E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSSWhy aren’t hoarders bothered by piles of old newspapers and the other junk that clogs their homes?
Scientists may have uncovered an important clue that could help explain why hoarders can live surrounded by mounds of clutter: A brain network that helps us decide whether something should be kept or thrown away may be malfunctioning.
The network appears to go into overload any time a hoarder tries to decide if an object is important, researchers reported in a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. At other times, the affected region of the brain goes too quiet, which may explain why they aren’t bothered by those old newspapers piles.
“When you go into a house like that you’ve got to start thinking, ‘How can this person live this way?’” said the study’s lead author, psychologist David Tolin, director of the Anxiety Disorders Center at The Institute of Living in Hartford, Conn. “It can be maddening if you don’t have this problem. But [hoarders] don’t really seem to recognize or appreciate it. The part of the brain that should be saying this is important is underactive.”
Tolin, an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, and his colleagues compared brain scans from 43 hoarders to those from 31 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and 33 healthy volunteers. Before any of the volunteers came in, they were asked to sweep all the papers from a countertop at home into a plastic garbage bag.
“[Participants] were told we wouldn’t throw anything away that they wanted to keep,” Tolin said. Tolin and his colleagues also brought in junk mail from their homes to use as a control. The papers were put into boxes labeled either “My Stuff” or “Your Stuff.”
While in a brain scanner, study volunteers then watched a video screen as a researcher plucked a piece of paper from one of the two boxes and asked if it should be tossed into a shredder.
When hoarders were looking at someone else’s junk, there was very little activity in the brain network that includes the insula and the anterior cingulated cortex. But when they were asked about their own junk, the network sparked wildly.
“These two regions are commonly thought to constitute a network involved with the understanding of the relative importance or significance of something,” Tolin said. “When hoarding participants were not making a decision that was personally relevant it was underactive. That may explain how a person can live in a horrible environment and not seem to care about it. The flip side is that when there’s a personally relevant decision in front of them, such as whether to discard something they own, the region gets hyperactive and they are overwhelmed.”
Tolin suspects that the network hyperactivity sparks an unpleasant sensation, so hoarders just skip making any decisions to avoid the feeling.
It’s not clear whether people are born with this kind of faulty wiring or whether they simply have a predisposition that gets kicked off with the right environmental factors.
Still, Tolin said, the new research may help clinicians come up with better therapies and also explain why certain treatments, like cognitive behavioral therapy seem to work.
The idea behind those treatments is to try to get the brain to rewire through positive experiences. So, Tolin said, a therapist might coach a hoarder going through a pile of papers in the living room by asking the kinds of questions that come naturally to others: Is this something I’ve used in the last six months? If I didn’t have this would I be worse off? Is this of good enough quality that it’s worth keeping?
“Part of what we’re doing is teaching and drilling them on appropriate decision making,” Tolin said. “They’re used to responding to the overwhelming impact of these brain regions. When they start practicing doing it this way, they are actually teaching their brains not to have that reaction.”
Gail Blanke, author of "Throw Out 50 Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life," tells viewers how to get rid of excess junk and TODAY contributor Jill Martin shows how to keep what's left organized.
Related:
- Elvis impersonator showcases his Garbageland on "Hoarding: Buried Alive"
- "Facebook depression" disputed by experts
- Anxiety cranks up activity in women's brains
Hazmat crews were called in to help rescue a 600-pound man who was trapped inside his Pennsylvania home and in need of medical attention. They were forced to cut a hole through the side of his house, because they couldn't get through the clutter inside his home. WPXI-TV's Courtney Brennan reports.
Leave a Comment:
My wife has definately become a hoarder.She had a back operation about 10 years ago that didn't goes as expected.From that time forward she wasn't able to do as before the operation.She was always a metticuluously clean and neat person before.After,the hoarding began.I have forced her to confine the hoarding to one room in the house and demand that everything that stays in the room must have value to both of us.Some arguements but you can walk around the room,it's functional but not nearly as neat as other rooms.I guess it could be worse,she could be one of those nutbags who shop all day and bring all that crap home!Her habit drives me insane but I signeded the contract for better or worst.
My sympathy to your wife. One of my husband's closest family friends was pushed into back surgery that left her permanently disabled and in need of a morphine pump. That particular scam is another health problem MSNBC ought to write about.
If you will allow me to offer some unlicensed advice (possibly worth every penny you're gonna pay for it), I believe that many hoarders need a greater sense of security. It sounds like you are not helping her to feel secure, except in the narrow technical sense that you aren't going to divorce her. She's only allowed to keep stuff that you consent to, yet you hint that you are so unhappy with her current performance that you feel you've ended up with "for worse." If you're letting this frustration show at home, your wife might know consciously that you can be trusted not to dump her yet feel that you don't love her or enjoy her company as much as you did before she was injured. That would make her feel less secure, especially when combined with worry over whether her health might get worse in future, and make her want to hoard as a defense mechanism.
