18 Tangible Benefits of Minimalism
We have gathered various benefits of minimalism for you into this resource. Many of these benefits are backed by research. We have listed these sources to the end of this post. Go through the post and see if you find upsides you haven´t considered before. If this piece of content brings you value, feel free to share it with others.
Table of Contents
1. You Spend Less Time Searching for Your Stuff
Average American spends 6 months during their lifetime on looking for their lost items. Furthermore, 2.7 billion dollars are spent annually in the US to replace such items. By reducing the stuff that doesn´t bring value into your life, there´s also less likelihood you need to search for your stuff and also save money! Interested to learn over 100 other ways to save money? Read our post here.
2. Minimalism Help You with Decision-Making
On average, adults make 35 000 desicisions in a day. Thus it´s no wonder if you become overwhelmed with your options and get stuck. This phenomenon is also known as paralysis analysis. (Feel free to read more about minimalist terminology from our Minimalism Glossary.)
But worry not, minimalism can again come to rescue. If you reduce the number of decisions you have to make, easier your decision making becomes. No one can remove all the decision making situations from their life but luckily there are plenty that can be removed.
One of the popular ways to reduce decisions is to simplify a wardrobe. This trick is widely utilized, all the way to the leaders like Barack Obama to Mark Zuckerberg (check his wardrobe post below). This is what the former head-of-state had to say during his presidency:
You´ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I´m trying to pare down decisions. I don´t want to make decisions about what I´m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.
3. Less Time Spent on Cleaning, Organizing and Maintaining
Did you know that the average American household has around 300 000 things? These require cleaning, organizing, maintaining or take a piece from your valuable mental space.
These time-robbing activies are also accompanied with the Diderot effect. Diderot effect, named after a French philosopher Denis Diderot, refers to a situation where acquiring a new item leads to an urge to get even more things. For example, purchasing new curtains may lead to a point where it may also feel necessary to aquire a new rug and a sofa to match with the curtains. Or buying a new phone leads to getting a complementary protective case, screen protector and headphones.
On the contrary, when you downsize your possessions, you realize you don´t need that much space to live, clean and maintain after all. And if you have subscribed to a self storage facility you may easily be able to get rid of that as well. Interesting piece of trivia: There are more storage facilities in the US than Dunkin´ Donuts, Subways and McDonald´s restaurants combined!
4. Easier to Welcome Guests to Your Home
As through minimalism you have less stuff at your home, easier and faster it is to organize your living space to a condition where you feel comfortable to bring guests in.
5. Faster to Go to Explore the World
Through minimalist practices you can have less things to check before leaving your home. Less time needed to ensure you don´t have electronic devices powered on, less time to ponder about your outfit, less time to searching for stuff you want to take with you. Perhaps you have even adopted a one-bag lifestyle which makes packing for adventures extra fast.
6. Can Make Your Life Safer
The ability to leave your space fast can become very handy in case of an emergency, such as a house fire where you need to leave your space quickly. With less clutter you are also less likely to fall down and hit your head while making the run, even if when nothing is burning. Furthermore, the likelihood of fire in the first place goes down as you have less things such as electronic appliances to catch on fire (one of the most common reasons for house fires). Also, clutter in home can make the fire spread faster and produce more toxic fumes.
Coming back to the point about falling down in your home: According to the British Royal Society of for the Prevention of Injuries, home is the most likely place for an accident to happen.Again, reducing the clutter-related hazards, you can make your life safer.
You can increase your safety on the road as well. By having a clutter-free car you can avoid situations where the clutter can becomes deadly projectiles in the case of sudden deceleration. And by adopting practices of digital minimalism you can make sure your phone doesn´t distract you while you´re driving.
7. Lower Insurance Costs
When you have less possessions, there is less to insure, pretty simple. For example, by adopting a car-free lifestyle you save a great deal of money on insurance. The average cost for full coverage car insurance in the US is 2150 dollars.
