Ann Pereira: Beyond Boxes-The Art of Organizing for Every Brain

We're diving into the real meaning of organization. It's not just about tidying up your space or labeling boxes – it goes way beyond that. Ever wondered why some "seem" to have their lives together while others look like they're swimming in chaos? Let's unpack that mystery and uncover what true organization is all about.

Meet our guest, Ann Pereira. She's not your typical organizer. Her specialty? Working with the neurodivergent community. Yeah, you heard that right. She's all about understanding how different brains tick when it comes to organization.

Picture this: what seems like chaos to one person might actually be a brilliant system for someone else. It's all about understanding how different minds categorize and thrive in various organizational setups. What works for one might send another into a tailspin of anxiety.

Hold tight! Ann doesn't just stop at highlighting these differences. She's here with practical wisdom. She's all about finding that sweet spot where everyone in the family feels at peace. Because let's face it, a happy home is a functional one, and that's achievable for all, regardless of neurodiversity.

So, join us today. This podcast isn't just for parents of neurodivergent kids—it's for everyone looking to bring a little more harmony into their lives. Let's make organizing not just about tidying up, but about nurturing our mental well-being.

BIO:
Ann Pereira is the owner and founder of House of Projects LLC, which helps people discover peaceful balance in their space through thoughtful decluttering and intentional organization. What makes Ann and her company unique is their special focus on challenges encountered by older adults, neurodiverse people, and people in the midst of life transitions. Ann combines her professional and personal life experience to help clients with challenging disorganization. Ann is the mom of 5 kids; she is a special needs parent, homeschooler, and former nurse practitioner.

RESOURCES:
https://www.houseofprojectsllc.com/

Transcript

This Way Up - Episode 24 - Ann Periera

 Parenting kids with different brains, with different needs that might not always be widely understood by other people in our lives, it's hard. And sometimes our physical space is a real external reminder of that. 

Welcome to This Way Up. We are bringing you engaging, informative, and inspiring conversations. Surrounding all aspects of mental health from the perspective of us as parents and caregivers. I'm Andrea Nenigian, and I'm Emmy Waters. When someone you care about is struggling with their mental health, this can be an incredibly stressful and challenging time.

So we're here to provide valuable resources to support you as you navigate this journey. 

Our guest today is Anne Pereira, and she is a professional home organizer. This episode is fascinating because she talks about how the organization of our external world, our physical spaces, reveals the inner workings of our brain. And we learned so much about ourselves and how our brain works just from this episode.

Emi, I can already hear it. People are thinking boxes and labels, but this is so much more than that. Anne's niche is working with the neurodivergent population. So let's dive right in and learn more about how to organize our space and the space of our loved ones to better match the way our brain thinks.

Ann Pereira is the owner and founder of House of Projects, LLC, which helps people discover peaceful balance in their space through thoughtful, decluttering, and intentional organization. What makes Ann and her company unique is their special focus on challenges encountered by older adults. neurodiverse people, and people in the midst of life transitions.

Ann combines her professional and personal life experience to help clients with challenging disorganization. Ann is the mom of five kids. She's a special needs parent, a homeschooler, and former nurse practitioner. Thank you. And we're so happy to have you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. This is going to be so fun because Andrea and I don't know much about this particular niche you're in.

So if you wouldn't mind, could you share how you got into this niche within the organizational services? That does service people of a neurodivergent background. I kind of stumbled into organizing. Um, I took time off of having a career to be a mom of my, to my five kids. And when I felt like there was enough time and margin in my life to, Do something outside the home.

A friend of mine invited me to come along on an organizing job to help pack a person for a move. And so I thought, well, why not? I'll try it and see what this is about. And the first client that I worked with definitely was  neurodivergent. And I realized that I, there was a lot going on for this person that I didn't understand.

And I really wanted to help, but I could tell that the kind of help that would be helpful to me was not going to be helpful to her, that she needed some kind of unique approach. So that inspired me to under, to learn more and get more education about how to help people who, whose brains work differently with organizing their space.

And then I just kept running into it more and more as I did more jobs as an organizer. So, and I also kind of recognize sometimes the approach being used  maybe wasn't what they needed. And I thought this, you know, I want to understand this more and, and be able to help people maybe in a different way. So I joined the Institute for Challenging Disorganization, which is like a global organization.

Their mission is to mainly provide education for all kinds of professionals as to how to work with people that have different challenges around organization, whether that be like productivity or physical organizing, working with seniors, working lots of different things. When you're working, when you first sat with that first client of yours that was neurodivergent, what things did you see that made you realize, Hmm,  I can't connect with this person like my traditional way of, of organizing?

