How to Know When It’s Time to Start Clearing the Clutter
It’s Spring! This is the time of year when things are starting to green up, grow, and blossom. The promise of a fresh start seems to be calling us into action to finally start clearing the clutter.
We spring clean to create order and a visually peaceful environment.
You may have been influenced to start the clean up by reading Marie Kondo’s book, “The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up”. You may be combing through all your belongings and asking yourself, “does this spark joy” and purging that which does not spark joy. I want us to take this a step further and discuss the benefits of applying this principle of spring cleaning to decluttering your mind.
Benefits of Decluttering Your Mind
Let’s face it, we tend to focus on negative stimuli more than we focus on positive stimuli. Dr. Rick Hanson says that “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.” When something great happens, we feel super happy for a bit, but when something bad happens, we tend to dwell on it, or allow it to bring us down. Being in a negative headspace is not productive.
Clearing the clutter of your mind can give us a sense of rebirth and a fresh start. It gives us the opportunity to destress and feel renewed. In Romans 2:2 it says, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”. We must stop and take the time needed to clear our minds so that we can better discern what God wants for us. Paul is urging us in this verse to be transformed from the inside out. Self-awareness is key. It is important to set aside time and space to allow those thoughts, feelings, and emotions to come to the surface.
Physical clutter -too much stuff in your kitchen, master bedroom, or in your office can be distracting and overwhelming when you are trying to make way for something new. It can cause you to lose momentum when you are trying to make room for new habits, new ideas, or new behavior. The same is true for the internal, mental, and emotional clutter. Just think about how good you feel after you have cleaned and de-cluttered your home! You feel like you are ready for anything. This is the feeling I want for my clients when they begin the coaching process so that they can transform their lives! Positive change is exciting and energizing and when we embark on this process, we do not want anything to stand in the way.
I had a client come to me for help in creating a new life after divorce. He was ready to let go of the past and put himself out there, but he was holding onto a garage filled with boxes of items from his failed marriage. In addition to the physical clutter, he was hanging onto all the negative emotions attached to those items. The physical and emotional clutter were holding him back from beginning again.
I asked him to start trying to rid himself of those boxes and the unwanted memories from his past. He did it and reported feeling like a big boulder was off his shoulders. He also reported that it was easier than he expected. He had not needed any of the items he was hanging onto, so it was easy to donate them and say goodbye to the past. Taking that first step is not easy, but with support, he did it. Clearing the clutter helped him make room for new ideas, habits, and behaviors needed to help him get unstuck and begin to create the life he wanted to live.
Mental Clutter can show up in so many ways:
Stress
Too much stuff
Too many choices or decisions to make
Digital or information overload- constantly being bombarded with texts, emails, tweets, blog posts, notifications, dog videos, even something as wonderful as your Bible app signaling you to read today’s verse can be overwhelming in the midst of our over-stimulated lives
Emotional clutter often shows up in persistent familiar thoughts or feelings:
“No one appreciates me.”
“No one even sees me.”
“No one cares.”
“I do everything around here!”
This kind of emotional clutter weighs you down and keeps you from focusing on the positive. It creates resistance in your soul and holds you back from living your best life. The more you allow these thoughts to play repeatedly in your head, the deeper the pathways they carve in your brain.
We’ve all experienced days where you have been running around at warp speed all day and everything seems to hit you at once… You’re all out of sorts because you’ve been holding on to a surplus of mental and emotional clutter. That is when it’s time to call a timeout, do some “spring cleaning”, and clear the clutter!
