Copyright © 2020 by Justin Moore

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 CONTENTS

Introduction
1. What is Brain Clutter?
2. Slowing Down
3. Retrain Your Brain
4. Focus and Find Your Center
5. Managing Your Thoughts
6. Living an Organized Life
Conclusion
 INTRODUCTION

“I forgot about that meeting, I have to run to get there. I’m going to
be late paying that bill. Where did I put my keys? Why can’t I
remember anything these days? I feel like I’m going crazy!”

Does this sound familiar? If you, you have the symptoms of a

cluttered brain. This means you are juggling a lot in your life and it is
pulling you in a lot of different directions. This leaves your thoughts
jumbled up into an incomprehensible mishmash. This will leave you
stressed and exhausted, which will keep you from putting your best
foot forward in your daily life.

You don’t need to worry. You are not going to go crazy. Nothing is
horribly wrong with you. You just have too much noise playing in your
head right now, and some of it needs to be shut off or quieted down.
It will be easier to do than you might think.

To make your thoughts come to you in a more organized way, you

need to create order in your mind. This means you need to reduce
your stress, which is the major force driving your brain to the
cluttered state it is in now. This might seem like a daunting task, but
this book is going to take you through the process. You will find out
why this happens to you and how to make it stop. If you commit to it,
before you know it you will find a sense of inner peace.
 WHAT IS BRAIN CLUTTER?

D you ever have those days where you feel like you cannot put two
thoughts together? You have a lot on your mind and are trying to fulfill all
of your responsibilities, and it does not seem like there is any way to
accomplish everything you need to. You might have some problems in
your interpersonal relationships and you are worried about whether or not
you are going to be able to find a solution for them. Something might
have slipped your mind and you are trying to figure out how to correct that
mistake. You feel like a million thoughts are running around in your mind
at once and you cannot keep up with them. You are stressed to the high

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heavens and you feel like your mind is a car that is driving straight off of a
bridge at a hundred miles per hour.

f this is happening to you, it means you are suffering from a

cluttered brain. You might have been worrying that you are
losing your mind and are going to have an inevitable breakdown because
that is what prolonged stress does to your mind. That is the source of all
of your troubles- a term you have probably been hearing your entire life. It
is one of the most common problems in the world and yet it still has a way
of sneaking up on people, and that is understandable. Everyone feels
pressure from society to always have it together. Those who seem like
they do are lauded for doing so. Picture that “supermom”- she goes to
work looking perfectly put together every morning and is the most
productive member of the team, and then she goes back home to cook
dinner for the family, and even then she still has the social life and energy
to go out with friends. Everyone wants to be that person. Unfortunately,
they are aspiring to live up to an impossible standard. That person is a
fictional character. You are not always going to be at your best. Stress
gets to the best of us. Many times we do not share when we are feeling
overwhelmed because that comes with a sense of shame. You might

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think you have failed and have concerns about others not thinking you
are mentally stable.

he fact that you worry about this proves that you are sane. You
know that there are limits to what you can give out per day. The
mentality that is actually “crazy” is when someone thinks a constant fast-
paced lifestyle is sustainable. Think about a time when you had to exert a
great deal of physical or mental force for a long period of time, such as
renovating a room in the house or staying up all night working on a
project. It takes every ounce of life force you have to complete your task,
and all you want to do afterward is go to sleep. When you wake up, it will
probably be late in the morning and even after sleeping for a long period
of time, you will still not feel like getting up, probably feeling tired or sore.
After you finally manage to get out of bed you come to the realization that
it is going to be a slow day. You need to have time to recharge. If you do

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not rest, your body’s immune system will be unable to fight infection and
your mind will be vulnerable to stress.

ou might think it’s strange when I tell you stress is not actually
the big bad monster it is made out to be, but it is true. Life
naturally comes with stress. Everyone deals with it on a daily
basis. There are things we have to do that we would rather not do. You
will have a lot of expectations placed on you at once. You will run into
unexpected problems. Our relationships are not always harmonious, and
when they are not it is an uneasy time. How we respond to stress is the
key. It becomes overwhelming when we internalize it, which is why it is so
important to learn how to handle it in healthier ways.
P rioritize Your Mental Health

You need to prioritize your mental health for many reasons.

First, you want to do this for yourself. A person with a cluttered mind
tends to loathe to put themselves anywhere on the priority list because
they fear being selfish, so just humor me for a minute and think of it in
another way. You are helping the people in your life when you prioritize
your mental health. We only give what we can. It is a romantic thought to
believe we can give everything we have and then still find a way to give

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some more, but it is not realistic. When you are low on fuel, you will feel
tired. This means even small donations will seem like too much.

magine a printer that has run out of ink. You can order it to print
out well-defined pictures all you want, but it is only going to
produce less colored and more faded content until eventually, you will not
be able to get anything from it. That is because something that has not
been given good things cannot be expected to put out good things. The
same thing goes for yourself. When you are overwhelmed by stress and
do not feel like you could ever get everything done that you need to as
you come up with more responsibilities to pile onto that already

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impossible list, there is no way that you are going to be giving your best
performance.

here is a common misconception that a higher level of stress

will lead to increased productivity. Actually, the opposite is true.
Some people will even go as far as to say they work the best pressure,
not realizing that what that really means is that they procrastinate,
meaning they have to put everything together at the last minute, and
because they did a lot in a short amount of time they confuse that for
motivation. The two could not be any more different. Motivation is what
will cause you to go the extra mile in your work life. There are stimulated
nerves involved, but that is different from anxiety, which comes out when
we feel like we need to fight for our well-being on some level. This means

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you are in survival mode. This does not bring about the sort of creativity
and feeling of freedom needed to be productive.

hen you are feeling stressed, you will actually be much less
likely to do the things you need to do. We do not like feeling
negative emotions and will avoid them if at all possible. That is what
causes you to put off a big project until the last minute. You look at it as
this impossible task and this is how you end up discouraging yourself
from working on it. This is because the project is a source of stress, so
you would rather look away from it and take part in something that does
give you joy. You tell yourself “I’m just going to take this one night off, and
then tomorrow I am going to power through the entire thing. However,
when tomorrow comes, you feel no better about taking on this challenge
than you did yesterday. In fact, you probably feel even worse, so you tell
yourself you are just going to give yourself one more day off. The cycle
repeats itself until there are not any more days to put it off and the

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deadline has arrived. Any task that is done in a rushed and panicked
state is going to be riddled with errors.

his means while you created a lot of content in a short amount

of time, you were not productive. True productivity comes from
a place of caring about your work, putting thought and effort into it, and
considering the best possible way to present your idea. You do not have
that option when you are throwing something together at the last minute.
You will not remember much of what you did because you were just trying
to achieve the bare minimum in a strict time constraint.
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hy You Should Declutter Your Brain

There are a lot of incentives for decluttering your brain. It is

integral to becoming a happier person. You need to be
relaxed in order to be happy. People who have inner peace are able to
accept themselves and their lives for what they are. They allow
themselves to get the most out of what are supposed to be the good
times in life- quiet evenings with one’s family, celebrating holidays with
friends, etc. Their time is not consumed by going over their thoughts. How
many times have you been up much later than you should be, going over
a checklist of worries? How many times have you felt a thudding in your

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chest that made you feel like the walls were closing in? Do you find that
you forget things more often than usual?

his is not because you are a forgetful person. You have too
much going on in your brain when it is cluttered. It would be if a
bundle of items that were more than your arms can hold fell from the
ceiling and you tried to catch them. You might catch a couple of things,
but most of them would hit the floor. When your brain is cluttered, you will
be more forgetful. Imagine you were trying to listen to one person, but
different people kept pulling you aside and talking over that person. You
would not be able to keep up with what anyone was saying. This is what

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your mind does to you when is full of clutter. You are unable to focus on
anything.

hen you have a million things going on in your mind, you

are prone to neglecting your health. You can be tired and
coming down with a cold or other illness, but ignore and suppress your
symptoms because you do not feel like you have time to be sick. There is
only so long that this can go on. Eventually, your body will wear out and
you will get much sicker than you would have if you had recognized that
you are sick and taken some time off. When you are lost in your thoughts,
you might even fail to recognize what is going on in your own body

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because you are placing anxiety at the forefront and yourself on the
backburner.

here is light at the end of the tunnel, though, if you are willing to
reach it. You can clear out all of this clutter from your mind so
that your stream of thoughts make sense and lend themselves to your
success rather than holding you back. When you do this, you create a
solid foundation for yourself. This way it will not matter what is happening

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outside of yourself. You will still be doing well inside.

ecluttering Your Brain During a Crisis

It is especially important to maintain peace within your mind

whenever there are times in the world where there is a crisis going on. It
will be hard to do this because you are being told one frightening story
after another. You are being reminded every second of the day that you
could become a victim of the crisis at any moment, which causes you to
feel unsafe. You are unsure that your future is going to be sound. You fear
for yourself and your loved ones, and the overflowing of bad news and

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scare tactics can make you feel like you are seeing the beginning of the
end.

hen all of this is happening, you will find it hard to put two
thoughts together. It is also easy to become morose
because you are being led to believe that your life is going to be changed
forever, and that all of it is going to be for the worse.
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hen you are in the middle of times like these, you need to keep your mind
decluttered so you can keep your spirits up. One thing you
must do is give yourself some sense of normalcy. This
means you cannot spend all of your time with your
headspace being consumed by the crisis. Even though it might not feel
right at first, you must do things that remind you of a time that does not
have anything to do with it. Make a few rules for yourself. While your
family is having dinner together, do not use that time to talk about morbid
things that will either inspire fear or make tempers run high, which is
especially easy during troubling times. Use this time to talk about a TV
show everyone likes, or for someone to share a funny story, or anything

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that brings about good feelings instead of just more worry. Play a board
game together and only talk about the game.

ometimes our minds fool us into believing that by obsessing

about something and worrying about what it is going to mean for
the future, that we are doing something about it when nothing could be
farther from the truth. We are keeping ourselves stuck in a place that
causes us pain and fear. That will translate to the rest of the people close

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to us who will be able to sense our tension which will go on to amp theirs
up, eventually leading to discord.