Right. Well, it started right when we opened the front door.  I had to do kind of a like,  Okay. Neutral face because it was very, it was so much chaos in the physical environment and nothing was, there were no categories or like groups. It was very, very random, very colorful. I could tell this was a really creative person and a really fun person.

And it was a stressful time because moving is stressful. So that also can amplify any. Challenges people have, of course, for all of us under stress, we don't operate at our best. So, and then as the more I've done this work, the more I find it really rewarding. When I see a big challenge, I think, wow, this, you know, this, and the person is really ready to receive help and open to new ideas.

It's a lot of fun to work with them. That's great. We should probably back up and define for anybody who doesn't understand or haven't hasn't heard that term neurodivergent. Can you define what that is? Yeah, I love this word. It's a very inclusive term to describe any features that someone might have cognitively or behaviorally that, um, Might not fall in the center of the bell curve of occurrence in humans.

So instead of using the word abnormal and normal, like that's very polarizing and also not very helpful. Like what really is normal. It's more just differences.  So that can be a way of defining something that needs to be understood and accommodated and supported, but it doesn't need to be necessarily fixed.

We're not saying that it's broken or abnormal. So, would the inverse of that be neurotypical? Yes. Versus neurodivergent? Okay. Yes.  And some people like to call it neurospicy. Ah, I like that one too.  They will self identify as, I'm a neurospicy individual, and that's kind of a fun way to embrace that you might do things differently and just find what works for you.

Who might fall into, um, A category of neurodivergent, which I even feel like that's not right to say category, but who might, who might identify? Yes. Yes. Someone with ADHD, um, that being one of the more common ones you might hear, or someone with, um, on the autism spectrum, even people with memory problems or dementia. 

We could put, you know, also fit that description. So you may be neurotypical at some point in your life and then end up being neurodivergent as your brain changes and your needs change. Yeah, that is interesting. You know, this is funny. This just occurred to me. If your purpose walking in somebody's front door is to help them reorganize and that person called on you because they knew it was time to tap out and ask for help.

Ask for help. Is it very common then that you are naturally encountering a neurodivergent individual that that's typically the person who, who needs you? I have found that to be true. I think in the world of organizing, there are Different types of clients and different specialties for sure. So some people are pretty organized.

They just don't, they want a more higher aesthetic look to their space and they want more, more of a design focus, or they just don't want to spend the time or, you know, for other reasons. And it is kind of fun. Sometimes I'll go to a a person's house and I come in and it's the opposite of chaos. And I think,  well, what am I going to do here?

What do you need me for? Cause this looks really good. So I'm not sure, but you know, then we talk more and find out what it is, you know, they do need help with and I can help. That's also a different personality, but it is a little unsettling to me when I'm like, Oh wow, this looks good. I don't know if I can improve on what's happening.

So yeah, but then there are other people who yeah, definitely are. And then, so yeah, by definition to help someone organize, they may have something going on that's making organization really challenging. I remember my daughter has ADHD and I didn't really realize that until she was, I don't know, probably about 10 or 11.

And I remember trying to clean her room with her and we would get everything in what I thought was a very organized manner. Okay, we're going to put stuffed animals in this bucket. We're going to do this and we're going to do that. And she would get very anxious. that I was moving her stuff, first of all around, and then it lasted a whole whopping, you know, four days, maybe the organization, the organization.

Yeah. It just, and then it went back to what was more comfortable, I guess, to her now that I look back to me, it looked like it was just a mess. But I think that as she's grown, I've looked at it and I've looked at like how her father has his desk and there's everything out. And it's almost like if it's not out, they won't remember it.

Yeah. And I think Andrea, you're touching on a great Aspect of different ways of thinking and different organizing styles that a lot of times people who have a different style are very visual processors. And so for us to go put things away or put them even in bins that aren't clear or in putting papers in a folder that's in a drawer is, it's very unsettling to them because they really need that visual cue to know where it is and also to, um, they even use that as a method of kind of maintaining their priorities when they're doing tasks or work.

So that's one thing that's great to identify right up front is and when you walk into a space a lot of times those clues are already there for you like to see and that's I think a fun part of what I do is I don't want people to pre clean before I come because that's that actually erases a lot of the clues that are are there in the space that helped me know like this person really needs you know they they're I'm looking at well what is out what is on this top layer that you know They're using this as a support, even if they don't realize it, because if, you know, or even sometimes people will have empty boxes or wrappers and I'm seeing that as recycling and trash and they'll say, no, that's to remind me I'm out of that thing and I need to buy more.

