11 Ways To Declutter Your Mind And Restore Inner Peace

You may have aclean, clutter-free home or office, but have you taken the time to declutter your mind?

If you regularly feel overwhelmed by your thoughts and struggle with stress and anxiety, it’s past time to deal with the internal clutter that’s causing these symptoms.

An inner thought monologue is constantly playing in your head and has become the background noise of your life.

Sometimes these thoughts are positive or neutral, but far too often, they are negative and self-sabotaging.

And trying to stop them seems impossible.

Try it now.

Try tostop the constant flow of thoughtsgoing through your mind.

It’s hard, right?

As soon as you curtail one thought, another one pops up behind it.

What Does It Mean to Declutter Your Mind?

In short, it means managing your thinking patterns to enjoy more peace of mind, presence, clarity, and well-being. Through the practices outlined below, you train your brain to focus less on what drains you or causes you stress and more on the moment at hand.

If you’re not paying attention, your mind operates on autopilot and meanders through a landscape of mental clutter that doesn’t always serve you well.

Sometimes our thoughts roam around in our minds like untamed monkeys.

It feels like an ongoing internal dialog that is often negative and self-defeating.

When we believe these thoughts, it can impact our mental health and create an unhealthy loop of rumination.

Fortunately, you can control your “monkey mind” and become more mindful of the present moment and less entrapped by your thoughts.

As you learn to manage your thoughts, you can also apply mental decluttering to other areas of your life to support a more mindful and conscious way of life.

Why Is Decluttering Good for Your Mind?

By practicing the strategies listed below in each area, you’ll enjoy some significant improvements in the overall quality of your life.

These mindfulness activities have a variety of science-backed benefits, including:

• Reduced worry, stress, and anxiety
• Fewer feelings of depression
• Better sleep
• Improved relationships
• 提高注意力和专注力
• Improved emotional intelligence
• Reduced perception of physical pain
• Improved decision-making
• Better resilience and equanimity
• Enhanced creativity

Let’s take a look at some simple actions you can take to clear the clutter from your mind, your relationships, and your life.

How to Declutter Your Mind: 11 Ways To Find Mental Peace

不要给自己施加压力开始这些搁浅船受浪摇摆estions at once. Read through them and consider which will best address your mental clutter. But remember, you need to practice every day (or most days) to reap the benefits.

1. Focused Deep Breathing

A change in breathing is often the first sign that our thoughts are overwhelming and stressful.

When we feel anxious, depressed, rushed, or upset, we may experience rapid breathing or shortness of breath.

You may not pay much attention to your breathing and your posture, but by simply becoming more aware of how you breathe, you foster a calmer state of body and mind.

Start paying attention to your breathing and simply become aware of how you are taking in and releasing air throughout your day.

One of the best ways to detach fromnegative thoughtsand gain control over your mind is through slow, deep, rhythmic breathing.

Thisfocused breathing刺激副交感神经系统tem, reducing your heart rate, relaxing muscles, calming the mind, and normalizing brain function.

2. Learn Meditation

If you’ve never practiced meditation or you’re not familiar with it, you might be put off by the idea of sitting quietly in the lotus position and emptying your mind.

But don’t let the clichés about meditating cave dwellers prevent you from giving it a try.

The benefits of meditating translate to your daily life, helping you control worry and overthinking, and providing a host of health benefits.

The key to findingsatisfaction with meditationis simply to practice. The steps for meditation are easy. The hard part is committing to it daily.

By making a daily commitment to meditation, you will improve your skills and discover how the mental, physical, and emotional bene ts increase over time.

3. Reframing Negative Thoughts

Critical thinking gives us the ability to solve problems quickly and effectively.

Creative thinking allows us to develop original, diverse, and elaborate ideas and connections.

But it’s the uninvited negative thinking that clutters our minds and often drains our enthusiasm for life.

Many people go through their entire lives victimized by their negative thoughts.

They feel they have no control of what thoughts take up residence in their brains—and worse, they believe the “voices” in their heads that tell them the sky is falling.

But you have the power to recognize this tendency and change it by building the reframing habit. The first step is to notice your thought patterns and interrupt them before they get out of control.

Become the “watcher” of your thoughts without attaching to them or judging them. See them for what they are — just mental noise.

Or you can interrupt your negative thoughts when you notice them by saying, “Stop!” out loud.

Visualize a heavy metal door slamming on those negative thoughts and keeping them silent.

Then distract yourself with something that will occupy your mind so there’s no room for the negative thoughts. Immerse yourself in a project that involves focus and brainpower.

