Declutter Your Mind: How to Stop Worrying, Relieve Anxiety, and Eliminate Negative Thinking

by S.J. Scott

Your constant inner dialog distracts you from what is happening around you, right here and now. It causes you to miss valuable experiences and sabotages the joy of the present moment.

In fact, nearly every negative thought you have relates to the past or future.

More choices might afford objectively better results, but they won’t make you happy.

All of this extraneous stuff and data not only sucks our time and productivity, but also produces reactive, anxious, and negative thoughts.

We worry about our health, our jobs, our kids, the economy, our relationships, how we look, what other people think of us, terrorism, politics, pain from the past, and our unpredictable futures. Our thoughts about these things make us suffer and undermine the happiness we could experience right now if we didn’t have that constant voice in our heads stirring things up.

“The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”

Any negative thought that enters your mind feels real, so there is an impulse to accept it as reality. But you are not living in a cave, facing life-threatening situations daily. You may be hardwired to think negatively, but you don’t have to accept this predisposition.

Mindfulness requires retraining your brain to stay out of the mental clutter from the future and focus instead on the present moment. When you are mindful, you no longer attach to your thoughts. You are simply present in whatever you happen to be doing.

As with building any other habit, decluttering your mind requires practice, patience, and a willingness to start small, then grow from there.