And so don't throw that away because I'll, I won't remember. Gosh, thinking about that brings up for me that, because this is, I met you because I needed some organizational help to have you come into my house and may not pre pre clean. I don't think that would happen. Number one, because that is such a vulnerable.

experience for me as the, I would assume for most of your customers and clients, for you to come and see my physical space and how disorganized it is, I would be embarrassed and I would want to try to hide that. So it just reminds me the work you do isn't just to come in and provide a concrete service.

It's to sit with somebody in their vulnerability, which takes a really special person. Absolutely. Yes. I did pre clean before you came to my house. I should have told you not to. Hell no, you can't see I go back and I think, like, why do we probably get so anxious about those things? Probably because when we were younger, People didn't understand the differences in the way, you know, the differences in thinking patterns, the differences in, in organization.

So, you and I, and all of us in our age group, were brought up that things had to be tidy, they had to be neat, you know, and it was, you were going to be judged if somebody walked into your space and it wasn't tidy and neat. What I'm hoping is, as we're seeing with the growth of all mental health, is that our children now are going to see opportunities in ways to better themselves moving forward and make things more workable for themselves, not necessarily presented for other people.

Absolutely. And I think that's such a great point is. For us as parents of kids who have different thinking styles and different organizational styles is to create healthy narratives around how they're made. And that just wasn't available, like that concept wasn't really available even 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and often cleanliness and organization have been kind of enmeshed in kind of a moral and character issue.

Thank you. And one author, I just love a resource that I always recommend to people, Casey Davis, she's a therapist, a person with ADHD, and she wrote an amazing little book called how to keep house while drowning. So this is her book. It's a bestseller. Oh, I'll definitely get that me too. And I almost wish she would have titled it something other than how to keep house even because that kind of Is triggering to some people, I think, because they're thinking, I don't want to keep house.

That sounds, you know, that goes back to this, like feeling defeated and the moral issue, but she really emphasizes that the way you handle things in your space and in your life and in your home is a functional issue that. Should serve you instead of a moral issue that has some standard that we all need to be striving for because and then feel shame and defeat when we don't achieve some universal standard of cleanliness and organization.

So I think she does a great job of unpacking some of that. And I think we, as parents can, um, be curious about our kids and how they operate and. Work on having those narratives of like that are supportive and, you know, helping them get to a place where they're functioning well and then they're not feeling the shame and the frustration or disappointment of the parent because things don't look a certain way.

Yeah, I'm sure it's very individualized, but are there certain general trends or themes you could describe that we might see in an individual with ADHD or autism or other? Yes, like just even themes, um, if you think about the domains of executive function, because Usually that's the area that's going to be different for people with different brains.

Can you explain what executive function is? Right. So executive function is, um, the skills that happen in the front part of your brain. There's eight different domains of executive function. It's working memory, like keeping things in the front of your mind. Like, why did I come in this room? What was I going to do there?

That's working memory, um, self regulation planning and priorities, task initiation. impulse control, emotional control, flexible thinking and organization. So, okay. Thanks for that. Those are the areas that we can. And so it helps to kind of take a look at those different areas. And usually people are strong in some and not as strong in others and figuring out how to capitalize on those strengths to help support the areas where they struggle.

So for families and kids, they might, um, I think one huge thing that was so helpful for me to learn is oftentimes in, you know, older kids and adults, their problem is not that they don't know what to do or even how to do it. It's the getting started part. It's the initiating a task. That is so difficult.

And there's it's an actual brain based struggle where there's not enough neurotransmitter called dopamine happening in their frontal lobe. And that is what we need to get started and sustain a task. So we have to figure out strategies of ways to tap into our motivation to kind of juice that system and get us going.

actually started. And oftentimes once a person gets started on something, then they're good to go. But it's just the task initiation can be really, so with kids, that means don't say, go in your room and I want you to start cleaning it for 15 minutes. And it's, that can be like, so overwhelming to a kid if they, cause they're overwhelmed, right?

They see a big mess. They don't maybe naturally have a sense of categories in what they're seeing. They don't have a way to break a big task into smaller parts that feel doable. So as parents, we can support in a bunch of ways, some of them being to work alongside your child, like Andrea described, as they get older, maybe step back a little bit, but always at least help with the initiation part, because that's probably, that might be one of the hardest parts is to get started and then helping them break things down into doable pieces.

So they feel some quick wins on the front end and that will help them kind of stay in the task a lot longer and feel more successful. That's great advice. So oftentimes when I try to organize myself, like I go into a closet, I am very motivated at the very beginning. There must be a lot of dopamine flooding my, my little brain.

But then I get into the middle of it and there is pure chaos around me. When your child or even adult is in the midst of chaos, then what do you do? How do you help continue that process so that they're not sitting in more chaos than what they were in before. Right. And that whole, it gets worse before it gets better, right?