If I were you, if your house is big enough that each of you could have one room under your total control, I'd label one room "her sewing room" or "her office" and let her do whatever she wants in it, so long as it doesn't attract vermin. (Obviously, if you have a three-room cabin, that doesn't work.) I'd try to bite my tongue about the mess, and go out of my way to make her feel secure outside that roomful of clutter. Help her pursue ways of reducing her physical pain and regaining mobility, help out with the housework as much as you can, praise and thank her for the things she can still do to make her feel that you still appreciate and love her. The happier she is, the less she will need superfluous stuff. The clutter might get worse for a while before it gets better, but I think your relationship would end up better that way than if you just keep the clutter down from the beginning by imposing demands on her.
Before anyone else talks, I suggest you watch A&E's Hoarders and see.... Its a real eye opener to you, considering its mental illness, OCD etc.... very difficult to deal with properly.....
For many hoarders, it's not about laziness but about attachment issues. If it was just laziness, why do so many hoarders on that show have a very hard time letting go of things, even if they don't have any purpose.
Laziness is part of the problem, but not the whole problem. Becoming accustomed to a crowded and cluttered living space is part of the problem, but not the whole problem.
The only time I see hoarders on that show willing to accelerate in cleaning out their homes is when their children are at risk of being taken away from them. Otherwise they have lots of reasons why they become hoarders.
Often it's a death in the family and you try to fill a void in your heart with things. One woman was raped twice and she was using the clutter as a defense against another break-in and attack. One woman was raised in a neglectful home, and the items in the home were more of her family than her real family, so she could never part with them.
It's a interesting disorder. Tragic often, but some will recover.
Very good point. I'd call my father a boarderline hoarder, because he doesn't save absolute trash yet, but he's getting there. When I was a child, he'd go through bouts of "lets clean this house!" and recruit everyone to help him. But it was misery for us as kids, because watching him clean was like snail watching. He'd have to go through every single piece of paper, box, bag, etc. He'd stop and recall all the memories associated with everything, from old bills to old toys. If I wanted to, say, throw away old items, he'd keep them because he thought my own children might want them someday. In the end, our "cleaning" was nothing more then a mass reorganization of the stuff we'd never use. It wasn't laziness as much as he couldn't part with a damn thing because of memories and the thought that he might need it later. I can't even count how many times I got in trouble because I threw away old homework that I had gotten a good grade on.
And that was just my childhood. When my brother died, all hell broke loose. Now, with no children at home, it's getting bad. All of my brother's old toys are stuffed away in one basement room, along with all of his old clothes, bed, etc. Now, his health is failing and he's overwhelmed, my mom is overwhelmed, and he wont do anything about it. But every so often, I hear him talk about cleaning the house and I know the drill....
Interesting article. There are degrees of hoarding. I've seen friends and family at several different levels. It does seem that there is a part where there is a paralysis of decision making. The person gets so anxious trying to decide where to start or what to do with what they want to get rid of that they just avoid it or get bogged down.
The traumatic loss or having experienced a time of extreme lack (the Depression) also seemed to have some connection. Will be interesting to follow the progress of this research.
Sure, maybe that's how it works for some people... but the ones you see on that extreme hoarding show, you know, the ones with 3 feet of cat @!$%# piling up on their walls, who sleep on a bed made of empty boxes and old KFC buckets with moldy chicken still inside... those people have something else going on.
One common thing I've noticed when watching the show, is people who were neat and tidy before, will become hoarders after suffering a traumatic loss, like loosing a child or spouse. I don't know if that's a strait up cause, or maybe they were predisposed to hoarding and it just becomes an easy coping mechanism for them, but it seems to be very common.
I feel very sorry for folks with this disorder. I also feel very sorry for their families. My mother-in-law became a hoarder late in life. I think it was when my father-in-law became disabled. She saved everything. And I mean everything. She grew up in the depression so that was part of it but she also very carefully washed and stored the styrofoam 'plates' that meat comes in. She had thousands and thousands of rubber bands from the newspapers, I could go on and on.
We live in Texas and she lived in PA. When she passed away my husband and his brother spent 2 years off and on to clean it out. (My husband couldn't just go up and stay so he had to fly up once a month or so for a long weekend). It was very stressful. Bless her heart. The guys knew it, saw it but trying to get her to throw anything out was so stressful for her that they just let her go. At least she did throw out real trash so she didn't live in squalor.
I'm getting older now and I watch these shows to give myself a push to get rid of a lot of stuff. Some things may mean a lot to me but I know my son won't feel the same. I don't want to make him go through all my stuff when I go so I'm doing it now. It's amazing just how much 'stuff' we accumulate in 61 years of life. And I'm not even close to a hoarder.
