How to Clear Mental Clutter in Five Easy Steps
Simple Ways to Free Your Mind For Greater Productivity and Wellness
Knowing how to clear mental clutter is a quality that will help us be more productive and operate with the right mindset.
With the pressures and expectations on us daily, it’s not uncommon to experience mental clutter. We have to learn how to deal with it for our overall wellness and sanity.
What is Mental Clutter?
Mental clutter is a state we experience when we have conflicting or increased mental activity.
Common causes of mental clutter include:
- Overthinking things.
- Being in a state of inaction.
- Feeling confused and overwhelmed.
- Not having clear priorities.
- Inability to focus.
- Having too many incomplete things.
- High levels of stress.
- Poor sleep habits.
Effects of Mental Clutter
Not dealing with mental clutter can lead to serious problems. These include:
- Poor levels of concentration, which will cause poor productivity and performance.
- Changes to sleep and eating habits.
- Uncharacteristic behaviours.
- Feelings of sadness, worry or anxiety.
- Slow progress towards the achievement of goals.
If we learn how to clear mental clutter, we will experience increased levels of calmness, peace and happiness in our lives.
Whenever I experience mental clutter, I force myself to pause and examine what is going on. I use it as a trigger to recharge, refocus and recommit to what’s important.
Clearing mental clutter can be a quick process or it can take as long as we want. My preference is to deal with whatever is going on in my mind quickly, so I can feel better a lot faster.
How to Clear Mental Clutter
Here are five steps you can take to clear mental clutter and get back to feeling your normal self again.
- Do a brain declutter. Holding too many things in our minds leads to confusion and inaction. To get a better sense of what’s affecting us, we can list everything that is going on or what we think we have to get done. The objective is to get things out of our heads and onto paper or a note-taking app.
- Assess what’s important to you. From our list, we can choose what our priorities are. Most times, many of the things we have going on in our minds are not important and we can easily let them go. The key is to refocus only on things that matter.
- Limit new input. Now that we are clear on our priorities, we don’t want to fall back to our old habits or patterns. We must have a system for evaluating all new demands or requests placed on us. The objective is to only accept anything new that is a priority or will support us in reaching an objective or experiencing something in life.
- Get clear on where you are going. Lack of direction and unclear priorities are major contributing factors of mental clutter. We have to know where we are going, which will make what we do daily a lot easier to decide. Having a vision for the future we want will help eliminate procrastination and indecision.
- Focus on the present. Whenever we allow ourselves to relive the past or worry about future, it will generate unhealthy or negative thoughts. The only thing we ever have is the present moment. This means if we’re in the past or the future, we’re causing ourselves to suffer. We can overcome this by applying releasing techniques and practicing letting go.
Final Thoughts
Mental clutter is a form of suffering. It will not support us in being the best we can be. The sooner we deal with mental clutter, the quicker we can get back to being our normal self again, without stress or worry.
If we allow ourselves to continue experiencing mental clutter, our health and wellness will suffer, which will affect other areas of our lives. Knowing how to clear mental clear is a quality we can develop for a happier, healthy life.
Action Step: If you are experiencing mental clutter, do a mental cleanse by doing a brain dump. List everything that is going on in your mind or bothering you. Then assess everything you listed and focus only on what’s important. Let go of things you have no control over or are not important.
Question: What else will help if you want to know how to clear mental clutter?
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