Scattered Brain is Unrelated to Intelligence

When you have a cluttered mind you might feel like you are
behind everyone else, that they have it together and you are just barely
hanging on. For one, their lives may not be as stable as they are trying to
make you believe. For another thing, you have untapped potential that is
being suppressed by the anxiety that is causing your mind to be so
scattered. You need to think better of yourself if you ever hope to reach
this.
M any times people resign to the idea that they are
scatterbrained or do not have a good memory. They have
learned to call themselves unintelligent, which is another way they
engage in negative self-talk. This is just as the name suggests- when
people talk badly to themselves. Many times people will describe it as a
voice that makes them feel bad about themselves. It might feel like a
separate entity, but you have to remember that this is going on in your
mind, so this talk is an aspect of you. This is not meant to discourage you
at all. In fact, it should give you some hope because this means you can
stop this from happening. If negative self-talk comes from you, it is not

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like a physical illness where you can only take the treatments that are
available and hope for the best.

hat you need to keep in mind is that you when you talk
about being scatterbrained, what you are really describing
is the effects that the stress has on their mind. No one’s brainpower is at
its best when they are suffering from prolonged anxiety. It is a distraction
and, as you have probably noticed, exhausting. That is because it
consumes not only mental energy, but also physical energy to be
stressed. Your heart rate and blood pressure are in an elevated state,
which means your entire body is working twice as hard as it usually does.
That is why you feel tired after you have been through an extremely

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stressful event.

eclutter Your Brain to Improve Relationships

Let’s talk about the positive impact that decluttering your brain
will have on improving your relationships, both in a work and social
sense.
N ow that you’ve been examining yourself and your behavior you
may find that you are beginning to reap benefits such as
calmness and greater clarity. You’re doing the work, starting by creating
order in your surroundings and getting rid of things that do not serve a
purpose. You are taking time for yourself and acting with slower, more

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deliberate movements. Your thoughts are clearer as you approach your
day.

ou notice yourself becoming more productive and that your

work product has an increased quality. You may notice yourself

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being more dedicated to your daily tasks. It may not take so
much effort to begin because you are feeling overwhelmed less often.

our approach to people is probably changing as well. You are

probably less anxious when your boss comes to speak with
you. Your work has been on time and accurate so, of course,
you no longer have that tightness in your chest and churning in your belly.
You feel more comfortable and can be more sociable because you are
not busy chastising yourself for what you have not done or done well. You
may have an increased awareness of your colleagues as well. With a less

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cluttered mind, one can “see past his own nose” and have more healthy
interactions with others in your life.

t’s almost like blinders are being taken off and you can better
see and evaluate what your colleagues do well, maybe better
than you do. You can also see areas of improvement and perhaps do so
with less judgment because of a lessened need to self-protect.
F or example, you notice your colleague always finishes his
reports faster than you do. With a clear mind, you feel more
comfortable asking him to show you his process. You observe with an
open-heart learning that he has found a way to export information from
the database so that he does not need to retype it which also increase
accuracy. Instead of holding onto clutter and jumbled feelings, you have

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just allowed yourself to be taught something that will lighten your load,
allowing you to take on more strategic aspects of your job.

his can start an exchange and you may ask your colleagues if
they would like to do a “brown bag lunch” to create a place
where you can each share areas that are giving you problems and tricks

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& tips that each person finds helpful. All this adds up to an enhanced
work culture.

our personal life is not neglected in this process either. You

probably come home from work or school less tired and with a
feeling of accomplishment, which is energizing. When you do
not feel like you have performed well at work, you may subconsciously

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punish yourself by decided you cannot go meet your friends for dinner
and to play cards. Instead, you stay home and stress out.

ith the improvements you have made, you feel freer to allow
more good things into your life. You come home, freshen up
and maybe you even make your special guacamole dip for the occasion.
Instead of a mind full of projects you haven’t completed and deadlines
you are behind on, you are able to focus on your relationships. Since you
have been working with your colleagues to streamline your processes
and you no longer need to stay late every day to finish your work, you do
more in your personal life. Your outlook is more positive, so you find
yourself connecting with your friends on a more personal level. You

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contribute more to the conversation than you had before. You get more
out your relationships when your contribution to it increases, too.

ou have clearer thoughts and can see where your friend needs
help and you’re are more observant so you can tell when they
have had a bad day. Uncluttering your mind helps you to see

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outside of yourself, helping you to connect with others in a more
productive way making your relationships deepen.

ou Are in Control

You are in control of your thoughts, actions, and therefore your

life. You might not feel like you have had any power up to this
point, but consider this. You have been able to stave off feelings of panic
so you can get through your day probably for as long as you can
remember. No weak person could manage that. On the contrary, it means
you are much stronger than you give yourself credit for. Whenever you
are feeling those anxious sensations and your mind is racing, I know that
you would much rather stay in bed and avoid the world, but instead you
make the conscious decision to get out of bed and take on whatever the
day has in store for you, even if it is unpleasant. That shows you have

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what it takes to regain control over your mind and what is allowed to go
through it.

n this book, I will take you through the process of organizing not
only your brain, but your days, and this will lead to peace in
your world. This is when you will be the most effective. Your confidence in
yourself will grow when you are no longer afraid of what could happen
and embarrassed about what already has happened. You will gain an
understanding of what it really means when all of that noise is going on
inside of your head and how to make it stop. I know that you have some
faith in yourself that you can make this happen, otherwise you never
would have clicked on this book in the first place. Everyone gets one life,
and every life gets a finite number of days. I am not saying this to scare
you, but to motivate you not to waste any more days. This is why it is so
crucial to make your thoughts your own and not the product of fear,
stress, and anxiety.
 SLOWING DOWN

I ’ no secret- we live in a fast-paced world. Everyone is connected

to multiple forms of social media, and those are often incorporated
into your job. This means you have to constantly keep up with all of
them, making sure you do not miss one call, email, or message. On
top of that, our lives are often a series of one thing after another.
Right after school is an extra-curricular activity. You get off from work
and then you need to pick the kids up from school and take them to
their rehearsals. After that, you need to go home and put together a
presentation that your boss will be witnessing. You are moving onto

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one thing after another. Before you can stop and process the most
recent event you have to move on to the next one.

hange the Pace of Your Life

The first step to decluttering your brain is just to slow down.

I’m talking about every facet of your physical and mental state when
I say this, down to the most basic vitals. In fact, that is precisely
where you need to start. Remember to breathe, because you might
be holding your breath. Slow your thoughts and even your body
movements down. This will help your thoughts to do the same thing.
Think about it this way. When you have lost an important item and
you feverishly go through all of your possessions, dresser drawers,
and other places in your room trying to find it, your search will
probably not reach a conclusion. This is because you are not
actually looking for the item, you are just panicking. As a result of
this, you will only cause everything in your room to be strewn about,
making what you are looking for even more lost than it already was.
What you would need to do is slow your search, bringing a method
to it. If you stopped for a moment and thought about the last time you
knew you had it, you would begin to retrace your steps, your first
course of action being to search in the most likely places for it to be.
As you began to search this way, memories would start to come
back to you about what you did with the item because there it is now

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silent enough in your mind that you can hear and are in a state to
receive important information that it is trying to convey to you.

hen we dial the pace at which we live our lives back a

notch, we will find that not only will we find our days
more enjoyable, but we are more effective in everything we do.
You’ve probably heard the old saying “slow your roll” and you can
imagine a person doing some ordinary tasks like working on their car
or gardening when their friend runs up panting and hysterical talking
fast and hard. The first person tries to understand the furious and
jumbled up talk and suddenly puts up his hands, saying “slow your

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roll, I can’t understand you” because they cannot keep up with their
friend’s rapid speech and frantic gestures.

