Mental Clutter
Tips to declutter mental clutter
What is Mental clutter?
Mental clutter is essentially something that “prevents us from sleep.” Something that increases pressure, distress, anxiety, depression, irritation, rage, and frustration. It prevents clarity of thoughts.
The answer is simple for those who do not endure constant mental clutter:’ avoid worrying about any of it.
In our lives, we have to minimize problems that create all of the negative thoughts and issues that altogether remove our cherished time spent on activities that offer us satisfaction and purpose.
Clutter, like mental clutter, comes in many shapes and proportions. Anything which prevents you from thinking is mental clutter. Overstimulation may also lead to mental clutter. While having a meal or traveling to a meeting, we speak on the phone, or when speaking to a close relative while watching Television, we reply and text message! Yeah, it can be great to multitask, but only to a degree.
Types of Mental clutter
- Being worried
Worry is still aimed at the future. In reality, we assume at a certain point that we can avoid such situations from occurring and manipulate our future through our worries. We do have the power to make decisions, but with the best knowledge and advice we have at the moment, we could only make those decisions. Worry drives our thoughts into chaotic junk and keeps us from seeing correctly. There is little scope for imagination or solving problems once we start thinking in black and white.
- Remorse and stewing about previous errors/choices
Guilt, generally with allegations of what we should or shouldn’t have executed, traps us in the past. Guilt can stay after a while as a consequence of having unbearably great expectations. This loop leads inevitably to misery. Saying that you can still neglect what occurred is not true, but it is possible to let go of the past to live in the moment.
- Self-talk negative
What we think about ourselves, others and our situations will significantly impact our convictions about ourselves, others, and the universe. These structures of beliefs derive from several interactions that we acquire during our lives. As a consequence of traumas or persistent dismissal, skewed value systems may also arise.
Causes of Mental clutter
When it comes to allowing clutter in our heads, multitasking may be the primary source. We have to bear all the specifics in mind as we toggle between chores instead of concentrating on one task at a time. On the other side, single activities are more fun. This improves concentration and boosts endurance, which eventually lets you become more accomplished.
Or maybe, online distractions are what generate mental clutter. Devices that distract your concentration prevent you from focusing entirely on your job and objectives. It might be time for new digital practices.
Presence is the inverse of mental clutter. It aids you to let go of to-do tasks to build processes and concentrate on being aware and efficient.
- Stress
The key reason many individuals feel frustrated by life is an overwhelming amount of tension. In reality, a range of mental health conditions such as generalized anxiety, panic attacks, and depression can be caused by the stress generated by overstimulation, physical clutter, and the countless decisions needed from these things.
As per the American Psychological Association, combine this tension with the genuine problems and concerns in your life, and you might catch yourself with sleep issues, muscle aches, headaches, chest pain, constant illnesses, and intestinal and abdominal disorders.
Our psyches seek out exit routes when life becomes too stressful and complicated. A not-so-healthy coping reaction can be caused by too much feedback, too much unpleasant exposure, and too many decisions.
Contradicting choices
When it’s regarding mental health, free choice, something cherished in democratic countries, may have a declining point of return. The term “paradox of choice” was introduced by psychologist Barry Schwartz, which summarises his observations that increased choice leads to increased anxiety, uncertainty, confusion, and frustration. More options could have better outcomes statistically, but they won’t bring you happiness.
Too much clutter
Our homes are packed with clothing that we never put, novels that we don’t read, new toys, and devices that don’t see daylight. Our emails for machines are overloaded. “We have become such prisoners to the technology that we would prefer to get the simple fix of instant information or entertainment over authentic actions and communication.” Our laptops are cluttered, and our smartphones display notifications such as “You need further storage.”
With this continuous flow of knowledge and technology available, it is simpler than before to become a mainstream user of items and information. We can buy anything from a novel to a yacht at the touch of a button and have it shipped to our doorstep.
We load our homes with stuff we wouldn’t need, and with a constant flow of messages, alerts, blogs, news articles, and youtube clips, we occupy our time. Knowledge and things are stacking up around us, yet we feel powerless to do something about it.
