habits

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Clutter Causes Overwhelm and Stress. Here’s How You Can Deal With It.

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One of the biggest causes of stress in our lives is actually clutter. Seeing piles of clothes, unopened junk mail, loads of laundry, a messy desk, and other disarray really causes most people to feel anxious and overwhelmed, sometimes even depressed. It’s hard to achieve a sense of calm when there’s chaos all around, in the form of physical eyesores or the insidious kind that attacks your mind. That’s why it’s important to corral the clutter in your life. Taking steps to get control of the disorder is the start of creating calm. Read on, and I’ll tell you more about that.

Clutter and Stress

Each person’s definition of clutter is different. We all have our comfort level when it comes to the amount of stuff we want to have around us and to enter our lives. However, it’s when you begin to have a negative reaction to all of this input that it becomes a problem. At this individualized and personal point, you’re dealing with clutter. Usually, this breaking point arrives because your life is affected due to the amount of disarray you’re facing. Whether you’re feeling closed in and agitated or you’re physically constrained by the mess, you have a problem that needs to be addressed.

Benefits of Clutter Control

There are loads of good things that come from controlling the clutter in your world. You’ll likely feel an increased sense of energy because you’ll spend less time looking for things you’ve misplaced and will no longer feel as overwhelmed emotionally by your stuff. This can lead to greater productivity and getting more done. It’s even been shown that folks begin to make improvements in other areas of their lives such as diet and exercise once the “weight” of excess clutter is lifted from them. Taking action in this one aspect of your life can have tremendous impact on other areas. Finally, you’ll be much closer to achieving the calm you seek once you start to pare things down.

How to Get Started

The hardest part of ridding your life of clutter is getting started. This is especially true if you’ve lived in chaos for a long time. The good news is that this problem is relatively easy to tackle once you overcome your initial resistance. The best place to start is the one that is causing you the most stress. For example, if coming home to your messy living room makes the idea of relaxing impossible; begin to clear things out in that room. Having a place to unwind at the end of the day might just be the catalyst you need to motivate you toward clearing out other cluttered places. It’s also a good idea to enlist help in order to make the process more manageable and less overwhelming. Have your family or roommate pitch in or consider hiring a professional organizer if you live alone. Finally, get rid of anything you honestly don’t use and find a “home” for everything else. When you cut down on the amount of stuff and put things in their place, you’ll find life becomes a whole lot less hectic.

These are just a handful of suggestions for minimizing the clutter. Now that you understand the impact clutter can have on your stress levels, you can start to make some changes of your own.

Physical vs. Mental Clutter

Clutter can come in many forms. For simplicity’s sake, I’d like to break it down into two main types. These are physical and mental. Each has a heavy impact on your stress levels. They both are likely to play a role in keeping you from creating calm in your life. Therefore, I think it’s important to take a look at each type, definite it, and examine ways both can negatively affect you.

Physical Clutter

Physical clutter is easy to understand. This is the kind of mess you can see. It’s the piles of clothing, papers, dishes, and more that are strewn around your home or office. It’s the overabundance of things you’ve been holding onto for years because they’re sentimental or you might use them one day. Physical clutter can even be the many tabs you keep open in your computer browser or the tons of media you consume each day. These things can be seen. They consume large amounts of your resources such as time, space, and money.

Mental Clutter

Mental clutter isn’t as simple to define. It involves the overload of information, along with nagging emotional issues, that overwhelm your mind. This type of internal congestion can consist of things such as your never-ending to-do list, negative internal dialogue, relationship demands, old grudges, or habits that don’t serve you. The source of such mess usually lies in emotions like fear, regret, worry, guilt, or shame. Identifying the types of mental issues that are cluttering your brain can lead to purging yourself of them.

Effects of Clutter

Ridding yourself of clutter, both physical and mental, can truly increase your feelings of happiness and calm. It can lead to less stress and overall greater well-being. The negative effects of too much clutter are astounding. Decreased mental health is one of the biggest issues to come of surrounding yourself with all sorts of clutter. Studies show that mental hygiene is improved when clutter is kept under control, both in the home and in the workplace. Too much physical clutter impairs visual processing. It can be incredibly distracting to see lots of piles and messes in your surroundings, leading you to miss cues regarding people’s emotions and other important information. Your cognition and clarity of mind are adversely affected by excess mental clutter. You simply can’t think straight when you’ve got a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions swirling around in your head.

This is merely an overview of the ramifications that come from physical and mental clutter. However, the information above should give you some insight into how important it can be to clean things up in both your physical world and within your mind. Doing so can lead to tremendous benefits within your world, including more of the elusive calm you’ve been seeking.

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Why It’s More Important Than Ever To Find Calm In Today’s World

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You may have heard of the quote by Dalai Lama which goes, “Calm mind brings inner strength and self-confidence, so that’s very important for good health”. But how many of you are actually struggling to find calm in today’s world?

