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

by S.J. Scott

You might feel guilty if you step away from this person. But if the relationship is causing you regular discomfort, you are not treating yourself with respect.

Consider the fallout of saying goodbye.

Their reaction may be more dramatic or damaging than you anticipated, causing things to get worse before they get better. You might find the loss of the relationship more painful than you thought it would be, and you second-guess yourself.

Can you handle the fallout, or do you find it more damaging than maintaining a draining relationship?

Letting go might mean a permanent end to a relationship where there is no communication or interaction at all. But this isn’t possible or reasonable for all relationships.

But you can create boundaries around the time spent with these people and how you communicate with them in order to protect your mental and emotional health.

Being proactive about these decisions makes you feel more in control and calm about how to move forward.

Communicate your intentions without blame.

You don’t need to get into a long, drawn-out conflict in order to say goodbye or cut back on your interactions. Nor do you need to assign blame or cast aspersions.

Person-to-person conversations are generally the best way to have this talk, but you know this person best.

Either way, try to keep it short and focus on your own feelings rather

than their faults.

“I need a break from our friendship because I feel like we are out of sync, and it’s causing me distress. I care about you, but I need to step away. I didn’t want...

Create a plan for a negativ...

It’s hard to anticipate how someone might react when they are hurt or angry.

Try to prepare for this potential fallout in advance.

Accept that it can be a process.

Sometimes guilt, confusion, or loneliness can make you second-guess your decision to let go. It takes going back to the relationship to cement your determination to finally end it.

Allow yourself to grieve.

You may have more emotional energy and fewer daily frustrations. However, grief has a way of sneaking up on us when we least expect it. Any process of letting go can create a pocket of grief that needs time to heal.

Don’t try to talk yourself out of your grief or second-guess your decision because your grief is confusing.

Where you choose to spend time every day ultimately determines the quality of your life.

In fact, we tend to allow happenstance, boredom, or other people to determine how we spend a lot of our time.

These actions help you direct the daily activities of your life. But you can’t focus on these big-picture actions all day, every day. That’s because the bulk of your time is often filled with mindless tasks that contribute to feelings of overwhelm, emptiness, and mental clutter.

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” – William Morris

Your home should be a haven—a place where you feel peaceful, happy, and calm.

In other word, when your environment is cluttered, the visual chaos restricts your ability to focus.

Clutter steals your focus, making you feel overwhelmed, distracted, and agitated. Your brain is so busy trying to process all of the visual stimuli that you can’t fully enjoy the moment.

You can declutter your home in less time than you think—and without feeling completely overwhelmed—when you tackle it in small chunks of time

every day. Set aside just 10 minutes a day to work on your clutter,

Creating habits requires a few special skills to make sure you don’t give up.

Make sure it immediately follows a previously established habit like having your coffee in the morning or brushing your teeth.

Then reward yourself after you perform y...

7. Avoid indecision.

but you need to deal with indecision in the moment to successfully declutter.

That’s why we suggest you put only the absolute keepers back in the spaces you’ve decluttered. Get rid of anything you know for sure you don’t want or need. Anything you feel slightly ambivalent about or rarely use, put into a storage box to deal with later. Label the box, seal it up, and put it into a storage room.

That’s why it’s so important to replace only the items you know you need. You can deal with the other questionable items later. You may discover you don’t need them at all after living without them in sight for a while.

“The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.”

If you have a strong attachment to the past, whether through your thinking or your clutter, you cause yourself suffering. Let go. Release the physical objects that weigh you down. Focus your mind and your daily life on the present, and you’ll feel liberated and unencumbered.

Digital “stuff” has an insidious way of occupying your time with nonessential activities—and just like physical clutter in your home, digital clutter creates feelings of anxiety, agitation, and overwhelm.

All of this digital input creates agitation and has an addictive quality that pulls you away from more meaningful pursuits that energize you rather than depleting you.

Start with an hour a day that you hold sacred and free from any digital time. Shut down your computer and put your phone into a drawer. What can you do instead of engaging in digital distractions?

Do something that is real, in-the-moment, and positive so that you avoid both the depletion of digital immersion and the secondary feelings of guilt and anxiety that often accompany too much time plugged in.

but if you keep all of your important personal and professional documents and files on your computer, then you know how critical this piece of equipment is to your daily life.

If you take 10 minutes a day to begin chipping away at the clutter, you’ll begin to feel increasingly lighter and unfettered.

We suggest you begin where you’ll reap the greatest rewards from decluttering your devices. If you are frustrated daily because you can’t find a document you need, begin there. If you have heart palpitations every time you see thousands

of emails in your inbox, that’s the place to start. The ke...

Here are some questions to ask yourself that can be used to create digital boundaries:

How much time each day is absolutely necessary for me to spend on my devices for my job?

Am I in a job that requires me to spend more time than I want...