Yes. And I think that's good to also talk to our kids about that. Like, it's going to feel worse, maybe, or overwhelming when we pull all this out and we, you know, kind of have a plan in place. Like, sometimes even, you know, I noticed when I'm working with clients, they will not want to stop because they are afraid they won't go back and get so they they won't eat.

They won't drink and like I'm over here bringing them something to eat and drink because I know they're going to run out of energy. And so, um, I think one thing that you're identifying even is doing it alone can sometimes be not a great strategy, right? So enlisting the help of a non judgmental supportive friend can be really Great.

And often I've noticed too that the parent child dynamic can be difficult sometimes and recognizing if that's happening for you, maybe it is better to enlist the help of someone else that's not the parent in certain areas because the child will take the feedback a little better and the parent's not getting, you know, sometimes the parent child are sharing these struggles because there are genetic and behavioral and all these things involved with that.

So, Just enlisting the help of a person that's not as emotionally invested or, you know, part of that dynamic can really make it go a lot better. Yeah. And again, talking to that vulnerability aspect, I think along the line, also what goes along with that is the feeling that you're being judged  or evaluated.

And there can be a long history of frustration on the part of the parents and frustration on the part of the child and so and those are tender places and it's hard and we want to be safe places for our kids and sometimes just inviting someone else in there to support us both. Can really go a long way.

Yeah. Well, you homeschool, right? I used to, yeah, I was a former homeschooler. Yeah. Okay. So I homeschooled for one year for my daughter and she was in eighth grade. And I remember saying, I have to hire A tutor who actually turned out to be an ADHD specialist. I didn't realize that at the time. I was so fortunate, but I hired her to cover those subjects that I knew would create tension.

I was like, I need to protect my relationship with my daughter.  more so than be her teacher at that point because absolutely it's a very similar parallel there you're getting into a vulnerable space and where can be judged you know it's it's tough yeah and it's probably hard to get to that point where you as the parent have the ability to see that in Sam  take a step back.

What did that take for you, Andrea? I mean, how did you get to that point? Well, in all reality, she was what 12, 13, whatever eighth grade is. And I had already been through several years with her of going to school. And I was fearful of homeschooling because of that dynamic. I knew that she thought differently than I did.

And so I wanted to just, you know, I don't know, I don't have a very good answer for that other than it was experience of just knowing at that point. That she thought she thinks differently than I do. Yeah. Well, when Ann came to my house, I remember, and we were initially talking about closets and things, but you made some comments. 

To me just seemed like you must be a psychic, an organizational psychic, because you totally nailed it when you described what my desk and office might look like. And when you opened my computer, what did my screen look like? There were some very specific things you spoke to, and I Do you have some special brain spice?

I know, um, that, that leads me to do these things, but can you talk to some of those? I don't know if you remember those, but something that would show us like a computer screen, how, how might a neurodivergent individual's computer screen look like, or the surface of their desk, even talked about clear bins versus.

solid bins, things like that, that'd be super helpful. Kind of going back to that visual processing and using, having things visible as, um, a support, as a cue that, Oh, like multiple tabs open on your browser. It's, and some people might joke, like, that's kind of what my brain looks like. I've got a lot of tabs open all the time and I'm kind of jumping between them.

Is that bad? Because people tell me when I was working in a corporate office and someone would look over my shoulder, they would shame me for having all those tabs open, but you made it seem like it was okay. And I,  and I was all right. If that, and if I guess the way to answer that would be to ask yourself, is this safe? 

for me in terms of being successful in what I'm trying to accomplish. Can I find what I need in a, in a reasonable amount of time without a lot of stress and frustration? Are these multiple tabs distracting me from the things I'm really trying to get done? Or are they supporting me in the things I'm trying to get done?

And sometimes. Um, with ADHD, especially I think because we're creating our brains are craving dopamine in this like novelty and motivation kind of things to keep us going. It kind of sometimes helps people to move from one task to the next to the nest and kind of bounce around because sustaining the same task for like five hours is very challenging.

But if you kind of. And again, this is a tricky balance to have because we can also really diminish our success by doing too many things at once and dividing our attention too much and it wastes a lot of energy. But if you're finding a happy balance with shifting tasks often enough to keep yourself engaged and you're still, you know, getting things done can be really, I think a great strategy, which would be definitely not what a traditional, you know, Productivity person might say, yeah, it's the way the way to do it.

But there really isn't one way. I think that that visual piece is so interesting. Have you guys heard of time blocking? Yes. Yes. So time blocking, I think, is a really a gift for Almost anybody in the sense that you can take those blocks of time and make them long as long or as short as you want them to be, allowing your brain the opportunity to focus on what needs to be done, but in the amount of time that it, that it can successfully process that.

that, that task at time. I, um, just started it and I love it. And I actually now get a little irritated when somebody walks in on my block of time and they interrupt me with something else.  My poor husband's feeling that right now. I'm like, I'm, I'm time blocking. It's not your time. But, um, I've now color coded my calendar as well so that I can see, oh, okay, well next.

