Looking for the best, simple tips to declutter your mind? Look no further, here are some helpful ideas for you to reduce your mental and physical clutter and chaos and create more space and freedom in your life and soul.

“Clutter is not just the stuff on the floor, it’s anything that stands between you and the life you want to be living.”

-Peter Walsh

Spring time is often a time of year when we begin to clean up and declutter our homes. The holidays and long winters can leave room for a lot of “stuff” to accumulate around us, leading us to get almost smothered and want to toss a ton of things out and get organized.

Best Tips to Declutter Your Mind and Life:

While it’s extremely important and beneficial to declutter our spaces, it’s equally just as necessary for us to take time to declutter our minds.

Having a cluttered mind can mean you often find yourself ruminating or over-analyzing situations, focusing on negative thoughts, and worrying about things outside of your control. It can mean you’re holding onto negative emotions and experiences, including resentment, past hurt, anger, and sadness.

A cluttered mind can also mean you find yourself keeping a mental to-do list, including incomplete dreams and goals, having external distractions and constant sensory input. A cluttered mind means a bunch of external distractions and contact sensory input.

Symptoms of having a cluttered mind might be:

• Cluttered, chaotic environment
• Lack of concentration
• Lack of creativity
• Extreme pressure, stress and overwhelm
• Feeling exhausted and low energy

The lack of space and organization in your mind can lead to various mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety. It can also prevent you from being able to make important decisions and focus on your work. When your mind’s cluttered, you won’t be able to connect with yourself and your surroundings.

It’s time to stop focusing on the negative and start focusing on the positive. In order to strengthen your mental muscle and improve your mind, we need to eliminate the habits that keep us from being fully engaged. One of the most important steps that you can take to improve your mental health is to become intentional about how you spend your time.

Home vs. Mind

To do this, let’s use the metaphor of our homes as our minds. Visualize someone who maintains a happy, healthy home. They might do regular cleanings, remove unnecessary and unwanted items, and decorate it with intention and pride. Someone with a tidy, happy home would be cautious of uninvited visitors and selective about who they allow to enter. They’d probably be quite intentional about protecting the peaceful environment they’ve created.

Another helpful tool I like to use to better understand the mind is to imagine your two selves. You have your best, most ideal self, and then you have your worse self. Kind of like the devil and the angel on each shoulder concept. In terms of your mind, your best self knows all of the best things you need to do, it is calm, peaceful, and organized and efficient. Your worse self is confused, anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed. That’s the devil on your shoulder.

It’s helpful to acknowledge these two selves, and understand that they both exist in your current experience. Neither one is in the past or future. They are both here, reading this article with you. However, YOU get to decide which one you let take over. You get to decide which one you let take the lead. Which one you listen to. This is where you regain your control. In your decision.

When you’re able to disconnect and detach from these two selves, you’re able to watch your thoughts and be intentional about what you choose to listen to. You literally become aware of your thoughts. You’re a third party, observing the angel and the devil. You’ll gain so much control when you are intentional about this. 

RELATED POST: How to Transform Your Self-Image Overnight

Compartmentalizing

There are various aspects of our mental space including our body, our money, career, relationships, environment, health and leisure. There are so many different departments that we worry about and have to think about. 

It’s important to be intentional about focusing on one of these categories at a time. When you’re sitting down to budget or sort your finances, you need to eliminate distractions and only focus on this one task. When you’re cooking a healthy dinner, try to only focus on your health. The more mindful you’re able to be of what you’re doing and focus, the more present you will feel and better your experience will be.

Questions to Ask Yourself 

When thoughts arise, try pausing. Try stepping back and observing the devil and the angel. Become aware of what your best and worse self are saying. Before deciding which thought to go with, consider these three questions:

1. Does this though benefit me? What is the truth?
2. Does this thought align with the person I want to be?
3. How would my best self show up mentally, in this moment?

By taking a pause and creating filters, you’re able to become less reactive to your thoughts and gain a much greater sense of control over them. 

Another key component to decluttering your mind and restoring inner peace is to gain awareness of how much you consume versus create. 

RELATED POST: Why and How to Create More Than You Consume

If your mind should be treated like a home, imagine if you just brought a ton of junk into your home all the time and never took the time to get rid of anything. It would become super cluttered! 

When we constantly are consuming and not creating, this is exactly what happens to our mind. 

When we leave things undone and incomplete, we just further add to the mental clutter in our minds. 

A great tool you can use is to create a long list of things you can do to become more organized and decluttered in your life. As you tackle these tasks, you’ll declutter your mind and life over time. Keep this list on your phone or somewhere you can easily access from anywhere. Refer to this list when you are tempted to mindlessly consume nonsense ie. scrolling on social media, watching real housewives, or watching Tik Toks for 3 hours. No judgement on those things, but mental health should always be a priority.

Ideas for your to-do list:

• Organize photos on iPhone
• Delete unwanted photos
• Organize Google Drive
• Organize notes on iPhone
• Organize iPhone home screen
• Declutter computer files
• Sort through emails
• Meditate
• Do yoga
• Renew passport
• Organize your pantry
• Organize your closet (donate clothes)
• Clean out your car
• Read a book
• Write in your journal
• Plan out your week
• Write a blog post
• Take clothes to the tailor
• Research your next trip destination
• Organize tax documents
• Sort through mail
• Clean out file cabinet
• Finish an online class

Next time you’re wanting to consume more, try doing one of these tasks instead. They will surely make you feel more productive and actually positively impact your life in one way or another. The more items you tackle on your list, the better you will feel over time. Be sure to add to this list as you go too! Think of things in your life you want to declutter and put them on your list. Maybe dedicate some time each week to doing one of two of these tasks.

All in all, when you declutter your mind and life, it will be freeing for your soul. It will help you feel more calm, peaceful and energizes throughout your days. Cultivating an organized, refined and simple life is what will make you feel more lightweight and light hearted. The more we consume and the more that accumulates in us and around us, the more heavy and stressed and overwhelmed we will feel.

I hope this post inspires you to create more space and peace in your life through the power of decluttering and taking control of your thoughts and mind.

This post was all about how to declutter your mind.