A Cluttered Home Causes More Stress for Women Than Men

When I was growing up in Sydney, Australia, I often took public transport to visit both my maternal and paternal grandparents. Much to my maternal grandparents’ consternation, I visited my paternal grandparents more often than I visited them. This was partly because although my paternal grandparents’ apartment was small, it was always as neat as a pin. In contrast, my maternal grandparents’ house was dusty and cluttered from floor to ceiling with materials from my grandmother’s former florist business, making it not as nice a place to visit. 

My childhood experience is not unusual, as many people find clutter in homes and workplaces to be unpleasant and even stressful. For example, a 2025 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that people who considered their homes more cluttered had lower levels of well-being and life satisfaction, as well as higher levels of negative feelings. Clutter also reduces the psychological attachment people have to their homes. Office clutter similarly increases emotional exhaustion and reduces productivity and work satisfaction.  

Sex Differences in the Effects of Clutter

Not surprisingly, there are sex differences in the effects of clutter on well-being. Women find a cluttered home more stressful than men do, on average, and this leads to detrimental daily patterns of the stress hormone cortisol. This was shown in a landmark 2010 study of 30 middle-class, dual-income families with at least one young child living in a large U.S. city. 

In this study, family members were given video recorders and asked to conduct self-guided tours of their homes, where they described the spaces and their possessions, and the meanings they attached to them. These interviews were analyzed with linguistic software, which provided counts of words associated with clutter, a sense of the home as unfinished, a sense of the home as restful, and words describing the backyard and natural features, such as trees or plants. Based on a principal components analysis, counts of the cluttered and unfinshed words were combined to create a stressful home score, and counts of the restful and nature words were combined to create a restorative home score. Family members were also interviewed and asked questions about their mental health and provided saliva samples at different times in the day so that researchers could assess their levels of the stress hormone cortisol and how these levels changed. 

For deep-rooted psychological reasons, decluttering the home is a good way to improve both mental and physical health, especially for women with young children.

While stressful home and restorative home scores did not influence husbands’ moods or mood changes in the day, for wives, a higher stressful home score was associated with a more depressed mood as the day went on. Further, wives with higher stressful home scores were more likely to have a daily pattern of cortisol levels associated with adverse health outcomes, and wives with higher restorative home scores were more likely to have a beneficial daily pattern of cortisol levels. For husbands, neither stressful home nor restful home scores were associated with their daily patterns of cortisol levels. Because both marital satisfaction and neuroticism may influence individual descriptions of home, mood, and individual cortisol levels, these factors were controlled in another analysis, but the results were the same.

Why Clutter at Home is Stressful

In this study, a cluttered, unfinished home contributed to husbands’ and wives’ description of their homes as stressful, while an uncluttered home with a yard, trees, and plants contributed to husbands’ and wives’ description of their homes as restorative. So why do people find clutter stressful and access to nature restful? Evolutionary psychologists explain the fact that people tend to find nature calming, especially landscapes with open grassy landscapes, trees, and water features such as lakes or streams, because over human evolutionary history, those landscapes were good spots for our ancestors to be: grassy areas with trees and water sources signified good supplies of wild game to eat and water to drink, while open spaces meant the ability to spot danger in the form of human or non-human predators. Thus, people the world over tend to find open grassy landscapes with trees and water features calming, and noisy, busy, cluttered, urban environments without greenspace stressful.

Evolutionary psychology can also help explain why we find clutter in our homes stressful. Just as an open grassy landscape meant that our ancestors could feel secure that they would obtain food and water and see and escape danger, being in a cluttered indoor space can promote the opposite in our stone age brains and warn of hidden threats (whether real or unreal) and the inability to escape them.

So why the sex differences in response to clutter? Many will tell you it is because women tend to be more responsible for the home environment than men. This is undoubtedly the case but not much of an explanation, since in all documented societies, women are more responsible for the home environment and child care than men. Why do women almost universally take more responsibility for the home and children than men? Evolutionary psychology suggests that this is partly because women tend to invest more in their children than men, on average. In a modern environment, investing in children involves creating a clean and safe home. A cluttered home is less likely to be a clean home and more likely to be unsafe, especially for small children.

So, for deep rooted psychological reasons, decluttering the home is a good way to improve both mental and physical health, especially for women with young children. Decluttering the workspace is also likely to have positive effects on both productivity and mood. And for grandparents, a good way to encourage your grandchildren to visit more often is to keep a clean and uncluttered home.

Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it matters for contemporary life (Routledge 2016), editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, & Society (Oxford, 2018), and author (with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber) of Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Routledge, 2024).

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