ou can see how cluttered the second person’s mind is

and, in his haste has rendered himself unintelligible to the
other. His words cannot be deciphered and he’s probably
waving his arms around using them for emphasis with a little too
much gusto. His friend can only comprehend his message when he
slows down. Along with being a cue to speak slower to others
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yourself, you can also interpret this lesson as a reminder to slow
down when communicating to yourself, or thinking.

his is a powerful message and can be used for a person

who wants to declutter their minds. This takes focus and
dedication to the point of resolve. If you have made the commitment
to yourself to clean up the living space of your mind, you might try
some techniques to consciously slow yourself down. When you are

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doing ordinary tasks, reign yourself in from going too quickly. Walk a
little slower, you’re not in a competition.

alk less rapidly when you are explaining something to

someone and see if this aids in getting your point across.
You might have an elaborate idea that you are trying to convey to
someone and you want to cover every part of it, but if you try to do
that you will not be able to create a message that can be

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understood. It will also cause you to trip over yourself trying to figure
out which aspect of the message to talk about next.

magine you are trying to recount the events of a movie you

just saw to someone. You might wonder where to begin.
Should you tell them what it is generally about or start from the
beginning? Maybe you should tell them the piece you think will make
them become interested in hearing about it? Your brain is jumping
around all over the place which can cause you to become paralyzed
in your speech. To avoid this or risking it becoming convoluted,
handle this one step at a time. What is the first thing you want the
person to know about the movie? Why do you want them to know
about it? This will give you a clue as to what to discuss next. Maybe
the movie takes place in a time period that you know your friend is
very interested in. This means that fact should be what you lead in
with. Also, remember that you do not need to give them a recap of

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the entire story in one sitting. You will not have failed if you do not. If
they understand the gist of it, you have communicated successfully.

lowing down means taking time for yourself. There are

things we all need to do to preserve our hygiene and
cleanliness, but they should also be seen as a service to yourself.
Have you ever noticed yourself performing self-care tasks too quickly
and Recklessly? Think about how you brush your teeth and hair.
Perhaps you find yourself, pulling the brush through your hair a little
hard and very quickly. If you were brushing someone else’s hair,
would you do it in this way? Perhaps instead, you would move the
brush more slowly and gently through the hair, take your time and
make sure it was a pleasurable experience for them. You deserve

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that treatment too. What about your teeth, do you find yourself using
too much pressure and rushing through the process?

ake it slower, ease up on the pressure and be aware of

your strokes, making sure they are circular and that you
cover the whole surface of your teeth and not neglecting any. Rinse
longer, you deserve the time it takes to care for yourself. When you
slow down the physical motions of these actions, you force yourself
to focus on them. It is easy to go through these motions quickly and
carelessly while using the time to think about all of the
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responsibilities piled onto you, causing you to feel stressed about
your day before it even begins.

tart Your Day Earlier

Are you waking up too late to make yourself a beverage like

hot coffee or tea and a little breakfast? Do you find yourself pushing
the alarm too many times and racing through an abbreviated
morning routine and feeling like you’re running behind all day?
Tomorrow, wake up the first time the alarm sounds and give yourself
time to show yourself some consideration in the morning. Make
breakfast for yourself, do a little exercise like yoga or a little walk or
run, even for just 15 minutes. Perhaps instead you prefer a moment
to sit outside and meditate or read the newspaper or a book you’ve
like to read. Spend some time with your family in the morning
connecting instead of barking orders and being in a hurry. When we
are stressed internally, we also have a tendency to become short
with others. You have placed yourself in the mindset that you need to
take action now or something terrible will happen, which means you
are going to place the same pressure on your family so that they “do
their part”. When we rush, we place imaginary consequences on
ourselves for what will happen if we slow down- for example, “If I
lounge around before I go to work, I will become demotivated and
not put out good work.” Actually, the opposite is the case. It takes a
lot of energy to rush through your morning routine. This means by
the time you get to work, you will not be starting fresh. When you
begin your morning slowly, you will gradually build yourself up to a
state of being bright and alert. Think about how when you work out,
you do not jump straight for the most intense activity. You warm up
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so you will have more energy to spend instead of wearing yourself
out in the first few minutes.

t work, do you find your mind leaping ahead to the next task
you have planned and that what you are working on now
becomes an afterthought? Perhaps this is creating a condition where
you are making too many mistakes, thus increasing your stress level.
Just for today, try this, focus instead on the paper you are writing
currently. Take a few deep breaths letting them out slowly and, if you
can while at work, put on some instrumental music at a low volume.

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Take the time to look over your work and fix anything you find that
could be improved at the time. Consciously move a little slower.

t the end of the day, evaluate your productivity and the

quality of your work. It’s better, isn’t it? Think about when you
are reading a book. You do not try to absorb the content of both of
the pages laid out in front of you at once. You focus on one and then
shift over to the other once you are done so you are taking in this
large body of information one bit at a time. This makes it so that it is
possible to take it all in. When you try to skim through brushing your
hair or teeth, you will not have benefitted much from it. However,
when you take your time, the job will be done more thoroughly, and

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not only will you avoid health risks, but you will find rewards for this
little extra bit of effort.

f you try these suggestions for a week, you will likely want
to keep going. It might be difficult to pick up a new habit
that you are not accustomed to, but once you begin to enjoy the
benefits of it you will want to do it more often so as to take even
more advantage of the good feelings they create. You will find your
stress level relieved quite a bit and you’ll be feeling better day to day.
I’ll bet you end up feeling less tired during the day and it’s easier to

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fall asleep. Without so much stress and with greater productivity, you
will find the relationships you have with coworkers more enriching.

ther people will want to know your secret! They will want to
be in on what is making you more relaxed and confident.
They will notice the boss is pointing out your work as best practices
or that your grades have improved. It’s okay to share this information
too and you’ll want to because of your awareness that it will improve
the workplace overall. You will enjoy being in a cleaner and more
relaxed workspace and on a team of winners.

You will reap rewards when it’s time for your annual review as well.
With a less cluttered mind, you will stand out as a leader and you will
enjoy hearing good things spoken about you. This is how making

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your mental space healthier is helpful for your productivity as well as
your peace of mind.

t is not just at work where slowing down will benefit you by

uncluttering your mind. You will also find your interpersonal
relationships both at home and with friends to be improved. When
you are with your circle of people, take time with them more slowly.
Your communication doesn’t have to serve a purpose and can be
purely for enjoyment. Ask about their day. Really listen when they tell
you. It will make your relationship with them better if you learn what
they like to do and do it with them. You will learn things about

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yourself and create a stronger bond.

e Present

Be present for yourself, your family, friends, and

colleagues. Slow down and do not miss your life as it passes by
while you hurry through everything with a mind full of clutter and
stress wearing away your health. Listen to what the people around
you are saying. Take a look at what your environment looks like. Do
whatever you need to do in order to process the present as opposed

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to the past, future, or a fictional scenario.

emember this- the past cannot bring you any more harm
than it already has because it has passed. The future has
not happened yet so it would be illogical to try to react to it. A
hypothetical worry is not worth spending one second of your time on
because there is only a small chance that it will happen. What is
happening in the present is what can truly impact you. You need to
devote all of your energy to it because it is what will become your

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past.

reathe and remember that there is a definite connection

between your breath and movement. As your breath
becomes slower and deeper, your movement will be deliberate.
Think about the motions you are going through. When you take a
breath, consciously inhale and exhale. This will go a long way in
decreasing your anxiety. This is because we do not think about
breathing properly during times of great stress. This will increase the
stress by making you feel like you cannot catch your breath, which
exacerbates a common sensation for people when they are
struggling with the feeling of being overwhelmed by panic- that the
walls are closing in. This verbiage is often used by those with anxiety
to describe what a panic attack feels like. Of course, the room is not
actually changing in size, and they understand that on a fundamental
level, but this does not stop the emotional response from happening
as the result of the illusions that their mind generates. The room
starts to feel smaller and smaller, causing you to feel trapped and

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like you cannot run from where you are at.

ight now, you do not need to run. Sometimes our minds

can cause us to perceive danger where there is none. You
do not need to need to respond to a crisis where there is none. That
seems like a simple concept when you say it out loud, but it is harder
to put in practice when you are in the moment and all of the
symptoms of an attack are hitting you at once. Just remember that
sometimes your mind creates scenarios that do not actually exist. It
does not mean you are going crazy. It happens to everyone. Think
about when someone tells you “we need to talk,” and you
automatically feel a sense of panic as your mind goes to all of the
worst things this could possibly mean. In just a few seconds, you
have imagined the end of a relationship or some other extremely
unpleasant discussion. Then it turns out that they just want you to
pick which colored toothbrush you would prefer. This means you
needlessly caused yourself stress. You are still not abnormal even if
this happens to you. It just means you need to recompose yourself
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and commit to not going into this mode if it is not needed. If you do
this too often, it can lead to an anxiety disorder.

hen we move through our actions too quickly, we will

often have overreactions to things. This is because
everything hits you at once and you act based on your initial
emotional response to something. To paint a picture of this, think
about when you first saw the death scene of your favorite character
on a show. You might have cried as if you had just lost your best

