Smith College psychologist Randy Frost, an expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder and a pioneer in the field of compulsive hoarding, estimates there are as many as 4 million hoarders nationwide and many more who fall on the spectrum of “problematic cluttering behavior.” Hoarding is a problem that worsens with age.

Hoarding, Frost said, is associated with a number of things including difficulty processing information, the inability to make decisions when confronted with a large amount of information and a failure to categorize things — meaning you can’t see the commonality of objects and they instead all look unique to you.