I'm going to be working on this. And I'm kind of more excited to work on this than I was on that. So, and that's motivating. It's so helpful. It is. And also on the other end of that in ADHD, we can make people can get very hyper focused on one thing. That's super interesting. And then they might need some support in putting limits on the time that they're going to spend on something.

And knowing that about myself or about my child, now I can figure out ways to give support or have strategies to not get off track because I tend to hyper focus on something and then I'll spend eight hours researching some really ridiculous product on Amazon, you know, because  and now I've, you know, lost track of all these other things that I wanted to get done.

So putting some limits on things where we tend to get too invested and then You know, putting that block in place of something that we're excited about when we're not as invested. So,  you know, curating these valuable conversations is really about our shared passion for promoting mental wellness  behind the scenes.

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So how are you able to walk in and identify how to optimize? a space or a system for another individual without them saying, this is how my, you know, a kid or even myself, I wouldn't know how to say, Hey, Ann, this is how my brain works.  How do you come in and know what that brain craves, needs, Maybe I don't always know.

And sometimes, I mean, I'll always ask, well, what are the pain points? What are the things that have made you reach out for help and, you know, and talking through that. And then I think I like to approach it. As what I like to call a set of many experiments because it's sometimes it's trial and error to figure out what's going to work best for a person.

And then there's no sense of failure. If something, if the first or second thing we try doesn't work because it's not about you. Trying to achieve some standard. It's just about you trying something and seeing how it goes and then making adjustments from there. So there's just a little bit less, um, of a sense of failure if something isn't amazing, I guess.

So,  What are some strategies after someone has been able, let's just take a child's room, after that you've cleaned up the child's room and you've organized it to their comfortability. Is that a word? Comfort. Comfortability. Comfortability. I don't think that's. We can do it.  Whatever.  After you've, you've organized it to their comfort in helping them.

Keep it that way to kind of maintain. Yeah. Well, and that's where I go back to, you know, when it falls apart, I like to look at like, well, what is it? What is the default here? Like one parent said, they always dump their dirty clothes right here outside the laundry room door. And I just can't stand it. And so I said, let's find a laundry basket that has a really small footprint that has the tall vertical that you are happy with the way it looks and just put it right there.

And maybe that's not really where you want your laundry basket.  It might be a reasonable compromise because now you're seeing clothes in the basket instead of a big pile on the floor. And that's a big, a big improvement from where we started. And maybe they're just not going to take, you know, whatever.

And same thing with like closet doors, like I've taken the closet doors off of most of my kids closets because they were these sliding, you know, it's just a basic small closet with those sliding doors,  it was so hard to. It just wasn't helpful. Like they want to just see the clothes and then they do a good job of hanging them up and, and they actually want to like make them look a certain way.

This is, you know, my teenagers, not younger kids, but for whatever reason that worked better for them. And then we weren't always struggling with those stupid doors. I don't know. It just drove me crazy. That's interesting. And then my. One of my children who has ADHD and autism, I've tried a kind of just open container system for his clothes  because it's very complex for kids, at least for mine.

It just was impossible for them to do. And so I resorted to the open bins or, um, to hooks. People will throw things on hooks way more readily than they will put things on hangers. And some people just don't want to fold their clothes or they, that does not motivate them, right? They're not feeling inspired to do that.

So creating open bins, and then they just put the clothes by category, like pants, shirts, socks, underwear. In the bins and then their clean clothes are they can find what they need and um, they can quickly Put them away with that kind of system and that allows them to maintain it because it's not too complicated There aren't visual or physical barriers that somehow Prevent them from starting the task or from seeing what they need and it just seems to work for them.

So. Wow, that's great. What, what helpful hints or other systems would you suggest for, um, those of us with kids that tend to be a little forgetful about grabbing a couple things before they leave or getting a homework assignment with them before they leave? I think creating a physical place in your house where all of their essential items live and then you as the parent, like essential items, like I'm, I'm saying to leave the house, like to go to school.

And then you as the parent can support the child in getting those things in that place the night before, so that there is less drama in the morning with finding the shoes, finding the, the backpack, the coat, the musical instruments, all of that. And then same thing when they come home, like we call it, I guess I've heard it called like a drop zone basically in your house where  those things can be, again, you know, it's You know, a lot of times kids come home and it's like, it's just the school vomited all over your living room or  family room, you know, there's just backpacks and shoes and coats.

