Spring Clean Your Brain - Part 2 of 3

In part 1 of this series we learned what mental clutter is and that it can negatively affect how someone lives, thinks and copes, now let’s see what we can do about it. What can we do?

Assess

How can you do a spring cleaning on your brain? First an assessment. Just as you would look around your home for things you want to get rid of, “look” around your mind for those thoughts that you don’t need. Do some mindful meditation. Take a few minutes, quiet all of the white noise in your life, take some deep breaths and think. Ask yourself:

What is my current state of mind?

How am I feeling?

Am I frustrated?

Am I feeling some negativity towards myself?

Do I feel contentment?

Am I more negative recently than I was before? 

Am I less motivated to keep reaching for goals I set for myself?

Is it more difficult to make a decision using logic than it was a month ago, a year ago?

Is solving problems becoming more and more overwhelming?  

Identify

Write down what you find during your mindful meditation on a piece of paper or in a journal. Then separate them into two columns or two categories, positive and negative. What things are in your negative column? Are there negative thoughts about yourself?  Are they negative thoughts about family, about life’s circumstances, about a financial situation, about business, or about anything else? Does that negative column outweigh the positive column? Are there some thought processes that you are experiencing that perhaps aren't the best? Do the assessment. Figure out where, where am I at? Where are my thoughts? What are some of the areas that I need to change? 

It's the same as going through your home to do your spring cleaning. You go into the rooms and you kind of stand there for a minute and you look at everything in that room and analyze. How do I feel about these things? Do I need that? Do I use that right now? Identify those things that need to go out of your brain. There may be thought processes that have just been hovering around for a while, and they are doing nothing to serve you. That’s brain clutter. 

Declutter

When you find things in your home to get rid of you  don’t just leave it sitting there in a pile or else it's still cluttering space. It's the same thing with your brain. You have done an assessment, figured out what thoughts you don’t need. You have identified, written down specific feelings and specific areas of your life that you have negative thoughts about. You have collected the mental clutter, bagged it up, now time to take out the trash. Put all of those negative thoughts or those thoughts that are not good for you, put them in a figurative bag, and get rid of it.  How can you do that?

Part 3 is all about tips, things you can do get rid of all that mental clutter, negative thoughts for good. 

-Julie "Brain Lady" Anderson