In an existence where we are constantly urged to buy more and accumulate more, decluttering takes on a new meaning. It is not simply about clearing toys off the floor or clearing the table for dinner.

If you had to step into an empty room and make it your own, you would probably start with the basic requirements. Say you want to turn it into a bedroom. You will need a bed, a wardrobe for your clothes, a bedside table. Next comes the bed linen, the lighting, and a carpet, possibly a mirror and a chair or stool, and curtains.

Then you start bringing in your personal belongings - the clothes, the shoes and accessories, the books, the trinkets, vases, boxes, wall decoration, calendar, clock, laptop, notepad, pen and papers, handbags. Note that most things have been mentioned in the plural.

And that's how it is now - we don't own one pair of jeans, we 'need'  seven. One handbag? Forget it. We own the entire range. Within a matter of weeks, you will probably be inundated with a collection of possessions, most of which you don't need anymore and probably never really needed in the first place.

That is the onset of clutter, that silent accumulation of objects that start out belonging to you because they're useful and end up invading your living space needlessly. And yet, you continue to believe that each and every item in your possession is important in your life. Taken to extremes, this becomes the very essence of hoarding. All eventual hoarders tend to start off in this very subtle and unassuming manner.

Most of us are not hoarders in the extreme sense. We just happen to own an accumulation of things which are probably unnecessary for us at our current stage in life. But we hang on to them nonetheless, until things start getting to us.

Clutter makes you feel engulfed, overwhelmed, tired, anxious and irritable all the time. No amount of cleaning the house seems to create harmony. You blame the bad vibes on your relationship, your work conditions, your children, or your lifestyle. You try to change things but everything remains the same. When do you ever look at the sum total of your possessions, your clutter? The way it stands guard around you, silently motivating your life?

Because motivate you, it does. It motivates you to invest in more storage space, to shove things to the back of the wardrobe when you need to clear up quickly, to take that much longer to clean any given room, to spend more money making quick purchases because you don't have the time to rummage around at home for what you need. When things get that bad, it is definitely time to pare down your possessions.

You will find that clearing up the space around you, giving a good purge to your rooms, will help clear up your way of thinking and detoxify your life in more ways than one. Does this sound like pretentious exaggeration? You just have to try it out to find out.

Take a simple exercise such as clearing up your handbag or your wallet. Sometimes I do it when I'm sitting in my car waiting for the clock to tick towards my next appointment. I open my handbag, rummage through it and start de-cluttering, right there on my car seat. All it takes is five minutes and it is amazing how I manage to take stock of my life inside that bag.

Out go the old receipts, the old notelets, the empty tissue bags. I re-order the cards in my purse, realise I have an expired one I can throw away, find that friend's business card I was missing. I check out my make-up bag, take a wet wipe and wipe down the powder case, the portable mirror, the lipstick. I sharpen the eye and lip pencils. Then while I'm at it, I clear out the junk sitting next to me in the car door. All the small garbage items fill one old paper bag and I'm one paper bag of garbage lighter. My baggage has just lifted a bit.

Most organising gurus believe that decluttering should become a continuous state of mind. That is not always easy to accomplish when you are inundated with matters typically considered urgent every day of the week. Sometimes you may barely have time to shower or eat, let alone clear your closet. But in this case, when you make time, you save time.

The most ardent organising gurus will recommend you declutter radically, once and for all. The now famous Marie Kondo recommends that we take each item in our hands, look at it and ask ourselves if it strikes joy in our hearts. If it does, it stays. If it does not, it goes. She suggests we should take every single category item out of its hiding place and sort it out definitely.

It's a radical move of course, when you try to carry out your very own clothing purge. It literally means emptying your wardrobe onto your bed and meticulously going through each item, one at a time. And if you have clothes scattered or hiding in other places around the house, you have to delve into those too and sort them out along with the rest.

Those who have gone through this process swear it works miracles, obviously after they have shifted tons of 'joyless' items from wardrobes and drawers into garbage bags or bags for donation to charities. Consider it a mega house moving exercise minus the moving and minus the house - you just concentrate on part of the process.

Then there are the rather more tranquil and laid-back methods which I like to call Sunday afternoon chores. These can happen in that lull between lunch and a siesta or in between tea-time and going out to visit the in-laws, or, if you're an early rise, in that quiet hour before everybody else awakes.

Use that time for decluttering. Clear the medicine chest of expired medicinals, empty boxes, sticky medicine bottles that are nearly finished but not quite. Alternatively, clear our your underwear drawer, cleaning it as it sits emptied of its contents and then checking out all your lingerie for tears, soils, loose elastic, ragged lace. Whatever is perfect or near-perfect stays. Or clear out the shoe cupboard, discard empty polish tins and bottles, throw out last summer's torn flip-flops, plan to re-heel whichever shoe needs it.

You don't have to wait for a change of season to declutter either. Garages, basements, boxrooms, playrooms, kitchen cupboards will all will look and feel better once you get your hands on the job. Will it help you? No end. You just have to try it to believe it.