It's just all everywhere. And it's unfortunate. I feel like our homes aren't often designed to support. This process, right? So we have to get creative and it maybe doesn't always visually have the best aesthetic, but it's functionally serves us so well to have some kind of hooks and a bin or something that where everything kind of lives so that we know what we're doing.

Yeah. Every house needs a mudroom. It really does. You do. Do you have those, Andrea, in California? No. No, we don't have mud. as muddy. Yeah. We don't have mud. We don't have snow boots. Yeah. But a mudroom, that's, that's the drop zone. That's where you walk in, you drop your backpack, you drop your keys, the mail.

My whole kitchen is a drop zone right now. It drives me crazy. Kitchen counters. I'm also not active about organizing it. So frustrating. I think it's so frustrating. And it's such a source of shame. I, I, I totally identify with those kiddos that just feel like, oh, they're, they just can't get their shit together.

I feel like that at my age still. I've just, I, I want things to be organized, but I'm not doing it naturally. And I, I'm so hard on myself. And what an opportunity to change the narrative, I mean, because come on over and  take a step back and say something about this isn't working for me instead of saying I'm not working for a clean house or I'm not doing this right.

It's that something about this isn't, is not set up for the way I need it to function. So how can I make, where are the barriers, how can I. Take away whatever, like for the mail, people will make a pile of mail. It feels overwhelming because different reasons, but I always am like, put a recycle bin in a shredder, like right where you walk in the door maybe, or in wherever it is that that process tends to fall apart and now you've removed a barrier to.

I have to go into the basement to the shredder and that's a lot of work and I'm going to forget why I went down there. So I'm just going to put this here and deal with it later. So kind of removing those barriers. Now I can just stand there and put all the junk mail in the recycling, open the things that need to be dealt with, put them on my desk.

And now I don't have, there's no more steps, right? Removing unnecessary steps or locations to make that happen. It's just a matter of taking the time to address the symptoms and put some systems in place. Right. And it doesn't have to be all or nothing. It doesn't have to be. I have to fix this all at once and do it exactly perfectly.

Like, what is one small thing you could try? Like, thinking of it that way. Like, what are small pieces of this that I could think about instead of it being like this big, huge monster that I have to tame? Yeah, which is very overwhelming. It is. I love because you keep on coming back to the functional aspect of your home.

Um, and I know that in our family we have different dynamics, right, of  reduces anxiety and what increases anxiety. Obviously I'm the one with the chaos that creates, it gets the anxiety here. Let's be honest. Um, but then what I perceive as chaos is actually anxiety reducing for a few people, a couple of people in the family.

Oh. Can you give an example? I don't mean to be like peering into your life. No, no, no, no. Yeah. Pick into my personal life. I mean, that's okay. So one little example is let's say the kitchen counters. So I like, and it doesn't have to be my whole house. It really is my kitchen. I like everything to be put away.

I like it to be cleaned off on the top.  really almost bare. I don't, I don't get that because my anxiety is a little less than a couple of other people's. Um, and they like to have things out. Like if I'm going to use the coffee maker with all the accessories of the car, why do they need to be put away? Oh, because I want it right within reach.

Because I want it right within reach. Part of that task. Yeah. Exactly, Ann. So that very minimal example. It's a great example. What would you say would be a way in a family to help create, um, I don't know. Some harmony. Harmony in the house so that everybody's needs are being met and everybody's, um, you know, anxiety, because I would think that most of this is really driven by anxiety, whether it's the shame of not looking good or it's whether things are not within reach, there's just a level of anxiety that that gets that and you want your home to be a calm place.

So what would you suggest and how to tackle differences in or thinking about organization? There's a couple of different ways to look at this. One is there's your space, my space, and there's our space, right? So people should have some places that they can, that allow them to function the way they need it to write their personal spaces.

If that's your desk, if it's your bathroom counter, In the kids bedrooms, right? Like allowing people to, you know, with kids to an appropriate amount of control over how they use the space and the things in it and having those kind of defined in your mind too, because sometimes moms I've noticed are like allowing kids items that are valuable to them to live in common spaces.

And it's creating anxiety because yeah, There's, you know, too much of it is too much chaos. So then it's okay to say those things can live in that child's room if that's important to them, but it's creating anxiety for you, then it's okay for them to keep that item, but put it in a place where now they're owning it and maintaining it in their space.

And then for shared spaces like the kitchen counter, a series of mini experiments  to maybe find a compromise because people that need the visual support may, they're just going to have a hard time with everything put away. So some level of compromise could be achieved by having those coffee accessories, maybe in some kind of container that lives next to the coffee maker instead of.