4. Teach Your Old Mind New Tricks

You will always struggle with some amount of negative thinking. You can’t overcome millions of years of evolutionary wiring through sheer willpower.

However, you can manage the pain by being more proactive in what you allow to remain in your thoughts.

Interrupting cluttered thinking is only part of the process of retraining your brain and learning to disassociate from negative thoughts.

Your mind abhors a vacuum, so you need to fill the void with constructive thought so you don’t careen back into old patterns.

Try these ideas:

• Challenge a negative thought and replace it with a more positive one that better reflects reality.
• When negative circumstances are happening, practice acceptance rather than struggling against reality with feelings of guilt or worry.
• Rather than just ruminating, take mindful action that focuses on your values, goals, or priorities.
• Set a worry timer that allows you to worry for a set amount of time, rather than allowing worry to dominate your day.

5. Identify Your Core Values

One of the challenges of modern living is figuring out what’s truly important and differentiating those things from the obligations that seem important at first, but really don’t matter when you take the time to examine them.

If you’re like most people, you might find that it’s increasingly difficult to minimize, organize, or bypass the deluge of information you encounter on a regular basis.

Today, we have more information, data, and material possessions available to us than any previous generation, but this new way of life doesn’t come with instructions on how to manage it all.

我们很多人觉得so overwhelmed that we fail to step back and assess the impact of information overload.

Nor do we know how to prioritize it all.

We become reactors to what life throws at us, rather than carefully evaluating what is best for us.

Fortunately, there is actually a simple solution to cutting through the “noise” of modern society, which can help you make effective decisions whenever you feel overwhelmed by all the available options: Define your core values.

Your core values can serve as a measuring stick for all of your choices and decisions in life, keeping you focused on the person you want to be and the life you wish to lead.

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6. Clarify Your Life Priorities

Once you’ve defined your core values, you should use this information to complete another exercise that will enrich your life.

Clarify your life priorities so you know exactly how you want to spend your time, energy, and money.

Without knowing our priorities, we allow the pressures of life to determine our actions and decisions.

When we don’t know the bigger “why” of our lives, there are no rules, no boundaries, no priorities to help us.

There are seven main life areas to help you establish your priorities and how you want to spend your time and money.

1. Career
2. Family
3. Marriage (or love partnership)
4.Spiritual/personal growth/self-improvement
5. Leisure/social
6. Life management (i.e., home tasks, financial planning, budgeting, etc.)
7. Health and fitness

If you sleep 8 hours a day, that leaves 16 waking hours. Let’s remove 2 hours a day for personal hygiene activities and eating.

That leaves 14 waking hours a day or 98 hours a week. For the sake of simplicity, let’s round that up to 100 hours a week.

在一个理想世界里,你会如何优先考虑seven key areas of your life?

How many hours of those 100 per week would you prefer to devote to each area (using your values to help guide you)?

To help you find your priorities, we recommend answering two simple questions:

1. How different is your current life priority reality from your ideal?

2. What are some actions you need to take to focus your efforts on what really matters to you?

We recommend you begin with the priority that can make the most positive difference in your life or where you feel the most imbalance.

You may find this area reflects one or more of your values that you aren’t honoring.

7. Be More Present in Your Relationships

One of the greatest sources of mental clutter can be relationship problems — with your partner and others in your life.

The practice of mindfulness allows us to be present with our partners, to be less emotionally reactive with them, and to more quickly overcome stressful situations in the relationship.

Relationship presence doesn’t just apply to romantic couples. You can practice mindfulness in all of your relationships.

What does it mean to be more present in your relationships?

Here are a few strategies you can practice:

Practice empathic listening.

Empathic (or active) listening is a willingness to step outside of your distracted mind and listen to the other person’s words in a non-judgmental way.

You remain completely attentive to what the person is saying. Avoid interrupting, even when you have something important to add.

Also, ask open-ended questions that invite more from the speaker. Avoid coming to premature conclusions or offering solutions. Be sure to reflect back to the speaker what you heard them say.

Practice mindful speaking.

Pay close attention to what you say during a conversation, particularly in your love relationship.

Place a mental filter between your thoughts and words, recognizing the power your words have on one of the most important people in your life.

Resist the temptation to simply react to someone’s words or actions. Take a moment to choose your words carefully.

Speak in ways that are loving, compassionate, and respectful, and try to use a calm, non-threatening voice, even if the other person is agitated or angry.

Practice loving-kindness meditation.

A loving-kindness meditation focuses on developing feelings of warmth towards others.

You can use aloving-kindness meditationspecifically to improve your relationships with various people in your life in order to reduce negative thinking about them.