You see, living a calmer life is possible. Today’s world is more hectic by nature. With the constant blips and bleeps of electronic devices, everything seems to be moving faster. However, the basic resources for creating serenity remain the same. Learning just a few tips and tools can help you gain control of the chaos that seems to constantly surround you.

However, it will not be easy. After all, you have a lot of obligations. There are tons of people, tasks, deadlines, and more clamouring for your attention. It can be tough to tune out all of the distractions and to focus on one thing at a time. Furthermore, all of that extra noise really adds to your stress levels over time.

One of the biggest reasons for our stress is that there are disarray and discord throughout our lives, along with the pressing obligations weighing on our shoulders. It can all become too much to bear. During this challenge, I’ll walk you through the various areas of your life and show you ways you can take charge of the never-ending pandemonium that seems to confront you on a daily basis.

We’ll start with clutter. Whether it’s at home, on the job, or in your mind, clutter is a huge obstacle to calm. Technology can add to feeling hyped-up. The barrage of smartphone alerts and ever-present media can have you on-edge and out-of-sorts. Your immediate surroundings also play a big role in how you feel at any one moment. When all you see is mess and disorganization, it’s bound to affect you in a negative way.

In addition to showing you the ways in which your life can be consumed by chaos, many of which you may never have suspected, I’ll share with you concrete methods for addressing them. You’ll discover tools for taking control of your life’s disarray, no matter what the source. Journaling, meditation, morning routines, streamlining, organization, and other techniques are just the beginning of taking back your life and creating calm.

While life can seem like a free-for-all sometimes, it truly doesn’t have to. Understanding what leads to the chaos and learning simple strategies to deal with these sources can go far toward creating a calmer world, at least in your little corner of it. Join me for a journey that I feel confident will lead to great things for you. I’m happy and honoured to have you along with me. Let’s get started and look forward to the next post!

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Coming Up With An Empowering Morning Routine

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The best place to start is with the new set of tasks that are most important to you. Figure out a preliminary time during which you want to get them accomplished. If your goal is to go for a run in the morning, you may decide to do that first thing before getting a shower and having breakfast. If your goal is to meditate each morning, you may decide it would work best after you’ve had a cup of coffee. If your goal is to find some time for reading or your favorite hobby in the morning, you could carve out some time before everyone else gets up and while you enjoy that first coffee. The same goes for wanting time in the morning to work on your business or learn something new.

Then work the rest of your morning chores around these new plans. It may take some shuffling around and mixing up with your current routine, but with a little creative thinking and a bit of flexibility, I’m sure you can come up with a working plan.

Making over your morning and turning it into a new routine isn’t something that comes naturally to most of us. It takes a little while to get into the groove of things. We’ll look at this in a little more detail tomorrow. For right now, my suggestion is that you write your new morning game plan down. It’s easy to forget what you’re planning to do. Writing it down will not only give you a reference to refer back to, but also solidify your new plan in your mind.

Place the note where you have jotted down your new plan on your night table or somewhere else where you’ll see it first thing in the morning. It will serve as a reminder of what you’re intending to do and do differently in the morning now.

Even though you’ve written your plan down, it’s important to realize it’s not written in stone. The well-laid out plans don’t always work when put into action. Adjust it and make changes as needed until you come up with a new morning game plan that works well for you and the rest of your family.

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Why You Should Review Your Morning Routine Regularly

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Creating routines and habits for your mornings are a great thing. They allow you to do what you need to do to move ahead without having to spend a lot of energy and time thinking about it. That’s a good thing. It’s can also be a dangerous thing when you’re focusing on the wrong things and are in the habit of doing things that don’t help you reach your goals.

When we get into a routine, it’s hard to stop and ask ourselves if it’s working as well as it could be. Even more importantly, with a routine and a set of habits firmly established, it’s easy to keep going even when the circumstances change. That’s why it’s important to take some time every now and again to review our routine and habits, including the new morning routine.

Set aside a little time every few weeks, or even months to review your routine. Put it on the calendar and make sure you do it. It won’t take long and it will be a very valuable exercise in the long run. Our lives and circumstances change. Our routines should change with it. Just because something has served us well over the past few weeks and months, doesn’t mean it will continue to do so. Which brings up a good point…

When you sit down to review your morning routine (or any routine or habit you’ve been working on for that matter), ask yourself this:

Is it working? Is it working really well?

If it is, simply carry on. If it isn’t, it may be time to make some changes and tweak it until you find something that works well for you at that particular point in time.

Another way to look at it is to find what you love and what you hate about the new morning routine. Change it accordingly until you get as close as possible to loving everything about it and still getting the results you want.

Remember, this morning routine will change and evolve over time as you, your circumstances, and the people in your life change and evolve. Embrace the changes and look at them as an indication that you’re making progress.

Keep tweaking and improving your morning routine and don’t be afraid to mix up your goals for it. Maybe you started out by making exercise a priority first thing of the day. As time goes by and you become more fit and make time for it later in the day, your focus may shift to meditation, or learn a new language. Keep evolving, keep changing, and keep using those precious first few hours of each day to establish some positive change in yourself and those around you.