Okay. So a little bit of containment so it doesn't grow and spread to where now I can't use the counter for other tasks that need to happen in the space. In your personal space, having the horizontal surface is clean because that allows you to think and focus on one thing at a time and it makes it feel calm and peaceful.

that's something for sure to embrace and be able to do in the places that you can. Yeah. Luckily, Amazon now has all these designer level organizational contraptions that look wonderful on kitchen services. You know, you see all those bottles and labels and yeah, it's really helping us out there.

Absolutely. Thanks, Amazon. I get overwhelmed with all of those though, because I have so many of those. I'm like, Oh, that one looks good. That one looks good. That one looks good. More containers are not the answer. Right. And, and people that struggle with organizations, sometimes that they're, you know, we go, we turn to that as the solution,  but a lot of times the containers end up being just more stuff to manage. 

A lot of times, you know, in any, every organizer would tell you, people have too much stuff. Yes. Like, and so that's like a whole nother podcast really that we could do to talk about how to decide. And then that's a big part of what we do as organizers is support our clients in that decision making process.

It can be overwhelming to do alone on how to think about my space and my items. differently so that I don't feel like I need to keep all of it because it probably the amount of stuff that we have often, um, makes maintenance difficult when there's just too much. Yeah. And same with kids, kids get overwhelmed with having access to too many toys at one time, right?

It's just impossible to maintain any kind of system if there's just so many objects physically in the space. So I also, that's another. tip and something I did with my own kids when they were little was having like a rotating bin system and putting away like 80 percent of the toys in bins and just keeping, you know, certain ones available and then rotate them.

So you preserve that novelty and now it's fun again because I haven't seen it for a month and or even exchanging toys with friends that have kids of similar stage where, you know, the things feel new and we play with them. And then when you start noticing the things laying around and not being played with anymore, then they go away and new things come out.

And it just, it's once you find that happy threshold of items to maintain in your space, it helps tremendously. Wow, that's a great nugget. I'm struggling with one of my kids. And we have his whole life and my kid now is almost 21, can't get rid of anything. So what, what are good, I mean, how do you pose a great question or situation to your child that helps them delineate when they're ready to get rid of something? 

I think with kids, I'm not sure. How to answer that? I more readily would be able to answer that with adults. Examining the reasons why you're keeping items. Like, sometimes there's a sense of guilt or obligation, or the just in case, or there's, I need to dispose of it a certain way, and if I can't do it a certain way, like environmental reasons or whatever, then I kind of just, it feels like too much, so I'll just keep it for now.

So I think it is really important with kids to allow them to have a sense of control over their possessions, because trying to take over that is going to create more anxiety. And that's true, of course, with adults as well. But I think a lot of problems can Be come bigger if you try to just take over and it's very upsetting, right?

So having, and there was a discussion on a organizing forum recently talking about this, like how, how, how much say should kids have in how this, how their space is maintained. And I think kind of walking alongside your child and allowing them to have choices, especially in their personal space. And that's where it comes back to having boundaries on what's your space, my space and our space.

And allowing your child to have an appropriate amount of autonomy in their space and then helping them kind of see the consequences of now I can't find things or kind of having some natural experiences with those different strategies and then maybe experimenting with different choices about, you know, reducing the amount of things or you're welcome to keep all of those things as long as they fit in your room.

until they finally, you know, maybe decide they want their room to feel different or look different. And then they can try a different strategy and make some of those difficult choices. I think that question about why are you keeping this or what does it mean to you is really good. I can even pose that to my son, but he, he actually, and, My kids and I have joked, we all tease each other about our funny quirks, um, but yeah, he gets such anxiety with the thought of releasing something, to this day.

So I have bins and bins of essentially just junk. Our family has the funniest story about him. When he was about 10, we said, it's time to get rid of the baby size dresser. It didn't fit his clothing. It was literally falling apart. super inexpensive piece of furniture. He had a nuclear meltdown that we were going to get rid of it and get him something that fit his big sweatshirts.

So I said, okay, well, we're just going to move it to the garage. And my thought was, I'm going to move it to the garage. He's going to forget about it and I'm going to take it to Goodwill. Yeah. So, um, Months go by because that's what I do with the goodwill pile there. Either my garage in the back of my car and Months go by and I'm getting ready to take it.

I mean six months later I'm looking through my phone looking through photos for some other reason and I find in my phone That he snuck in the garage He's 10 or 12. He's older. It was kind of funny and took selfies of him with his dresser. Oh, I love it because he was so afraid it was going to be gone and he would miss it.