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friend because at that moment it really feels that painful.

owever, later on, you do not have that visceral feeling

anymore because you realize the impact that event has
on your life isn’t actually that much. It doesn’t cause any harm when
you overreact in that kind of circumstance, but there will be ones that
come along that need to be properly reacted to. For example, your
small child tells you they got a bad grade. You might be concerned,
upset, or whatever else they might feel, but this is a crucial moment
for not only your relationship, but for their development. They are
coming to you for help and they feel ashamed along with fear about
what you will do. If you control whatever you are feeling at the
moment, assure them that you will help them with the class material
and tell them everything will work out alright, this will be a moment
that you come closer than ever, all because you just stopped, got
your breath and emotions under control, and responded in a
collected and logical manner. On the other hand, if you yell at them
or go into panic mode and say, “How are we ever going to bring this
up in time?!” They will learn a very dangerous lesson from this
experience- that they should never ask for help and that you will
react poorly when things go wrong. As a result of this, in the future,

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they will keep it from you whenever they have a problem, no matter
how serious it is.

ot Everything Warrants an Immediate Reaction

Just because something happens, does not mean you

need to react to it immediately. Sometimes our minds can fool us into
thinking everything warrants an immediate response. There are only
a handful of things that fit into this category. When you are driving
and you see someone veering too close to your car, you need to
take immediate action. However, when it is not an emergency such
as this, you have the luxury of taking some time to consider what you
are going to do next. This saves you trouble in a few ways. For one,
you do not have to feel the pressure of coming up with a response all
at once. You can have some time to think about it with a clear mind.
You also will not have to correct yourself after speaking or acting
when you are in a place in your mind to where you are thinking

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irrationally.

igh emotion is the equivalent of irrational thinking. You

might be convinced that you truly believe something
because of an emotion. That is how people snap over something
small due to pressure that has been building up within them for a
long time. They have had one of those days where nothing goes
right and you cannot catch a break, and someone does something
that should be mildly annoying and this ends up being what causes
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the person to explode. This is not good for your physical and mental
health or your relationships.

tress, frustration, and depression tend to come as a

package deal. Even if one is dominant, you feel the others
to some degree. If you are constantly feeling anxious, you will see
your environment and future as grim, and when you do not feel like
things will ever get better, you will become angry. These emotions
will poison not only the mind, but your physical body over a long
period of time. With clarity, you will find many health benefits
including digestion, respiratory and mental all because of your

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reduced stress level. This is because stress can contribute to,
prolong and even bring on health issues.

n the other hand, being relaxed can alleviate them.

Whenever you have an injury or other complication that
causes pain, take a note of how when you are feeling distressed
about it and your mind is saying “please make the pain go away”
repeatedly, you will feel it more strongly. However, if you calm
yourself, you will find some relief. This is because in a way, when
you are stressed your body fights the body’s natural healing process.

When your mind is calm, so is your body, and vice versa. When you
have a quiet mind, you will experience a large number of health
benefits. You will be able to go to sleep faster, which will mean you
will wake up in the morning feeling refreshed. Your heart will stop
beating so quickly, lessening your risk for blood pressure problems
later along the way.
R est and Check for Tension in Your Body

As you go through your day, check in on how you are

postured. Stress causes us to slouch over, causing neck strain. You
will also notice that your muscles are tight. Take a moment to relax
them, letting your arms fall to your sides and breathing in deeply to
release the pressure in your chest. Also, and maybe most
importantly, check your jaw and make sure you are not clenching it.
It is not uncommon to do this in the middle of the day when you have
the most calls and customers. If you are not careful about this, you
will run the risk of doing damage to your teeth because they are not
meant to handle the strain of being ground together for longer
periods of time. If this is a problem for you, make a point throughout

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the day to separate your top and bottom teeth and relax your jaw.
This only takes a few minutes.

ometimes we refuse to slow down because we do not think

we have the time to. What if I told you that you don’t have
the time not to? Pushing yourself isn’t always the answer. Know
when it is time to rest. If you think this will take time away from doing
your work, try to put another spin on that thought. Let’s say you are
trying to create a PowerPoint for a presentation. Consider the quality
of work that you would do on it if you are feeling tired. Your
performance will not be up to par. You will not be as vigilant about
checking for errors and making sure your sentences make sense,
and you will work more slowly than usual. You are not going to be
motivated to do anything, and no matter how hard you try to hide it, a
lack of enthusiasm about a project will show in the quality of it.
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henever we are overly tired, we will often feel resentful of anything
we have to do and therefore you will feel like you are
just enduring one thing after another. This is not a way
to create a healthy and productive life for yourself. When you get into
these modes, there will be times that you need to crack the whip and
keep going, but this is not always the way to go. Throughout our
lives, we run into times where we need to be kinder to ourselves. We
are more than willing to give other people a break, even when they
have done something that caused us harm, understanding that they
were going through a hard time. However, when it comes to us, we
hold ourselves to a standard that could never be reached. People
also have a tendency to push themselves to give more, but then
neglect to give back to themselves. That would be like expecting
your phone to keep running but never put it on the charger. You have
to allow yourself some recharge time and treat yourself to some
things that replenish your reservoirs. It does not have to cost money.
You can just draw yourself a bath and take time to savor how your

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skin and joints feel immersed in the hot water. These simple
comforts sometimes give you the strength you need to keep going.

hen you are in the middle of all of the chaos your days
can throw at you, it is easy to underestimate the toll
that mental and emotional clutter combined with stress can have on
you. It is the way of most people to just keep going on about their
day, ignoring their problems and resolving that they aren’t that bad
because they can still go through all of the things they need to do
every day.
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ust because you are not visibly distressed, doesn’t mean your
mental well-being does not need tended to. The longer
you put it off, the more of a mess you will have to deal
with. It’s like when you let the dishes pile up in the sink
and you look away from it because you do not want to
deal with it. Eventually, they will be overflowing. The sink will not be
able to hold one more dish, so when you finally go to clean it out, not
only will you be there for a long time because you have such a hefty
job to do, but you will also be trying to maneuver around the
precariously-placed dishes so that they do not fall and break. When
we ignore a mental health struggle, that will not make it go away.
This will only make it get bigger until it is something that is

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impossible to ignore, and you will likely have effects from it that you
did not expect or want.

henever you feel yourself thinking too fast, just

remember to stop for a minute. You do not have to
completely pull yourself out of whatever you are doing or make a
scene. You just need to take a moment to pull yourself together.
Take note of the muscles in your body that are tight so you can relax
them. Get your breath under control again. Breathe slowly and
deliberately. Take a substantial breath in, hold it inside for a second,
and then let it out slowly. Slow your roll. Your internal dialogue is

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probably making about as much sense as a person who just had
surgery and is still under the effects of the anesthetic.

ur Brains Are Like Computers

There are similarities between the way our brains work and how
computers operate. Think about when you have too many programs
being run on a device. A number of games are all logged into at
once. A large number of tabs are open. At some point your screen
freezes. You wait a few minutes for the situation to work itself out,
and your only recourse is to turn the computer off, wait for ten
seconds, and turn it back on again. You might be worried that your
device has broken and that you will not be able to use it anymore,
but when you log back on it is business as usual. What happened in
this situation is that your device became overstimulated and needed
to be reset. It was performing too many tasks and therefore did not
have enough energy to do everything it was being asked to do. We
can do the same thing with our brain. That is how you end up living
with that strange phenomenon where you have so many thoughts

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going on but you cannot focus on a single one of them. You cannot
handle everything that is being thrown at you so you become numb.

n order to slow down, remember this- there is nothing that

needs to happen right now. There is no emergency. You do
not have to do anything except bring yourself back to a state of mind

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where you can actually think. Don’t let your mind jerk you in any way
it wants to.

am going to ask you a question that is going to sound out

of the blue at first but will make more sense as I explain it-
what makes you happy? What do you look forward to? I am not
asking this in a deeply philosophical sense. There are things in this
world that give us warm feelings inside while others bring our mood
down. What does the latter? It might be something as simple as
playing with your pet. If this is so, then for just a moment, go to a
place in your mind where you are with your pet. Think about what it
looks like and how it feels to touch its fur. If there is a person you feel
a lot of affection for, whether you know them personally or they are a
famous person, or even if they are a fictional character, picture this

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person in your mind. Think about things they did that were endearing
to you.

motional Crutches

These are what can be referred to as good crutches. In the

past, the concept of emotional crutches has garnered up a bad
reputation because when people hear of them their mind often goes
to abusing alcohol or even an illegal substance. However, this is not
an accurate representation of what that concept means. A crutch
does not have to be destructive, nor does it need to take over your
life to the exclusion of everything else. It also does not have to cause
you to avoid life. Think about what physical crutches are meant to do
for a person. It is not to prevent them from walking, but to help them
do so because they cannot do it on their own right now due to an
injury, illness, or another issue that is causing one of their legs to be
weaker than it usually is. When we use emotional crutches, we keep
good things that bring us happiness close to us while we get through
things that are not as pleasant. Think about when you listen to your
favorite music while you are doing a writeup. It is never fun to write
for work, and you would rather be doing something else because the
content of this is boring. However, it is something you must do for