To all of you jumping all over whowhat, I suspect you're the same type of lazy people he's describing. And I agree wholeheartedly: hoarders are lazy pigs, plain and simple. I don't buy the glib explanations of "mental illness"; please, that seems to be today's catch-all excuse for any type of aberrant behaviour. I actually wrote considerably more, but I think I'll just cut it here, and finish with, I'm not buying the 'mental illness" angle. All I'm reading is a lot of simpering excuse-making.
Why aren't dung beetles bothered by all that dung?
First, to the poster whowhat, Hoarding is NOT simple laziness. Some try to categorize people as lazy; however, that is simply not the case. Just like any other psychological dysfunction, once something like this begins, many cannot reverse it by themselves. I have first hand experience with a hoarder. In this case, some well-meaning family members decided to try what they called an intervention. They cleaned out the house, donated truck loads of "stuff" to charities and hauled off truck loads to a landfill. The hoarder almost had a complete breakdown in the process. The house was cleaned, some remodeling ensued, and - two years later - it is full of junk again. The hoarder needed professional behavioral therapy when the home was cleaned and refused to go. This person is far from lazy, though, and engages in many community, church, and family activities. He/She simply cannot stop hoarding "stuff."
First, to the poster whowhat, Hoarding is NOT simple laziness. Some try to categorize people as lazy; however, that is simply not the case. Just like any other psychological dysfunction, once something like this begins, many cannot reverse it by themselves. I have first hand experience with a hoarder. In this case, some well-meaning family members decided to try what they called an intervention. They cleaned out the house, donated truck loads of "stuff" to charities and hauled off truck loads to a landfill. The hoarder almost had a complete breakdown in the process. The house was cleaned, some remodeling ensued, and - two years later - it is full of junk again. The hoarder needed professional behavioral therapy when the home was cleaned and refused to go. This person is far from lazy, though, and engages in many community, church, and family activities. He/She simply cannot stop hoarding "stuff."
I find it curious that my wife is a horrific hoarder
while her brother is a relentless neat freak. Two very opposite extremes and I
have to belief there is a gene connection here.
Some of us are hoarders because we're LAZY. We would rather spend time making comments than we would with sorting and tossing. Our survivors can do that, and they won't be so fussy about throwing something out that might be of use!
I grew up with hoarders and discovered as an adult NOT that I am a hoarder BUT not being allowed to throw things away or get rid of them other ways (donation, yard sale, etc) I NEVER learned what was or wasn't important to keep.
It took me years to understand that I'm going to get that catalog pretty much monthly---I have actually had my parents pull that kind of stuff out of my TRASH to save when they were visiting. It upset them so much to toss the junk that in order to keep the peace I waited until they had gone to even collect my mail.
I literally grew up having to hide my trash so I could toss it at school a little at a time.
Hoarding is a very scary ordeal for those who have it and an exercise in humiliation for their children.
I find great pleasure throwing away stuff I haven't used in years. Nothing worse than having to walk through a overcrowded garage or attic. And you can't find anything.
Hoarders are mentally unbalanced and simply think they need to keep everything, regardless of whether it has a use or not. A local man and his aging father were hoarders until the father passed away. Locals pitched in to clean the house (not a large house, either) and filled three 15 cubic yard dumpsters with junk. The man is still around and is also hoarding stuff for whatever eventualities. He is intelligent, yet wears the same clothes daily, has hair about three feet long, a long beard and wears a coat and hood even in the summer. He walks everywhere and can carry on an intelligent, informed conversation and is harmless. Everyone around here knows him and some just avoid contact with him. Who really cares that he's a hoarder?
So how do you expain the dead animal carcasses?
Fascinating scientific findings. I help people all over the world declutter and create homes they love (I provide a free masterclass at ) and I have a background in Psychology (I have a Psychology degree). I'm fascinated by the physiological and psychological causes of hoarding and how understanding them can contribute to the development of effective treatments for this distressing, and much misunderstood condition.
Common sense would tell you that anyone living as a horder must have something not functioning properly in their brain. I wish I could get money from the government to do research on something that is pretty much prooving common sense. To be honest human beings are adaptive. Once they start to live in subpar conditions they adapt to it and it becomes normal to them. And the process continues. You can call it an inactive part of the brain or whatever and clearly not everyone is a horder but human beings in general are adaptive.
To give you an example and you will laugh or think I am crazy. Ever watch a movie and laugh hilariously then later you see a sequel and think it's even funnier. Then later still you go back and watch the original movie. Then you think to yourself, this isn't that funny. You could say because you already saw it and that is partly true but it is true because you have already adapted. The bar has been raised to the level of the sequel. It's just my opinion but I see it everywhere in life and horders are no different albeit much more accentuated.