Organized desks, sleek nightstands, and marble coffee tables holding a single geode perched atop a photography book about Lisbon are where it’s at these days. In large part, you can thank Marie Kondo’s million-copy bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up for making minimalism—i.e., a lack of stuff—so on-trend. Through Kondo, we’ve been persuaded that tossing our belongings is the way to achieve happiness. In response, we’ve fetishized minimalism and tidying up.

But it’s not doing us any favors.

Most of us know a neat minimalist lifestyle isn’t sustainable. Especially if you’ve got a job, a social life, or pets, never mind a baby or anything that both requires you to have stuff and hinders your ability to clean house 24 hours a day. A picture-perfect home is simply impossible to maintain. Which is why I’ve got some great news for you. Being messy has a ton of benefits. It’s a relief to hear, I know. Especially for those of us who proudly decluttered our homes and threw away our books and said thank you to our socks at the end of the day before realizing what an unsustainable crock of shit it all was. Being messy is, for many of us, our natural state. And it’s healthy. Scientific studies back this up. So, relax and embrace the clutter. I’ll tell you why.

Messy environments boost creativity

Some of the world’s most respected artists and thinkers are notoriously messy. Everyone from Albert Einstein to Tina Fey to Roald Dahl. It’s no coincidence. Science has proven that messy people are more creative. Researchers at the University of Minnesota and at Northwestern found that subjects placed in clean, uncluttered rooms were more likely to choose “classic” menu items instead of new ones. They favored conventional thinking when it came to finding weird uses for ping-pong balls. Subjects placed in a messy room, however, were more adventurous and thought outside the box. They came up with more creative uses for those ping-pong balls and chose more unusual menu items. Their brains were simply more limber, more open to new ideas. “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition…which can produce fresh insights,” noted Dr. Kathleen Vohs, who led the study. So surround yourself with your random collection and get to work on that tech start-up, embroidery project, dog memoir, or any other creative thing you’ve been meaning to undertake.

Messiness is an effective organization tool

Messy people have a secret, a cheap and easy filing system that’s just as effective as getting rid of all your things, or buying an expensive box from that store that sells expensive boxes. The method? The pile system. The pile of clothes on your floor right now? Congratulations: That’s a system. According to David Freedman’s A Perfect Mess, “piles have a chronological meaning to them...people know how many inches they have to go down on a pile to get so many weeks or months back in time, and that makes it very easy to find things.” That means the pile of clothes on your floor is actually organized according to when you last wore stuff. Your gym clothes are on the bottom, right? Your favorite black sweater is on top. And everything else is in a perfectly sensible stack in between!

Mess is authentic

As I write in my book, we’re born messy, we die messy, and somewhere in between we get bullied into believing that we should be neat and organized. But for many of us, minimalism just isn’t organic. Otherwise why would we have bought a million copies of a book instructing us how to be tidy? That’s a lot of naturally messy people looking to change their ways. This expectation that neatness is best adds another layer of stress to our already stressful lives. We need to recognize that. So next time you’re worried that your coffee table isn’t Instagram-worthy or your houseplants aren’t currently on trend (ferns and ficus are back in a big way), try to relax. Remember that you’re in a fertile, creative environment. Your house is perfectly organized and probably full of piles of things you can find immediately should you need them. And best of all, it’s all the real you.