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work.
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f you do not have something to look forward to, you can change that.
You might not be able to purchase tickets to your dream
concert or go on a getaway to a fancy resort, but this does
not mean you cannot give your life some more glamor. This might
come in the form of making yourself a nice dinner. It does not have
to be for any special occasion. Just make it a time where you can
afford a meal that is a little more expensive than what you usually
get. Light some candles and put music on that pleases you. Get
dressed nicely. This might seem silly to do at first, but everyone

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needs to stop the pace of their life for a moment to do something
nice for themselves.

ake some time to get to know yourself. Think about how

when you like someone, you try to find out their interests
so that you can do things for them that will make them happy. Give
yourself the same consideration. Our minds can become consumed
by trying to figure out how we can help others, but if we ever want to
do that we need to be in a position where we can afford to be
emotionally charitable. When your mental bank account is full,
meaning you feel calm and content, you will be able to give more to
others than if you let self-care go to the wayside and therefore your
account is running on empty. Don’t make life just about fulfilling
responsibilities and completing tasks others assign to you. Be a little
selfish and take time just for yourself.
 RETRAIN YOUR BRAIN

T , the people around you and the

course of your life begin from an internal place. It has long been said that
what you think becomes what you do. People who do not think they are
good people are going to have lapses in judgment in their dealings with
others. If you don’t think you are an attractive person, you are going to
avoid social situations because you do not want to be seen by others. The
way you think dictates what you do, which is why you cannot take your
hands off the wheel when it comes to how your brain operates. You have
probably heard the saying that you teach people how to treat you- if you
show someone that they can talk to you poorly without any repercussions,
they will. Take this mentality with your own mind. For many of us, this is the
entity that says the cruelest things to us. Why does this happen? Are we

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really just bad people and we have only taken it out on ourselves so far? Is
there something even worse at work here?

our Brain is Trained

I am here now to tell you that you can relax because this is not
what is going on. Your brain has been trained to speak this way
to you. How you might ask, is that possible? The answer is that you have
been training your brain all of your life, and will continue to for the rest of
your days. Think about when you learned how to write. That was training
your brain. The same goes for when you were figuring out how to walk and
everything you learned during your years in school. By the end of those
lessons, you were probably able to name all fifty states and practically
recite the United States’ Constitution off of the top of your head. After you
were done with school and some years went by, your memory of these
lessons became increasingly fuzzy. As you took and left jobs, the same
thing happened. All of this adds up to the fact that your brain is not locked
into one form. It changes with the new information we take in and the
habits we pick up- or cease to do. This ties into why our brains can become
cluttered. When you mentally go through your ever-lengthening to-do list,
develop fears for the future, and entertain other thoughts that creep into
your mind to disturb your peace of mind, these thoughts make their
permanent home here because of how often you have reviewed them.
When a person faces any form of emotional upset, even if it is not one of
the most mentally destructive traumas, it can still impact the way your brain
works, even creating neurological differences in your brain from before they
were there. At some point, the cycle of thoughts and emotions becomes
just as automatic of a process as the light turning on inside a refrigerator
when it is opened. This leads to a circular internal conversation that does

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not go anywhere, which closely mimics a couple of common disorders that
affect one’s emotions as well as the way the mind works.

e cannot bring up a cluttered brain without discussing anxiety

and OCD. Before you start to worry, let me assure you that I
am not trying to diagnose you or even imply that you have one of these
disorders. However, while not everyone with a cluttered brain has an
anxiety disorder, everyone with the said disorder- down to a person- has an
abundance of brain-clutter. Even if you do not actually have either of these
disorders, a cluttered brain inherently mimics the symptoms. This means

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learning about them will give you direction in helping yourself no matter
what.

nxiety Disorders

In anxiety disorder, you are constantly in fight-or-flight mode. The

feeling itself is helpful at times, such as when you are dealing with a
dangerous situation that requires immediate action and you need to rely on
adrenaline to get yourself out of it. However, it becomes a problem when
you constantly have this feeling. It chips away at your confidence, sense of
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stability, and feeling of independence. It makes you call every aspect of
yourself, everyone else, and the world into question.

CD, contrary to popular belief, is not about cleaning one’s room

with a toothbrush or needing pencils to be perfectly parallel. It
could take this form, but it would need to be motivated by something
internal. For example, the sufferer has convinced themselves that they will
be responsible for a death in the family if they do not arrange the pencils
just right. Your brain makes connections between events that are unrelated.
They have assigned themselves the power to impact the world outside of
them with their actions and even their mere thoughts- “If I get annoyed at

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someone and then something bad happens to them, it is my fault.” This is
known as magical thinking.

eople with OCD also often have an innate fear of finding out
everything they thought was true about themselves was not.
They question basic facts about them, even down to their religion or sexual
orientation. This is not at all to say a person with these thoughts has a
problem with any form of an alternative lifestyle. This is the true source of
their anxiety-imagine thinking all of your life that you were attracted to one
gender. You have become comfortable with this idea and it is a part of your
identity. Then, one day, out of the blue, a thought invades your mind- “What
if I really like the gender other than the one I thought I did?” You would feel
your entire world crumbling down. You would feel like your whole life had
been a lie. If you were in a relationship, you would be scared that it was not
right for you. Your entire world would feel like it was crumbling underneath -
why is something that was once inherent about me suddenly changing in
my adulthood?
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f you are affected by OCD and you are feeling this way about any aspect of
yourself, let me assure you now that your entire world is not suddenly
changing. All that is going on is that you had a thought that was
jarring. It made you doubt yourself and conflicted with your sense
of self. This made you go crazy with the thoughts. Sometimes the
thoughts of sufferers cause them to fear that they could be “bad” or
dangerous people and they did not realize it. These people never have and
never could harm anyone, but because the image comes up in their mind
of doing something morally unacceptable, they think they are capable of
doing it and punish themselves as if they were. They also will constantly
check themselves to see if they feel any response to the thought of
committing a violent or otherwise immoral act, and that is when they go into

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very dangerous territory. If you try to look for a thought inside of your mind,
you will find it.

ou might even cause yourself to create the sensations you are

fearing to have and then when this happens, you confuse it for
the intrusive thoughts being true. Let me try to explain what is
going on in a way that gives you another perspective on it. Whenever you
are reading a story about someone suffering a severe injury that the writer
describes in graphic detail, you might find yourself cringing and feeling a
sensation in the place in your body that mimics their wounds so strongly
that it is like you feel what they went through. That is how far the mind will

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go to paint a picture of something to make it real to you if that is what you
want to believe.

ven if the intrusive thought is not as traumatic as the ones we have

discussed, we all sometimes get stuck on thoughts that bring us
discomfort. It can be as simple as driving to work and thinking “what if I get
caught in a traffic jam and that makes me late, and then my boss no longer
trusts me?” Because of this one thought, you spend the entire drive to work
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anxious, and even when you turn your car off it does not subside until you
have walked into the building.

nxiety Disorders vs Everyday Stress

The similarity between these disorders and everyday stress is that

they can cause a person to give thoughts more credence than they
deserve and hold themselves accountable for things they have not done or
were not their fault. They also try to reach conclusions for things where
there is none to be found. For example, in the case of OCD, the sufferer
often tries to find reassurance that their intrusive thought is not true,
causing them to ask others the same questions repeatedly and needing to
do a set of rituals every time the thought comes back to them. This takes
time away from them and impacts their relationships because those in their
circle will not know what to do to help them, as they have reassured their
loved one of the same thing countless times but things always seem to end
up back at square one. Clutter can do the same thing to your mind. How
many nights have you stayed up trying to pull yourself out of a thought that
makes you anxious but finding no way to do so? For example, you fear not
completing a project in time. You try to tell yourself that you have the time
and resources to do it and that everything will be fine, but then you think
“but you could lose it or it breaks right before you present!” At this point,
you are suffering over imaginary scenarios. The project has not even been
completed, so there is no way that it could get damaged. If you have
partners you are working with and are anxious about whether or not they
are going to pull their weight, call them at a reasonable hour to have a
conversation with them. Set up a system where each member of the group
reports their progress and presents proof of it. That way your mind will be
put at ease and you will feel like you have some control over the situation.

his is when you need to train unhelpful behaviors out of your brain.
Psychology has brought about things such as neuroplasticity and cognitive
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behavioral therapy. I will show you how you can learn what these things are
and how to use them to help you. These might sound like
intimidating concepts at first, but you can trust me. When you
break them down to their basics, they are simple ones that can be
mastered within just a few months. That is how little time it takes many
patients to see dramatic improvements with anxiety and OCD-related

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issues. It will definitely sort out the thoughts in your mind so that they will
not all come to you in a rush that you cannot handle.

herapy for Anxiety

Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most widely-used model for

therapy in modern times. Its idea is that self-destructive behavior patterns
stem from a cognitive distortion- to put it simply, your mind upholds a belief
that is inaccurate. You are looking at the world through a set of lenses that
do not offer a correct view of the world.