8. Ability to Become Financially Independent, Retire Earlier or Work Less
Practicing minimalism tend to often lead to increased savings. By investing these savings, considerable passive income streams can be created which give a possibility to work less, do more meaningful work or retire earlier if one prefers to do so. If you´re interested of such opportunities, check out the FIRE movement. The abbreviation FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early.
9. Increase Self-discipline
By resisting the urge to get more stuff through advertisements (of which see up to 10 000 per day) or peer pressure or simply your own wants you increase your self-discipline.
10. Easier to Concentrate
Research has shown it takes about 20 minutes to get your concentration back after a distraction. Contrast that to tens of notifcations most of us receive to our devices becoming a digital minimalist and reducing the amount of distractions on your phone may very well start to make sense.
11. Higher productivity and Higher Chance on Becoming Expert
Time is finite. Besides removing distractions if you put focus on fewer things, you can dedicate more time on mastering those areas you value the most. I highly recommend watching this video (especially from the beginning to 4:33) by Sam Ovens where the power in focusing on a chosen specific thing is what makes champions. The best on their respective fields rarely have multiple things they put equal amount on effort into. In the video below Sam gives an example of Michael Phelps who won 23 olympic gold medals in his career. His to do list in the mornings was to:
1. Wake up.
2. Get in pool.
12. Better Physical and Mental Health
Man-made items off-gas to the environment, releasing VOCs (volatile organic compounds). VOCs can cause anything from headaches to cancer. With less possessions, less VOCs there are spread to your environment.
Studies made on the topic of clutter in homes suggest that clutter can decrease mental wellbeing and also raise physiological reactions, such as increased cortisol levels, especially on women.
13. Less Stress on the Environment
When a person own less, or change own consumption to a more sustainable alternatives, one can siginicantly decrease their negative impact on the environment.
One of the examples of the ways to significantly reduce one´s environmental impact is to change car to a bicycle as a method of transportation. For instance, one study came to the following conclusion:
“An average person cycling 1 trip/day more and driving 1 trip/day less for 200 days a year would decrease mobility-related lifecycle CO2emissions by about 0.5 tonnes over a year.”
Other significant way to become more sustainable is to rethink the consumption on clothing. For example, manufacturing of a single traditional cotton t-shirt requires 2700 liters of water. That equals to the amount of drinking water for one person for almost 2,5 years. Maybe you don´t need more clothes that you have at the moment? Or when you add to your wardrobe, buy long-lasting and high-quality pieces and/or buy used.
14. More Flexibility
Got an itch to sell your stuff and start to live as a digital nomad out of your backpack travelling the world? It is quite a bit easier when you own 3 000 vs 300 000 items you need to get rid of. Also, as your finances have (hopefully) improved through minimalism and you have saved a good chunk of money, your bank account also allows this flexibility.
15. Higher Quality Items
When you stop buying things you don´t actually need you can allocate more money to those items that actually are useful to you. Luxuries are not forbidden for minimalists. Instead, minimalism can even increase luxuries if one wants so. And buying higher quality stuff require less repairs or other headaches while also carrying higher resale value.
16.You can Reduce the Time Spent with Toxic People
When adopting minimalism to your relationships and reassessing your priorities, you can save yourself from wasting time on relationships that take more from you life than they give. Read more about different types of minimalism here.
17. You Can Live in a Better Location
After getting rid of the unnecessary clutter you can find yourself from a situation where you don´t need as much living space as before. Probably many of us could do just fine with less space. Between 1950 and 2004, average square footage of a new single-family home grew from 983 square feet to 2349 square feet in the US. Instead of focusing on this never-ending spiral of increasing the square footage you can instead relocate yourself to a more space-efficient home that is in a more central location to those activities you enjoy the most.
18. More Appreciation and Gratitude on What You Have
With less physical and mental clutter, it is easier to appreciate and be grateful for the relationships, the stuff you have and overall the world around you. With increased gratitude it is also easier to get rid of the craving spiral for more stuff.