Not only does all this foreign information and knowledge drain our time and efforts, but it also creates responsive, nervous, and pessimistic thinking. It all seems relevant and critical. There must be a response to every text and email. It is essential to buy any new gadget or gadget. This gets us worked up continuously, occupied with trivial things, and disconnected from the individuals around us and the emotions inside us.
Sometimes, since we are so involved in discovering new items and data, we feel like we do not have time to declutter. But at a certain stage, we are driven to emotional and mental exhaustion by all this hustle-bustle. We evaluate, fixate, and stress to the snapping point as we evaluate anything heading at us.
It helps alleviate some of the tension and negative feelings by decluttering our things and reducing the time invested in our electronic devices.
But in the mental clutter of negative thought, concern, and remorse, we have plenty of excuses to get distracted.
We worry about our well-being, employment, children, financial sector, relationships, how we appear, what others think of us about crime, about government, the trauma of the past, and our uncertain future. Our reflections on such things make us struggle and hinder the joy we might feel right now if we didn’t have this relentless voice trying to stir things up in our minds.
Bias towards negativity
For 600 million years, the human nervous system has been progressing. However, it still reacts very much like our early human ancestors, who often encountered life-threatening circumstances and eventually wanted to exist.
The “negativity bias,” our propensity to respond more strongly than positively to negative stimuli, has developed. Negative stimuli induce more neural activity than positive stimuli that are similarly strong (e.g., noisy, bright). They are often presented more efficiently and comfortably.
It implies that you are conditioned to more negatively overanalyze, stress, and perceive things than they are. You see risks as more menacing and obstacles as more complicated.
It feels true to every negative thinking that reaches your mind, so there is an impetus to embrace it as fact. Yet you do not live under a rock, confronting life-threatening conditions every day. To think negatively, you might be conditioned, but you do not have to embrace this susceptibility.
In most routine practices, mindfulness can be exercised, and particular exercises can cultivate it.
Mindfulness involves retraining the brain to keep out of the future’s mental clutter while concentrating on the current moment. You no longer cling to your emotions while you are mindful. In whatever you appear to be doing, you are present.
Tips for decluttering mental clutter
- L.I.V.E= List, Interior Structure, View, and Exterior Structure
- List: If you’re not writing it down, odds are you’re going to overlook it.
- Interior Structure: Organization begins first on the interior.
- View: Be straightforward about what you want in life. A dream is a screenshot of your objectives and what you’d like to draw into your life.
- Exterior structure: You will start organizing your external environments when you have calmed yourself internally and recognize where you will be heading and why.
- If you want your life to be structured, you should first understand that your life is not just about things. Realize that you are here for a larger reason and appeal for your greater strength to support you accomplish this goal. You can finally stop getting dominated by clutter with this realization and begin living the life you always have wished for.
- Only up to a certain point are items beneficial. The utility starts diminishing after that level is surpassed, and if the waste is too big, the object will potentially do far more damage than good. To hold clutter aside, set rules and boundaries.
- Cleaning is straightening back and placing stuff away. Create a permanent location for items and adopt a scheme that allows you to arrange everything where it belongs each time you use it.
- Write all your list of tasks down. To keep track of a To-Do list, it is quite challenging to depend on your mind. Thus to allow you to keep going ahead, throw those thoughts into words and prioritize.
- As quickly as you are finished utilizing them, move things back. Using the law of 1 min, if you could somehow move an object to its home in 1 min or less, it’s worthwhile doing it now!
- Limit the time you sit and watch Television or social network interaction. Place a constraint and adhere to it! To get things done, start using some of the time you left off.
- Multitask, by combining an active task with a passive task in an effective manner. Sending emails or speaking on the phone may be a dynamic assignment. Running the washing machine or completing a load of clothes may be a passive assignment. If you are having problems with procrastination and getting the job done, use a stopwatch or request responsibility from someone you trust.
- If you are not already doing so, you have to carry a daily planner. For precise time management, a daily planner is a must. Schedules potentially help us stay motivated and achieve tasks. Jot down everything from private time in your diary, such as workout sessions, massage therapy, dinner dates, etc.
- The New Perfect is good enough. Organizing is not just about living the ideal life. It’s about establishing goals that are achievable and then trying your very best to achieve them.
It's not easy decluttering, but let’s try our best!
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