A cluttered brain counts as a cognitive distortion because it impairs your

ability to think in a logical way. Essentially, these are the moment that you
feel like you cannot think straight. It has long been thought that there are
certain mental states that can cause a person to things they would not
ordinarily think of, and it has been proven countless times to be true. Have
you ever gotten angry at someone over a minor issue because you had a
lot on your mind and thought later about how you overreacted and that they
did not deserve that treatment? On the flip side, let’s say you are a person
who does not cry easily. Then a member of your family falls ill and you
notice that lately, you cannot go through a day without crying at least once.

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Emotional distress can cause you to become confused about what you
feel.

his is why you always need to analyze your thoughts as they

come into your head to see if they are accurate. For example,
you are at the grocery store and someone bumps into you. This causes
you to have an impulse to say something rude to them. At that moment,
you are convinced that you have an intense dislike for that person.
However, when you break that idea down, it does not hold up to logic. You
have never met this person before and they did not mean to run into you.
They were just not paying attention or did not see you. You then think about

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the kind of person you are and realize that you are not the type who would
get angry at someone simply for making a common mistake.

ransient Feelings

In order to make your emotions more congruent with your true

self, you need to realize that there is such thing as transient feelings. The
meaning of this term is in the name- they are thoughts that come and go. A
parent will feel a moment of frustration towards their child when they walk
into the room and realize that they have not cleaned their room like they
said they would, but this does not mean they hate them and want them to
move out. People can have grievances with their romantic partners without
wanting to break up with them. Once it leaves, you can tap back into what

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you actually feel. When people in a relationship have had a quarrel, they
need to keep in mind that they love the other person.

ransient feelings also play a role in our success in our careers.

Say you want to publish something you have written but are
afraid of being rejected. That feeling of nervousness can only have the
control over your actions that it is given. If you truly did not want your work
to be read, you never would have gone through the trouble of writing,
editing, and looking over it. You created it for a reason. This is why you
need to ignore that temporary feeling of nervousness and pursue what you
really want to do. You might be thinking, “how can that feeling be transient?
It’s happening all the time!” What I mean by using that term here is that you
are only going to have that feeling for as long as you put off showing others
your work. When you get feedback from someone, you will see that the
possibility of them pointing out an area that your work could see

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improvement is not the worst thing in the world and should not stop you
from placing it in a position to where others will read it.

hose who have any level of anxiety are notorious for thinking ten
steps ahead. It comes from a need to be prepared for any
possible situation. They cannot stand the thought of a problem hanging in
the balance for a while and waiting to solve it. This is because the problem
is causing them a great deal of stress and they feel like by sorting this
particular issue out, they will get rid of and find relief from their stress, not
realizing their brain will only come up with another source shortly after.
Many times, when a person’s brain is cluttered, a contributing factor is a
person’s need to solve all of their problems overnight and the feeling that
things are horrible if they cannot manage this. We are taught that we
should not go to bed with a problem standing in our relationships or other
aspects of our lives. While it is true that you should do everything you can

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about a situation before you go to bed, once you have done that, you need
to let it go for the night.

he concept of “don’t go to bed angry” can have a detrimental

effect on your life and mental health. There are times where you
are having a conversation with someone and it is going nowhere. Both
parties are tired, stressed and frustrated. This means they do not the
means to say anything productive. They will be drawn to saying things that
feel good in the moment but have a negative impact on the relationship in
the long run. You will also stay up for a long time having this circular
conversation.

ognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Neuroplasticity

C Now we are going to get into cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT,
neuroplasticity, and figure out how they can be used with one
another to achieve the outcomes you want to see. CBT and
neuroplasticity are closely related and they lend themselves to each other
when a person is trying to change the way they think. CBT emphasizes the
theory that people can change their thinking patterns even if they have held
these beliefs for most or all of their lives. Neuroplasticity states that if

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someone repeats the same lesson over and over again, it will become the
dominant practice, taking over the one that is left behind.

hen we are thinking about the connections in our brains, the

term “use it or lose it” becomes relevant. The ones that are
used repeatedly are strengthened and become a part of your long-term
memory while the ones that are neglected deteriorate and eventually die
out, causing you to forget information. This is why we do not remember
lessons we learned in school that we once knew off of the top of our heads.
We have talked about cognitive distortions being learned. This is from- you
guessed it- neuroplasticity. If someone believes they are not intelligent, it is

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because that intrusive thought has gained access to their mind repeatedly
until it eventually became the way they naturally think.

nother way that neuroplasticity impacts our behavior is that it can

be used to influence which emotional response we gravitate
towards. This plays a considerable role in a cluttered brain and an instinct
to go into panic mode. People who tend to have abnormally high-stress
levels jump to the worst-case scenario as a default reaction to events in
their life. For example, they haven’t been feeling well for the past couple of
days. Their mind jumps past the possibility that they just haven’t gotten
enough rest or have a case of the common cold. They go immediately to a
life-threatening illness. The entire time that leads up to them going to the
doctor involves them imagining a health crisis that they might not survive.
By the time they get to the office they beg the doctor to just give them the
news that they are dying and get it over with. If you live your life this way,
you will be in a constant state of unrest. Every time you run into an
inconvenience, even a minor one, your instinct will be to panic. It will get to

I
a point where you do not have the ability to stay calm because your brain
has been trained otherwise.

f you relate to this concept, do not lose hope. You do not have to
stay this way forever. Just because you learn an unhealthy
pattern of behavior, does not mean you cannot unlearn it. In childhood, we
all do things that are undesirable in society- running around in the house,
tracking mud onto the floors, etc. However, when a child’s parents tell them
that what they are doing is not acceptable and remind them of this fact
whenever the behavior takes place, the child will begin to leave this habit
behind. Eventually, they will get to a point where they are checking their
feet for mud before they enter the house on their own. In the example of
panicking at the doctor’s office, get into the habit of holding off your
thoughts just for one minute to give the doctor time to explain to you what

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is really happening. It will likely take them at the most thirty seconds to do
this. You can put anything off for thirty seconds.

hink about what the other possible courses of action are when
you are faced with a crisis besides worrying. Instead of doing
that, think about why you are in this situation and how you are going to get
out of it. For example, if your performance in work has been suffering
because you spend too much time surfing the internet while you are at the
office, the solution here is to rededicate yourself to your work. You might
want to look into why you are avoiding it. It might just be a simple case of
going lax. You may not be getting enough sleep. There could be a problem
with a coworker. Let’s say that is the problem. Once you have realized this,
you can then resolve whatever problem is going on with them so you can
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have a healthier work environment, which in turn will allow you to go back
to your normal levels of productivity.

hile your mind may be the one that takes in, processes, and
distributes information, you are the one in control. You cannot
always let it have things go its way. Whenever we have developed thinking

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patterns that are harmful to us, our minds develop an urge to go to them
even after we have decided that we want to stop them.

hen applying CBT to a real life concept, let’s imagine a

person with stage fright whose career revolves around public
speaking. This seems like quite the dilemma, right? The person might even
start wondering if they cannot handle this job and should find another one,
even though they are passionate about this one.

Do not decide not to pursue something you want to do based on fear. This
will cause your life to become dictated by forces in your mind that do not
have your best interests at heart. This problem will not alleviate itself
because you give in to what the anxiety tells you to do. In fact, this will
cause things to become worse. You will teach yourself that the feeling of
distress means you need to run, and soon that will always be your
response to it. Anxiety might serve the purpose of helping a person
manage a crisis, but that is not what is happening in this case. You are
responding to sensations in the mind and body. Your mind has conjured up
a situation without any evidence to back up its existence. In reality, you
might just be driving to a grocery store when you are suddenly hit with
visions of a tragedy occurring at that building. This causes you to choose
not to go to the store and drive home. The next day, you come to find out
that nothing out of the ordinary happened there and you are without the
things you wanted to have, all because of a hypothetical situation.
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e will now go back to the example of using CBT to get over a fear of public
speaking. Using this psychological model, the person has a
resistance to being in front of a crowd because of the idea
that doing so will put them in a bad position. They might imagine
themselves getting on the stage and doing something embarrassing
themselves somehow, such as tripping over the steps or jumbling up their
words while addressing their audience. Then their mind plays out a scene
where everyone points at and mocks them for what just happened to them
and no longer being taken seriously by their peers. They might even
conjure up images of being recorded and the video going viral, meaning
they are doomed to spend the rest of their days as a laughingstock. Before
it is even time to perform, they have decided how it is going to go. They are
responding to fears about the future as if they have already happened.

