How many times have you opened a drawer, found something you haven’t used for years and… put it back there? It happens to almost everyone. Decluttering is on everyone’s lips, but when it comes to taking action, those items almost seem to hold up. And in a way, they really do.
Behavioral psychology has a precise name for this phenomenon: endowment effect. Recent studies confirm that we tend to attribute a disproportionate emotional value to the objects we own, simply because we own them. It’s not weakness: it’s neurology. Our brain encodes certain objects as part of our identity, and letting them go activates the same brain areas involved in physical pain.
Owning fewer objects means aiming for higher quality, saving money and having less clutter in the home, so we can focus on what really has value in our lives. (READ also: Do you want to get rid of the superfluous? Try the 30 day challenge to embrace minimalism)
Our favorite stuffed animal from when we were little, our children’s school notebooks, the first gift from our partner, books read and loved, party favors that we don’t have the courage to throw away. Behind every object there is a story that is difficult to erase with a simple wipe of the sponge.
But there’s good news: you don’t have to choose between memories and light-heartedness. There is a technique that really works, and it’s simpler than you think.
The farewell ritual: why it works (and what the research says)
The most effective way to free ourselves from the objects to which we are emotionally attached is to organize a moment of conscious “goodbye”, a real farewell ritual before letting them go.
It’s not just folklore or Marie Kondo-style Zen philosophy: research in the field of cognitive psychology suggests that actively processing detachment, rather than repressing it, significantly reduces post-decisional regret. Basically, we feel better after saying goodbye to an object with intention than when we quickly or guiltily discard it.
Here’s how to do it:
- Take your time, don’t rush. Before packing everything up in a box to be sent to the landfill (or for sale or charity, depending on the condition of the items), sit down with those items around you.
- Let’s think back to those objects, how much they made us feel good psychologically and how useful they were to us at a particular moment in our lives.
- Let’s relive the moment when we chose and purchased them, or when we received them as a gift from a family member or friend.
- The simple act of seeing everything one last time and reconnecting to the emotions behind the objects can be a way to then let them go with greater awareness and with a little less pain.
The secret: separate the memory from the object
One of the most powerful insights to emerge from the most recent studies on emotional minimalism concerns a fundamental distinction: memory does not live in the object, it lives in you.
Storing baby clothes or elementary school notebooks doesn’t take us back to childhood. Those moments already exist, permanently, in our memory and in our identity. The physical object is only a symbol of it — and symbols, when they no longer serve us, can be replaced or simply released.
An increasingly popular alternative, even in the digital age, is to photograph objects before letting them go: creating a small visual archive, perhaps accompanied by a written note on why that object was special. In this way the memory is preserved in a form that does not take up physical space.
Organizing a moment of farewell – perhaps involving other “actors” of that particular period of our lives, such as our parents, our siblings or our best friend – will allow us to remember one last time before letting go of the past forever and moving on.
Decluttering in 2026: the new “slow” approach
If the decluttering of previous years was often associated with a certain frenzy of “throwing everything away immediately”, the current mood is going in a different direction: slower, more conscious, more sustainable. We are increasingly talking about intentional decluttering, which does not aim for a perfectly empty house but for a space that truly reflects who you are today, not who you were ten years ago.
This approach also takes into account the environmental impact: before throwing away, we ask ourselves whether that object can be donated, repaired, sold or recycled. Decluttering thus also becomes an act of responsibility towards the planet, as well as towards oneself.
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