I'm reluctant to recommend the advice of a man responsible for writing a book called Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? Colleagues have reported from some of the world's most dangerous places, but I wonder if even they appreciate the physical courage required to walk into a bookshop and ask for this title. A self-help book is well on the way to defeating its purpose when the act of buying it induces a psychological problem, in this case severe anxiety and embarrassment. But for all the resentment I now bear towards Peter Walsh, an "organisational guru" and a regular on Oprah, I'm compelled to admit he's on to something.

Most of that something, to be honest, is contained not in the book mentioned above (I refuse to type it out again), but in its predecessor, It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan For Living A Richer Life With Less Stuff. The more recent book focuses mainly on weight loss, but common strands unite the two, because Walsh is a sort of philosopher of clutter, in search of a Grand Unified Theory of our emotional relationship to "stuff". What he's advancing, in his aggravatingly homespun way, is a holistic perspective in which the obesity crisis (too much bad food), our cluttered homes (too many objects) and the curse of "information overload" (too many emails, too much TV) are all facets of the same compulsive drive. We imagine the key to happiness to lie in something outside ourselves; we obsessively accumulate more and more of that thing; yet our failure to find satisfaction stimulates us to further accumulation. A poignant new online documentary about hoarders, Possessed (at vimeo.com/603058), underlines Walsh's implication that we "normal" cluttered types aren't that different from those for whom hoarding is a symptom of mental illness.

So what do we do about over-accumulation? One approach is overly simplistic: just put your stuff in boxes, stop overeating, turn off the TV. Another feels overly abstract: just remember that happiness comes from within, and stop investing objects with emotional value. Walsh opts for a middle path, arguing that the first step in, say, clearing a cluttered home shouldn't be to tidy up, but to decide what kind of life you'd like to live there, then plan your decluttering around that. From this perspective, a messy children's room may be quite all right, requiring no action; but one small stack of work papers in the bedroom may be stressing you out far more than you realise.

If Walsh's holistic approach is right, it has interesting implications. One is that the urge to "clear your clutter" may be a response to overwhelm in other areas: when we feel assailed by, say, media scare stories, we try to claw back some control by tidying our homes. Another is that addressing the problem in one area may bring results in another: Walsh's second book arose, he says, because clients he'd helped with organisation said they lost weight more easily in a decluttered home. Clutter made their butts look fat, you might say. But please don't.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com