He never told me he took these selfies with the dresser.  I mean, literally him with the dresser and the drawers open and about five of them. And when I saw the photos, I was like, Oh, this is him. is traumatic for him the thought that I'm getting rid of his baby dresser so I didn't get rid of it now was in the garage and we put the gardening tools and the the hammers and all of the hardware so I just felt like we cannot get rid of it causing that much anguish so in listening to you say asking what does it mean to you I think That is an important question because I don't know the answer, but it does cause so much trauma to his self to get rid of the empty, okay, he's really going to kill me, empty blistex chapstick thing.

He used to, they'd get empty and he'd line them up on the side of his dresser and we couldn't move them. They had to be in a certain order and we just couldn't disrupt it. So we learned to move around him, but, um, 20 years later, I've got six bins of  junk that I'm saving. Andrea looks like she's going to cry.

No, no, I'm going to cry because I have, I have a child like that too. A few years ago, we needed a new Christmas tree. And, um, I mean, the lights were falling off and it was, you know, we just had to get, so we bought a new Christmas tree. I didn't even think twice about it. I gave it to a girlfriend who loves Christmas and didn't mind stringing the lights on.

My daughter came home and she was like 16 or 17 and was crying.  Saying, Mom, the Christmas tree, I loved being able to string up the lights and having to go through that effort. I loved having to take the little branches and, you know, move them a specific way. And I thought, Oh my God, I am the worst parent ever.

Oh. We just don't know what is so meaningful to them sometimes. And maybe she didn't know it till it left. And then, and then, you know, she recognized her. And I think you're touching on such a big, oh, it's such a big topic is our attachments to physical things. And, and it's our memories and our story. 

Again, we could, I could talk for an hour about that because there's all kinds of things with that. But I love, I mean, what you, what your son did, that he took that selfie. Yeah. I think that's amazing. And so again, an important clue, and this is a strategy that we use sometimes with people and it's actually been shown to be really effective in research is taking pictures of items. 

Can help. It preserves that emotional connection and memory. Oh, wow. Making even a book of memories and helping our kids practice bridging that gap between, um, memory preservation and then actually hanging on to all the physical items. And we can't do all pictures and we can't do all physical, right?

Because we'll have to find some kind of balance and really supporting our kids through that process. And there's even methods that are used to help people practice that because for some people it is very distressing to discard items, even the chapstick container, whatever it is. And then they really need to recognize that and Make do intentional practice of I can tolerate the distress.

I feel over Eliminating some of these items, but they have to be the ones making the choices and being in control And we have to be supporting their process. So even if they you know within reason, of course, we can't  You know some people i've seen actually rent storage units to avoid this distress.

Yeah of not discarding their items that's what I did and that you know, that's one strategy, but just You Considering all the different aspects of the cost and, you know, am I really enjoying the items now, or is it just really avoiding a difficult decision that, and a difficult, you know, naming that just saying, I know, I know I'm going to experience some distress in this and, but noticing that's not going to last forever and I'm making space in my life for new memories and new opportunities, new hobbies, whatever it is, but that's something to approach with a whole lot of sensitivity and.

awareness because it is really difficult and not making people feel shame. That's the way they work or function. That is so, we could have talked an hour on that, that idea of the attachment and probably a little mini grieving in there for, for people who, who struggle with that. And that's okay. Yeah. But I, it's also been shown to try to take over that for our kids.

And not give them those choices can actually make them deep in their commitment and attachment to those things and those beliefs, and it can make the problem a lot worse. Mm hmm. Kind of like a relationship that you're not too fond of. You gotta, you gotta tread water very, very. Yeah. Proceed with caution.

Proceed with a lot of love and support and understanding and, and, you know, communication. Yeah. Wow. Well, we're walking away with so much good information that I wasn't even expecting that would come out. Before we wrap up, Anne, what would be good advice, parting advice, wisdom that you would put out there to parents who are assisting their kids through any, any variation or version of COVID 19?

What we've been talking about parenting kids with different brains with different  needs that might not always be Widely understood by other people in our lives. It's hard and Sometimes our physical space is a real external reminder of that So I think it's so important for us to  take care of ourselves And I know you guys talked to someone about  right?

Put your own oxygen mask on first and take care of yourself so that you can have the capacity to engage with your child with the approach that they need because it is hard and we do get frustrated and our kids get frustrated too. So to try to cultivate self care so that we can then have curiosity and Creativity and kindness in the way that we approach our kids and their organizational challenges and create that healthy narrative for them. 

It doesn't have to be all or nothing. It's not going to be perfect that, you know, celebrating all the small victories that we come along the way in learning how to approach how we need things to be to function and be successful and happy in our lives. Amazing. Staying curious and leaning into your curiosity as a parent.

That's huge advice, huge advice. Because it says we don't have to know it all, but it also honors our kids and communicates them to them that we're with them. Thank you so much, Ann. Lots of good information there. Yeah, thank you. 

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