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They feel real because they are so intense.

erein lies the cognitive distortion- “bad things will happen to me

if I get up on stage. I know this is exactly how it will play out
because I thought of it. There is no other possible outcome.” The person
has closed themselves off to the prospect of succeeding. They have made
a prophecy about their future that causes them distress, and they are doing
what they think will make them able to avoid that. If this scenario sounds
familiar to you, the good news is that it proves that you think rationally.
How, you might ask? Even though these acts are misguided, they do come
from a place of self-preservation. What would be irrational is knowing what
you were doing is not good for you, but doing it anyway out of a need to
self-destruct. You are avoiding public speaking with the mindset that you
are going to prevent pain or misfortune from happening to you. This means
you want to care for yourself. When the willingness is there, anything is
possible.
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he first step in the CBT route would be to figure out where this fear came
from. Maybe you did have an unfortunate incident in the past with public
speaking. You got tongue-tied during a presentation and some
people laughed. Before anything else, you would want to look
over that memory again and see if you are remembering it
accurately. You might imagine all of the other students cackling at you and
whispering amongst one another about how badly you failed, but take a

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moment to consider that wasn’t the case.

aybe they thought what you said instead of what you

intended to was genuinely funny.

Perhaps they even thought you intentionally said that and admired your
comedic abilities. Even if they did laugh at the fact that you misspoke, it

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was only for a moment. It does not mean they formed an entire opinion on
you from that experience.

nce you figure out the origin of the fear, you have the means to
make it start to crumble, because now you can slowly build up to
confronting your fear. If you are afraid of speaking in front of even small
groups of people, this can be a good place to start. At first, make it people
who you know very well and trust, and therefore you will not feel such an
immense pressure to impress them. This could include a close group of
friends or family. When you present to them, you will look back on the
experience and realize nothing terrible happened. Now you will have had
an experience speaking in public that was not bad. You will also have taken
away a portion of the fear surrounding it upon the realization that you can
do it.

hat you have done is subject yourself to exposure therapy, a very

commonly used technique in CBT. The idea is that the more contact you
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come in with the source of something that is causing you distress, the less
power it will hold over you. Partially, it then no longer gets to
be this big, ominous presence that looms threateningly over
your head. For another thing, once we have faced our fears find that no
terrible thing happened to us, there is nothing left to fear. You have worn it
down until it is manageable. This is when you can develop your true
feelings about something. In this case, as you grow confidence speaking in
bigger crowds, you might find that you actually enjoy public speaking
because you like to present information to people in a way that they might
not have thought about it before. The fear of it was clouding your thoughts
so that an inaccurate version of yourself was portrayed. Don’t get caught
into those spirals where you are lost in your thoughts but none of them can
reach a resolution. At this point, you run the risk of developing anxiety.
When you feel one of these phases coming on, take a breath and sit up
with your shoulders back. This will serve as a physical symbolism of pulling

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yourself out of it.

issociation

Commit to being fully in whatever moment you are in right now.

When you do not do this, you will become distracted. You are at a meeting
or in a conversation with a friend. You start thinking about something that
happened the other day, a bill you are worried about, or something you
want to get done next week. You look up and realize you have not heard a

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single word the person speaking in front of you has said in the past five
minutes.

his is known as dissociation, and we are all guilty of it from time

to time. However, if you do it chronically, it will negatively impact
your life in more ways than one. For one, it will be more difficult to form
close relationships with others. People like to feel like they are being heard,
and if you space out while they are speaking to you, it is going to make
them feel like what they are saying to you does not matter to you,
especially if they are trying to open up to you. It also means you will not
hear them tell you things you need to know- “there’s going to be a
mandatory meeting tomorrow.” People who do not take in what others say
often miss out on important events and ask why no one told them about

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them. It is likely that someone did, but their brain did not receive that
information.

hat being said, it will be easy to miss things that happen around
you. Sometimes when people are driving and they know where
they are going, they will go into “autopilot mode” and think about other
things. When they get to their destination, they do not remember anything
from the drive. This is dangerous because, on the road, unpredictable
things happen. Someone might run a stop sign or fail to yield. If you are not

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paying attention to the road this can result in a car accident.

issociation causes us to miss out on important information. Your

physical body is there, but you are not a part of what is going on.
Say you are behind on a project and right now you are at a meeting. If you
spend that time worrying about the project and how much catching up you

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had to do, you will then miss out on what is being discussed at the meeting,
you will be even more behind.

ometimes we can also cause ourselves to dissociate when we are

listening to negative self-talk. This is because you have to stop
what you are doing and give all of your attention to it, meaning it will hold
you back from growing as a person. Again, you think badly of yourself
because you have learned how to do it and it has become second nature to
you. Talking to yourself in a more positive way is something you will need
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to train yourself to do if you have a propensity for negative self-talk. At this
point, part of the reason your brain does this is that it is the routine.

raise Yourself

Give yourself credit whenever you do something well. You would

take all the time in the world to point out a mistake you made, so show the
same level of commitment to congratulate yourself. When you get no
rewards for good behavior and disproportionate punishment for doing
things wrong, you have made it so that there is no carrot in the “carrot and
stick” dynamic. This means there is no incentive for trying to do better for

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yourself, and when this happens you will remain in the same place.

o not save praise for the great accomplishments, as we never

save the negative self-talk for especially big failures. If you make
a dish and it tastes especially good, give yourself credit for your skills as a
cook. If you help a friend through a rough time, take a moment to
acknowledge that you were a good friend to them. If someone drops
something and you pick it up for them, you are being considerate, which is
an admirable quality. By the same token, get out of the habit of talking
badly to yourself. A big part of this is finding new ways to word it whenever

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you are thinking about something that did not go well.

et’s say you had a job interview that did not go over well. Instead of
berating yourself and saying things like “You’re so stupid! You blew
it! Can’t you do anything right?” Try saying something constructive,
like “I didn’t present myself to the interview with the right level of
professionalism. Next time, I will be more well-versed in the proper
etiquette for a job interview before I go in.” The next time might be the one
where you do get hired, but not if you just beat yourself down and therefore
become demotivated. Instead of negative self-talk, try constructive
I
criticism. It will work much better in getting the results you want from
yourself.

t might feel like you are not going to reach a better thought
pattern, but I can assure you that you will. It will take time and
practice, and a commitment from you, but just as both neuroplasticity and
CBT promise, you can instill or break any habit you want to if you repeat it
enough times.
 FOCUS AND FIND YOUR CENTER

O biggest challenges those with a chronically cluttered

mind can be summed up with the two concepts mentioned in the
title. I like to compare it to a pair of earphones that have been carried
at the bottom of a bag all day long. They have been getting tossed
around and tangled up with the other contents of the bag. When they
are taken back out at the end of the day, they will be wrapped
around each other and maybe even around another item, and you
will need to take some time to untangle them before you can use
them properly again. This concept goes with your mind as well. We
stuff our thoughts, feelings and experiences throughout the day
because we do not have enough time to look at them, so this leaves
our minds in a mess, which can make it difficult to figure out how you

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actually feel and make sense of your thoughts.

o not feel alone in this. Even the supposedly most well-

adjusted person has to make a conscious effort to wind
down at the end of the day. With everything going on in our daily
lives, it is easy to lose your mental balance. This is why I am going to

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teach you how to clear out the unnecessary noise in their mind so
they can discover their true selves.

he most integral part of finding your center is coming into

yourself. This means you are not thinking about anything
except what you have felt today and what you need in this moment.
When I say “need”, I am not talking about your responsibilities. I
mean what it would take to bring you to a state of tranquility. To do
this, there needs to be a retreat. That is why many people shut all of
the blinds and curtains in their house at the end of the day. It is
meant to be symbolic of shutting out the day. The world outside is
happening away from you and you are here in the comfort of your

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home, recharging yourself so you can approach tomorrow feeling
fresh instead of trying to draw strength you do not have to get up.

rotect Your Energy

To get your mind into a peaceful place, you need to push

anything unrelated to you away from it so as to free yourself from
distractions and prevent your energy from being spent on something
that is not worth it. It is our natural instinct to hold everything close to
us and analyze it as much as possible. However, this is not going to
do anything except make you feel more upset. Earlier in the book,
we talked about times of crisis. When you keep going over them in
your mind you will find more about that you cannot control, which will
go on to make you even more frustrated. When we do not feel like

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we have any say in anything that happens around us, our anxiety will
be at a higher level than ever.

hen you develop a chronic feeling of anxiety, it is easy

to begin to think everything that happens around you is
a direct response to you. You might see some people talking and
think it must be about you, and if they have singled you out it must
be a bad thing. You look at yourself in search of a huge flaw they
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could be pointing out. You become self-conscious about something
that likely did not even happen.

hen you take things personally, you create scenarios in

your mind and act based on them instead of on reality.
We discussed that in a brief example above but sometimes these
situations can become even more extreme. This means you put it
onto yourself when terrible things happen to other people and make
yourself answer for it. On the other hand, let’s say someone goes out
of their way to act rudely to you when you are in private with them.
For an anxious person, this will often cause them to think “What did I
do? I must have done something wrong to make that person behave
this way, because they do not do it with other people.” (I can assure
you that this is not true. People who inflict emotional damage on one
person does the same thing to everyone else who spends too much

