With spring comes the urge to open the windows, clear out our closets, and start fresh. What better time to declutter our homes and refresh our physical and emotional lives?

Letting go of things we no longer need can benefit us on many levels. Not only does it give us more physical space to live our lives, but it can also open emotional space for us to connect more deeply with ourselves and others.

Positive psychology founder Martin Seligman’s PERMA model outlines five pillars of flourishing: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. Spring cleaning—sprucing up our homes and simplifying our environments—may seem like a purely practical task, but it can also strengthen each of these pillars.

Here are five ways a streamlined environment can boost well-being

Positive Emotion: A cluttered home can increase our stress levels, contributing to unhealthy mood states and elevated cortisol. UCLA researchers found that women who described their homes as cluttered or filled with unfinished projects experienced flatter diurnal slopes of cortisol—a dysregulated pattern in which cortisol levels remain too high or too low throughout the day. This pattern is associated with chronic stress, poorer mental health, and an increased risk of disease. In contrast, women who described their homes as organized showed steeper cortisol slopes, a healthy physiological pattern.

These empirical findings support what many of us intuitively know: a chaotic environment can disrupt our internal state.

For some of us, clutter may take an even greater toll. I (“Suzie”) have often remarked to James that physical clutter affects me the way verbal clutter affects him. As a philosopher who carefully chooses his words, he immediately understood the comparison.

A more organized and less cluttered home can be restorative. It can foster a greater sense of calm, serenity,........

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