EGI – Procrastinating deadlines such as, for example, the simple payment of bills produces disorder. And disorder in turn creates more disorder in an endless chain, which affects everyone’s life. Thus, paraphrasing Milan Kundera, the New York Times titled an article on the subject as follows: “The unbearable heaviness of disorder”.
Yeah, why a study published in Current Psychology has related and found a close link between procrastinating one’s actions, postponing them, and disorder problems, organizational confusion in all age groups. Indeed, with a directly proportional relationship between the increase in age and disorder. What can have a negative impact on mental well-being, instead creating a strong discomfort in everyone.
While a second study, which however dates back to 2010, appeared in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examined dual-income married couples living in the Los Angeles area who had at least one school-age child at home: the result was that “wives who perceived that their home was messy” or that it needed work to tidy “tended to have increased levels of cortisol” during the day while those who did not feel untidy, which in the study included the majority of men, “had cortisol levels that tended to decrease throughout the day.”
Cortisol, for those unfamiliar with it, is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands, more precisely by the zona fasciculata of their cortical portion, and it is a steroid-type hormone, i.e. deriving from cholesterol. Which is why the women who in the research study described their homes as cluttered or in need of tidying up “started the day stressed out and became more and more stressed out”.
The same is true for men: in terms of cortisol levels, “men who did more housework in the evening were just as likely to have increased cortisol levels at the end of the day as women”. The point or the difference, if you like, notes the Times in this regard, consists only in the fact that in the end “there are not so many men who devote as much time to housework as their wives”.
Of course, the more things you have in your home, the greater the risk that disorder will rage. So a possible solution is to “make a conscious effort to buy fewer items”, also because often most of what we accumulate inside the home actually doesn’t serve us as they mistake our desires for needs prompted by a thousand conditionings. Not least that of advertising.