I have a confession: there are 20,577 unread emails in my inbox, 31,803 photos on my phone and 18 browser tabs currently open on my laptop. Digital clutter has invaded my life and I have no idea what to do with it.

With the storage capacity of our devices increasing with every upgrade and cloud storage plans costing peanuts, it might not seem like a problem to hold on to thousands of emails, photos, documents and various other digital belongings.

But emerging research on digital hoarding – a reluctance to get rid of the digital clutter we accumulate through our work and personal lives – suggests that it can make us feel just as stressed and overwhelmed as physical clutter. Not to mention the cybersecurity problems it can cause for individuals and businesses and the way it makes finding that one email you need sometimes seem impossible.

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The term digital hoarding was first used in 2015 in a paper about a man in the Netherlands who took several thousand digital photos each day and spent hours processing them. “He never used or looked at the pictures he had saved, but was convinced that they would be of use in the future,” wrote the authors.

Defining digital hoarding as the “accumulation of digital files to the point of loss of perspective, which eventually results in stress and disorganisation”, they suggested it might be a new subtype of hoarding disorder – something that itself only was recognised as distinct from obsessive compulsive disorder in 2013.