这种冥想培养我们的意识f others as human beings deserving of compassion and love—even when they are being difficult — which can decrease relationship conflicts and improve your own well-being.

The steps for a loving-kindness meditation are simple to follow and help you develop a positive mindset about all of your fellow beings.

8. Simplify Your Activities

Do you find yourself running around like a chicken, mindlessly checking items off your list so you feel productive and worthy?

We get trapped on the treadmill of tasks and obligations, leaving little time for those things that allow us to be present and fully engaged.

There’s no doubting the fact that it’s hard to break free from the busyness trap. We’ve been brainwashed to believe that “idleness is the root of all evil.”

We’re not suggesting that working hard, being productive, and having an active life are bad things. To the contrary, they can contribute to a fulfilling, happy life.

But there is a diminishing point of return that creates the opposite effect, making you feel depleted and overwhelmed.

Cutting back and expunging non-essential activities can feel uncomfortable and even threatening at first.

That’s why the first step in cutting back is embracing it as a worthy endeavor — acknowledging that busyness is contributing to your mental clutter and accepting that less really can be more.

Here are some ways to declutter your schedule so you can enjoy more of what’s truly important:

• Prioritize your daily activities by focusing on your core values.
• Purge your commitments and obligations by letting go of things that aren’t serving your values.
• Focus on just three main daily goals. Don’t overwhelm yourself.
• Allow for time to relax and do nothing, even for a few minutes.
• Leave work at work and avoid using digital devices at home to focus on work.
• Take a digital sabbatical at least one day a week.

9. Develop A Gratitude Practice

Our minds have a habit of focusing on adverse, unproductive events because a “negativity bias” governs our thoughts. This cognitive bias means that difficult events impact our psychological state more than positive events. We feel the effects more intensely and dwell more on negative thoughts as a result.

Awell-researchedand valuable way to counteract the negativity bias is by training yourself to focus on the positive, happy, and beautiful things in your life.

You can make this a habit through daily gratitude practice. Practicing gratitude can be as simple as setting a reminder to stop for a moment throughout your day to reflect on all you are grateful for.

You can also practice agratitude meditationor write in a gratitude journal. The key to all of these practices is authenticity. You can’t simply repeat, “I’m grateful for my friends,” without feeling the emotions of gratitude.

An excellent way to spark these emotions is to consider what your life would be like without the person orthing you are gratefulfor.

10. Practice Using Affirmations

Affirmations are positive statements you repeat to challenge negative and self-destructive thinking patterns. Affirmations are usually spoken or written in the present tense, as though they have already occurred or are happening right now.

Pay attention to the current theme of your negative thoughts. You may ruminate on your appearance, lovability, a relationship, or any number of unsettling situations in your life.

Write down some of the negative thoughts you find yourself looping regularly. Then create some positive words to replace those negative thoughts. For example, if you feel no one cares about you, you might create an affirmation like, “I am kind, lovable, desirable person who easily attracts people who care about me and treat me well.”

The key is creating affirmations that you believe can become true for you. If you don’t believe you are truly lovable, you could say, “Every day, I am becoming more of the person I want to be who attracts the type of people I want in my life.”

Keep a list ofpositive affirmationswith you and practice speaking them aloud to yourself in front of a mirror. Or use them asprompts for journalingor meditation. Just practice them regularly to get in the habit of thinking more positively about your life.

11. Spend Time In Nature

There’s nothing that clears the mind and soothes the soul like spending time in nature.

The Japanese practice “forest bathing” orshinrin-yokuto immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of spending time in the natural world.

Spending time in nature can lower blood pressure, heart rate, and levels of harmful hormones — like cortisol, the stress hormone. You don’t have to be in a forest to experience these benefits. You can be at the ocean, mountains, parks, or any peaceful natural setting.

Just 10-20 minutes of nature cleansing time can increase feelings of well-being and happiness and decrease stress.

When you spend time in nature to declutter your mind, it’s essential to leave distractions behind (turn off your phone but keep it with you for emergencies).

Pay keen attention to your senses and focus on what you experience. Look for moments that inspire awe and wonder. Try to change up your nature experiences so that you encounter something new each time.

Are you ready to declutter your mind?

When you neglect to take stock of your mental clutter, your thoughts and emotions remain freewheeling and capricious.

As a result, your experience of life becomes unpredictable and entirely dependent on the random nature of thought.

The less time you spend “in your head” with intrusive, negative thoughts, the more time you have toenjoy the present moment—and every present moment for the rest of your life.

Decluttering your mind is a lifelong endeavor, but one that pays off with profound rewards that can significantly impact your quality of life.