, if I bring this home with me, where precisely will it live in my home? Will I engage with it? We can ask ourselves, how does this decision I am trying to make line up with what's important to me, line up with my values, with my principles, with my goals? Because old patterns are familiar and they are tempting and they can be easy, but the whole thing we're all trying to do is break out of at least some of them. And even asking the questions, even if we make an imperfect decision, asking the questions improves our self-awareness. It improves what we know about ourselves and how we understand ourselves and the way we navigate the world. We're not trying to aim for perfection or pure minimalism. We're aiming to make conscious decisions about what our relationship with our possessions and belongings is like. Something else that can be really tricky when you've been having some success with intentionality is if you have a moment and feel like you've screwed the whole thing up. You've been being really deliberate and purposeful for weeks and weeks and weeks. and then you have a weak moment late at night on a shopping website, and you order a load of stuff you don't need or even really want. The first thing to remember is that that moment of maybe a poor decision doesn't cancel out all the more deliberate, intentional decisions you have been making. We can look at it and just try and work out what happened. Try and kind of problem solve, but looking backwards. How did I get to that point? Was I overtired? Was I really annoyed? Was I feeling insecure? And when we can understand what happened, that can help us to put things in place for future situations. Whether that's recognising, oh I'm really stressed again," I know that's a risk, and so I'm going to keep away from my laptop this evening. Or, and this is one that applies to me, I know when I'm feeling insecure about an event or something I've got to do, I suddenly start fixating on how if I've got the right thing to wear, it will be fine. and that inevitably involves buying a whole load of to wear. And I can these days go, oh that's the risk, there's an event I'm feeling insecure about. I know the pattern here. I'm going to think that its success or failure is entirely dependent on what I'm wearing. Whereas actually that's not the case, and I can talk myself down. What happened to trip us back into that pattern? If we can understand that, then rather than ourselves for what we did, we can use it to inform how we navigate the next bit of our lives. And we can at that point say, okay that's done. I've done that. I'm not proud of it, but I did it. What's the best thing I can do now? What's the best course of action to take next? Maybe it's say, okay I need to ban myself from charity shops again. Maybe it's say, okay I can keep two of those books I bought, but the rest go straight to a charity shop, whether I've read them or not. Maybe it's just saying, okay I'm disappointed in myself, but I'm going to learn from this. I'm going to make sure I learn from this and do things differently next time. How can we respond rather than react? How can we take a moment, react with compassion to ourselves, but also determination and knowledge and awareness? If we can treat setbacks as data, as information that can help us in the future, rather than evidence that we're a failure and that we'll never get better and that it's all doomed, we're just better equipped to start the next day and do things differently. We're better equipped to adjust how we behave and how we feel. and when we are able to offer ourselves some compassion and resist the urge to be all or nothing about it and go, well I bought 12 books, therefore I'm going to buy a hundred books, We're a lot more able to move forward to create more sustainable positive change. When we're compassionate to ourselves, that's not the same as having lowered standards or letting ourselves down or making excuses. It's just giving yourself some kindness and understanding, but using it to inform what you do next. Learning and changing is a whole process. It's not an overnight thing, but the more positive intentional decisions we can insert into our day, and the fewer reactive decisions, and the more we can increase the intentional decisions over time, the better we're doing and the better we can create change. Paying attention to how our body feels as well as our thoughts. Are we tensing up? Are we bracing ourselves? Are we relaxed at a thought? Do we feel constrained or free when we think about how we're going to do something or how we want to do something or how we might feel if we take one course of action versus another? Intentionality is a practice. It takes work, and at first especially, it can feel like it doesn't come naturally at all. It's not like in a week you can make yourself a certificate saying, intentionality achieved, tick, no more work to be done there. We make thousands of unconscious decisions all the time, but the more we can bring into consciousness, the more we can bring into intentionality. The more we pause and just take a moment to question something we're about to do automatically, the more we learn about ourselves and the more opportunity we have to do things a bit differently. Even the tiny, tiny intentional choices about washing up your dish immediately after eating, rather than leaving it in the sink for a week, they all count. Whether that's choosing to get rid of something or choosing to do nothing at all this morning. When we are present and purposeful and conscious, even just for a moment, those moments add up, and we get better at it. And we're more likely to remember to even try, and we're more likely to have some trust in our ability to make better choices. And all of that can help to improve how we interact with our stuff, how we interact with our space, and how we interact with ourselves. Give yourself leeway. Be patient with yourself as you work this stuff out. It's hard, but so worth developing as a skill. We make plenty of unconscious choices every day. We kind of have to. We don't want to have to think about how to lock a door every time we lock the door. We just want our hand to reach our keys, and the key to go in the lock, and we twist. But the decisions that deserve intentionality, the more we can do that, the better we're doing, and the better we're setting ourselves up for tomorrow and the day after and next year. It's hard to look honestly at ourselves, but it's so valuable when we can. And if you're listening to this podcast, you know that really. And I’m recording this podcast, and I know that really doesn't mean I’m always brilliant at it, but I’m trying. Okay, thank you for listening and I will speak to you next time. Thank you for listening to That Hoarder: Overcome Compulsive Hoarding podcast. It’s been a pleasure to have you on board. You can find all the links I’ve mentioned and a transcript of the episode online at overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk. To find out more about how you can support this podcast and the overall project go to overcomecompulsivehoarding.co.uk/support and do subscribe to the podcast so you make sure you don’t miss any future episodes. There may be links in this podcast that earn me money. This doesn’t come at any extra cost to you if you make a purchase through those links and it helps to support the podcast.