Table of Contents
Declutter Your Mind
What Is Cleaning Up the Mind?
Take time to understand your mind and clean it up if required
- Ever experienced mental overwhelm?
- Do you frequently experience tension or worry due to the weekly tasks you have to complete?
- Do you simply want to give up caring about everything in life?
Everyone occasionally has negative thoughts. But if you frequently feel overtaken by these thoughts, you should pay close attention to what you’re thinking and how it affects your mental state. Must think about it, i.e., Declutter Your Mind
Your internal dialogue is a typical pattern of your mental environment. It’s always there, day and night, reminding you of the house chores you need to finish, phone calls you need to make, rent you need to pay, or making you feel bad for missing your best friend’s birthday.
Even though you might not always be conscious of them, these thoughts are the continual background noise in your life.
Sounds familiar?
Right now, can you pause for a moment and focus on your thoughts? Can you stop worrying about them?
Yes, of course, it’s challenging. But this is the time to declutter your mind. You’ll observe how these thoughts remain uninvited and frequently undesired, one after the other. Your mind occasionally wanders to pointless realms. Many of your thoughts are unwanted and unfavorable, e.g., “I did not like the way he talked to me,” “he is a rude person,” “I am the culprit for ruining our weekend,” etc.
These thoughts, whether unfavorable, neutral, or pleasant, clutter our minds, just like having too many possessions may clutter up your home. Unfortunately, getting rid of mental clutter is more complex than getting rid of physical clutter. Do you think it is easy to declutter your mind?
But the good news is that it is possible to declutter your mind! The mental clutter that might prevent you from becoming more focused and aware can be cleared by developing habits, taking action, and changing your perspective.
Having too much clutter can destroy your productivity and health
The International Human Rights Organization’s (IHRO) regional director, Professor Dr. Ushy Mohan Das, claims that “mental and physical clutter is actually stealing a lot from you. It might take your time, space, and energy, but it can also take your peace.”
Clutter gradually becomes comfortable, and you adapt to it to the point where you don’t even realize you are getting affected by it and finally find it challenging to get rid of it.
Be prepared to declutter your mind! Mess and clutter are associated with unpleasant feelings like uncertainty, stress, and impatience, whereas an organized environment and mind tend to promote more pleasant feelings like calmness and a sense of well-being. You cannot focus on your work when there is clutter around you because a messy environment hinders your progress and prevents your mind from processing information correctly. Having more time, space, and energy gives you the freedom to create the kind of life you want.
According to Ushy, the founder of The Mind Workshop, “clutter to the brain implies unfinished business, and this lack of completeness can be exceedingly stressful for some people. In fact, it also may induce problems associated with sleep by making it difficult to unwind at the end of the day.”
Can it develop the habit of procrastination?
Yes, of course!
In one way or the other, procrastination is an emotion-focused coping method. We engage in task avoidance to avoid an activity’s unpleasant feelings (viz., fear, uncertainty, frustration, anxiety, boredom). As our natural instinct is to give in to feeling good, we place more importance on controlling unpleasant emotional states than on achieving our goals.
When a task at hand makes us feel unpleasant, we’re more prone to procrastinate it to feel better. Of course, our future selves pay the price for this temporary mood improvement.
How To declutter your mind
So, how to declutter your mind?
Your mind is desperately waving a red flag and pleading with you to clear some space when a tide of clutter gradually turns your mental space into a chaotic mess. At that moment, your thoughts also require cleanliness, just like your cabinets and cupboards. Getting rid of all your mental clutter is necessary if you want to be motivated, productive, and effective.
Remember that if anything needs decluttering, it’s our minds! Yes! It’s Declutter Your Mind!
But how to do that? How do you declutter your mind?
It’s not like your thoughts are just lying around, waiting for you to go through them and decide which ones to keep and which ones to discard. The mind is not like an inbox, which can be browsed and responded to.
To declutter your mind, you must externalize your thoughts. Attempting to hold thoughts in your mind is like trying to hold water in your hand, which is almost impossible. However, you may clearly document your thoughts by writing them down so you can use them later.
If you think about it a little, it’s really not that difficult! Believe me! You can declutter your mind!
Subtle changes can have a significant impact, mainly when utilized in conjunction. Simple activities and things that are nearly certain to have a beneficial effect will help you declutter your mind.
Therefore, it is time to give up the thought patterns preventing you from realizing your full potential. You must become more careful about where you focus your attention and how you use your time and energy if you want to strengthen your mental muscles and clear away the clutter in your head.
This way, you can escape unwanted thought patterns that keep you locked and cluttered in your head and declutter your mind!
My Favorite 4-Step Method
I’ve detailed this in my book Immediate Action. You can buy it from here if you haven’t read it yet.
Here is my favorite 4-step method that is super helpful in keeping my mind decluttered. You can also declutter your mind:
#Step 1: Have clarity of the things you have on your plate
Before taking action, you should know what things need to be done and when. And this clarity comes from putting things in writing. So, list everything you need to do, everything you should be doing, and everything you want to do.
#Step 2: Have clarity of why you are doing those things and know their priority levels
Just be aware of your motivations for doing all of these things!
You may have several things on your plate, but you can’t finish them until you know their priority level. Famous American poet Bill Copeland rightly said, “the trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”
Setting priorities is an excellent approach to actively taking control of your life. Believe me, once you write down and think about the things you’ve written, you’ll realize that many of them are really not required to be done. We frequently overburden ourselves with needless activities. We are so preoccupied with what we should and ought to be doing that we completely forget to question ourselves: “Do I even need to perform all those activities?”
Ask yourself two questions for each item on your list:
- Is it necessary?
- Does it matter to someone I love more or to me?
If the answer to both of those questions is “no,” you have just discovered a distraction! So you can cross it off your list. You become less and less distracted as you cross things off your list.
#Step 3: Focus on what is there on your plate now
Now your plate should look cleaner and filled with much more manageable things.
Next, based on your short/long-term goals and life aspirations, you need to figure out what are the things that matter the most to you. Make a list of your top priorities, and then make sure that your decisions and actions align with those priorities.
Making an action plan to achieve those targets and figuring out how to allocate your time so that you can concentrate on each item on that list is the next step. As you get older, your list of priorities may change, and that’s OK as long as you keep checking in with yourself to ensure your current priorities are still beneficial to you.
#Step 4: Review your list of things every day (even just for only five minutes)
You must make it a point to update your to-do list regularly with all you learn. If not, you start deviating off track, and your list becomes inaccurate. Distractions suddenly begin to creep back into your life as you move.
Additionally, if it turns out that anything you formerly considered necessary is no longer relevant, simply cross it out and move on. You must take the time to recognize your interests and devise strategies for pursuing them.
I believe you will find something valuable for you for sure!
I’ve written a series on self-help, i.e. “Self-Help Master Series.” You can check out the series at https://neelamravi.com/e-SelfHelpMasterSeries. My aim with these books is to become a channel of blessings for someone every day, and I hope that readers find value in them.
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Loved this so much. Thanks for sharing!
most welcome 🙂
Very nice
thank you 🙂