Last night I finished reading The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life (©2011) by Dr. Robin Zasio, the first of the “decluttering” books I requested from the library a few days ago. I found it an interesting and helpful book – I have already donated a box of magazines to the library book sale that I’ve been lugging around for fifteen years!

The main idea I gleaned from this book is the concept of “cognitive distortion,” of seeing or thinking about things differently than they actually are. In fact, I strongly, strongly recognize about eight and a half of the nine listed cognitive distortions detailed in Chapter 5, including:

• All or none thinking, or dichotomous thinking: you see all things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you believe yourself to have failed.
• Over-generalization: a single negative event seems to you a never-ending pattern of defeat.
• Discounting the positive: you reject positive experiences by insisting that they don’t count and ignore successes.
• Mind reading: you negatively interpret the thoughts or feelings of others even though there are no solid facts that support your conclusion.
• Fortune-telling: anticipating that things will turn out badly and treating the prediction as an established fact.
• Catastrophizing: expecting the worst possible outcome and responding as though your prediction will come true. This tends to lean toward highly exaggerated conclusions.
• Emotional reasoning: Assuming that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are.
• Should statements: you try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts. The emotional consequence is guilt and a perpetual feeling of failure.
• Labeling: an extreme form of over-generalization in which, instead of identifying an error in your thinking, you attach a negative label to yourself, such as, “I’m a loser.”

I found the book easy to read, straightforward, and helpful in understanding the psychological side of not just cluttering/hoarding, but of low self-confidence in general.