Removing clutter from your life doesn’t just mean a little spring cleaning and sending a box of stuff to charity. Decluttering your life is more than just removing excess physical possessions, although that can help boost your mood, too.
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There is an abundance of extra clutter clogging up our lives such as negative thoughts, misgivings, assumptions and other things that clog our Zen pathways. Lightening your load by decluttering your physical and mental self can eliminate stress and open valuable real estate in your mind. In with the good and out with the bad can be your mantra as you declutter your life to boost your mood.
1. Don’t Worry; Be Happy
Don’t worry; be happy: it’s easy to say, but is it just as easy to do? Worrying can have detrimental effects on your overall mental health. On top of that, the stress that comes with worrying can be detrimental to your physical health as well.
Not allowing your worries to overtake your every waking minute is therefore beneficial to your mental and physical health. If you find yourself obsessively worrying about something throughout the day, write it down and set the worry aside until later.
If you need to, set aside a short amount of time to work through some of these worries or stressors. Try to keep the time to a minimum, and leave the list of worries out of view for the rest of the day. Removing this excess worry from your life will help lift your mood.
2. Hoarding Leads To Unhappiness
You might not think you are a hoarder, but that doesn’t mean you can’t lighten your load a bit. Most people have something, perhaps a drawer cluttered with old receipts or boxes in storage of old school work, that they could do without.
Having all of that extra stuff stored away has a way of weighing you down, even if it’s not in full view at all times. Just knowing you have extra junk in the attic or basement, or no room in your drawers to add new items, can leave you feeling a bit full.
Removing these items and freeing yourself up to new things is almost like cleansing your spirit of all the excess negativity, leaving only light and happiness.
3. Remove Those Who Put You In A Box
Nobody puts baby in a corner, and nobody should keep you boxed in, either. Don’t let others choose your path; it’s all up to you! Remember that you don’t have to have everything figured out. You only need to know what you are doing right now and what makes you happy.
If someone keeps forcing you to figure out what’s next and what you plan to do with your life, simply tell them that you plan to be happy and healthy, and that’s all you have planned right now. Don’t let them pressure you into a perfect mold of what you “should” or “shouldn’t” be. You should only be you!
4. Clean Out Your Digital Spaces
Having a cluttered digital space is a fairly new problem. With this technological age where everyone creates megabytes of digital communications including documents, photos, home videos, e-mails and messages, it’s easy to clog up your laptop, home computer and mobile phone.
Then you have the problem where you must decide what to delete (or store on an external hard drive) to make room for even more digital “stuff”. One way to eliminate your cluttered digital space is to set your mobile phone’s settings to automatically delete messages or old e-mails after a certain period of time.
If a message is incredibly important, you can note it down in a safe space. But having the settings automatically cleansing your inboxes periodically will help you declutter without really doing much work!
5. Time To Tackle The Closet
Think of all the clothes, shoes and accessories you have. Now think of all of the clothes, shoes and accessories that you haven’t worn lately. Imagine how much that is physically cluttering up your closet, causing you to be overwhelmed every time you are searching for that one favorite shirt you wear all the time.
Go through your clothes and donate anything you haven’t worn in the last year. Don’t forget to check your out of season clothes that are packed away under the bed or in storage! Alternatively, you could turn all of the hangers in the closet around so they are backwards, and as you wear a piece turn the hanger the right way.
You’ll begin to notice exactly how much you aren’t actually wearing!
6. While You’re Cleaning, Focus On Your Workspace
Feng shui is the Chinese practice of organizing your living and work spaces in a certain way that allows for mental clarity and Zen-like calmness. Keeping your desk and workspace – whether at home or in a traditional office – neat and tidy can help you also achieve Zen.
You don’t have to study feng shui in-depth to keep your workspace organized. Just be sure that everything has a place, and be sure to put everything in its place! Have different folders (out of sight in a drawer or cabinet is best) for all of your long-term projects, and only keep current items in view on your desk.
The less cluttered the desk the better, and as mentioned before, this includes your computer’s desktop, too! At the end of every day remove all unnecessary items from your desk and workspace so you begin each day with a fresh start.
7. Lose (most of) The Bad Food
The next way to declutter your life starts in the kitchen. This won’t be a tirade about eating healthy, but do consider removing some of the unhealthy items from your kitchen and diet for your own physical and mental well-being.
The food to start with is most definitely sugar. White sugar is added to so many more foods than you probably even realize. The link between added sugar and depression is very real according to medical research attained by Time magazine.
Removing this unhealthy ingredient from your diet as much as you can will help lift your mood and keep you healthy and happy.
8. Declutter The Mind With Mindfulness
Mindfulness has been quite trendy lately. This is for good reason – it works! Mindfulness is a practice that helps you become very aware of your surroundings, allowing you to be at peace within your environment.
Practicing mindfulness involves exercises of the mind where you learn to relax and accept your thoughts, feelings and emotions at any given moment.
Removing the extra thoughts and living in each minute helps you declutter your mind. This leaves room for processing your emotions and not letting your thoughts get carried away and snowballing into something larger than you can handle.
Mindfulness has been proven to give people positive effects on their psychological well-being, making it definitely worth your while to give it a try.