I
time around them. It is never just you, no matter what they might try
to get you to believe.)

t is strange how most people call their own behavior into

question whenever someone is rude to them. This is
because they are going on the assumption that people never treat
others badly without any reason to do so, leaving them with the idea
that they must have brought this behavior out in the other person.
This mentality is dangerous to one’s well-being because it will cause
you to become a person that is easily taken advantage of. People
will know that all they have to do is put some base in their voice and
that will put you on your heels trying to placate them, meaning they
will be able to get anything they want out of you. When you think
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about it this way, casting other people’s actions back to them is a
means of self-preservation.

ou see a lot of people throughout the day and you do not

know the state any of them are in. You do not know what
kind of news they might have gotten or what
circumstances they are going through. This is not to say their
behavior towards you is excused, but that it is very unlikely that you
are at responsible for someone you have never met. Even if it is a
close friend who has been acting differently lately, keep this same
thought. If they are ignoring or being rude to you, do not interpret this
as something you did wrong. Do not chase them for attention or
apologize for something you did not do. They are the ones who have
changed. They might have started associating with a person who
brings out an unflattering side of them (however, they are still the
ones culpable for their behavior. Don’t get me wrong. This is not to
let them off the hook. It is to show you how unrelated their behavior

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is to you).

eave the things other people do where they belong- with

them. They are why they took the actions they did and if they

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ever want to see improvement, it is going to need to come
from them. That is all there is to that story.

nalyzing Criticism from Others

Now we need talk about when you receive criticism that is

personally directed at you and might hold some weight to it. That is
hard to take. No matter who you are and how thick you think your
skin is, we all want to be well-liked by others. At the very least, we do

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not want to have problems with anyone. To hear someone criticize
you personally causes you to doubt yourself.

hen this happens, the first thing you need to do is

check what they told you for accuracy. Consider the
source. Some people are negative and behave this way with
everyone. There is also a chance that they are projecting. This is
when a person attributes their own flaws onto someone else
because they do not want to face them. Say you have a friend who
you rarely talk to. They say you should call them more often but
when you do they do not answer. You message them and they use
one-word responses that do not provide any conversation material.
This causes you to stop talking to them, and later they tell you that
you are bad at keeping in touch. In this case, your friend does not

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want to own up to their part in the two of you growing apart, so they
are putting it all off on you.

ow, if there is truth to what they say- for example, you

interrupt people in the middle of their sentences- you
need to let this hit you only as a constructive criticism. Know that the
person who told you this isn’t saying they do not want to be your
friend anymore. If that was the case, they would have just left.
However, in healthy relationships, each person needs to feel like
they can voice a grievance they have with the person in a way that
maintains the dignity of both parties. They do not dislike you as a
person. They dislike that particular habit. If you work on it and the
problem is resolved, you will be able to enjoy a closer relationship
with them. People with high levels of stress can be sensitive to
criticism because they interpret it as rejection. Just remember to take
it in the spirit it was meant to be. You can probably name a behavior
you would like to see them change, and yet that is

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compartmentalized from the love and care you feel for them. If they
really are your friend, it is the same way for them.

oping With Stress at Night

Let’s talk about coping with stress when it hits most often,
which is at night. This is because you do not have anything left to do,
which means you have a lot of time to think. This makes it so that
your sleep is delayed and interrupted. If you cannot turn off the
dialogue in your mind, you will be unable to sleep. This is

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unfortunate because nighttime is when you need to find your center
so that you can get a good night’s sleep.

hen we fail to do this, we do not think or perform well.

Therefore, learning how to distance yourself from
upsetting thoughts and stimuli from the outside world is what your
health depends on. This means you must get a handle on those
sneaky nighttime worries. You know the ones I’m talking about. Your
eyes are getting heavy. You are just about to drift off when all of a
sudden, a thought comes to you so abruptly you swear you can hear
it out loud- “Did I pay my light bill?” At this moment, you sit up, wide
awake now, and go to check it out. You find out that you did, and
while you feel relieved, you no longer feel like going to sleep, and it
could take hours for you to get back into that state. When this
happens, you were bated into disrupting your own sleep. Now we

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are going to talk about how to refrain from taking the bate in the
future.

ou might need to do something that represents putting

your worries away before you go to bed. For example,
you might keep a journal specifically for this purpose,
preferably one that can be sealed shut. Every night, write down
everything that is troubling you. When you are done, close the
journal and put in a drawer. The closing of it symbolizes cutting
yourself away from it. The book is shut so you cannot look at the
content inside of it. Putting it somewhere that you cannot see it
means it is out of reach for the night. You might look at them
tomorrow, but for now you need to let go of anything that is not

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conducive to sleep, which is one of the most important aspects of
maintaining a healthy mental state.

fter a person goes a certain amount of time without proper

sleep, most of the time only being a few days, a person will
begin to deteriorate. For one, your cognitive function becomes
compromised. This means you cannot think critically or remember
information, or in some cases even taken it in. Your mood will be
affected. You will become more irritable and overall emotional, which
makes you more likely to make rash decisions that can affect you
permanently. For example, you might say some extremely harsh
words to a valued friend over a minor annoyance, and in the long run
it deals damage to your relationship with them. If the lack of sleep
goes on even longer, a person can start to mimic signs of insanity.
B efore you go to bed, eliminate all possible distractions.
This means putting your phone and computer away. The
cycle begins when you lie in bed with your phone telling yourself you
are only going to respond to this one text and then go directly to bed.
However, one text leads to another. You might look something up in
the internet. Someone could call and you decide you are just going
to talk for a few minutes, and a few minutes become a few hours. In
short, electronics and sleep deprivation go hand in hand. Lie down
and make sure you have nothing to do. This is also not a time to
think deeply about anything. Whatever has not been fixed yet is
going to have to wait until tomorrow. Do not start any new trains of

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thought. Visualize things that help you clear your mind, and make
sure all of these things are pleasant.

here is a dark underbelly to taking medication to get to

sleep. If you do this for a prolonged period of time, you will
become dependent on it. If you do not have it you will be unable to
sleep. Also, as you go on using the medication, you will build up a
tolerance to it. The amount you took before will no longer put you to
sleep. This means you will need to take increasingly larger doses of
it to achieve the same effect. It will get to the point where every time
you go to the store you will need to buy more of it. You will start to
buy multiple containers of it so you can make it last throughout the
week, meaning the amount of money you spend on this will rack up.
As you amp up your dosage, you will find that you feel groggy in the
mornings. If you are having problems sleeping, there are many
healthier and more natural means of fixing this problem. You can
listen to a relaxation audio or practice a guided meditation. As an
alternative to the medication, you can also take tablets of melatonin,
which is a natural substance that helps the body fall asleep. You will

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wake up the next morning feeling rested and ready to get up.

anage Your Stress, Even Amidst Chaos

There will be times that there is a lot of chaos going on

in this world and around these times, your life will naturally be more
stressful than usual. This is why you will need to firmly establish the
idea that your home is a safe haven that you go to at the end of the

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day to escape anything going on in your daily life that is troubling
you.

here needs to be a cutoff time for thinking about heavy

subjects. For one, there is nothing you can do about them
right then. For another thing, you will be unable to sleep if you are
plagued with worries and other negative emotions. This will cause
you to get poor sleep so that the next day, you are tired and
therefore unable to take on the challenges of the day as well as you
would have if you had been rested enough to do so. You will never

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feel as exhausted as when you are trying to get up in the morning
after having stayed up all night under extreme stress.

ou must put a hard stop to researching morbid issues and

thinking about something that brings you pain in the
evening. There are bits of information that you do not
need to know. As people, we are curious. When we hear of a story
that captured our interest, we can quickly spiral down into a pattern
where we are trying to figure out every intimate and often gruesome
detail about it. These details have no worth because you get nothing
good from knowing them. It will not help you to have it and in fact
you will hurt yourself by finding them out. While it is not the majority,
there are some things in this world that are purely painful. There are
stories that only tell of horrible things with no happy conclusion. If

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you let those sink too far into your mind, it can have an effect on your
psyche.

ou Create Your Own Reality

In order to gain control of your thoughts so you can

organize them, you need to eliminate the idea from your
mind that you cannot bring your stress down or that it will not allow
you to turn your focus away from it. Think about how many times you
have felt an urge to do something but did not. This goes to show that

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feelings cannot control your actions even if they are intense. You can
make your own reality.

major similarity controlling your stress has with raising a

child is the fact that there will be times that, like a child, your
mind will try to assert more power over you than it should have.
Think about the parent who never tells their child no. They do not set
limitations on them, or if they try they soon give in if the child starts to
throw a tantrum.
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hen they do this, they are rewarding bad behavior and this goes to
have devastating consequences for a young mind. They learn that
they can get anything they want if they just push hard
enough. The parent is allowing themselves to be
bullied in their own home and they are setting the child up to have a
tendency towards bullying others.

How this relates to your mind is that if you follow the rules the
anxiety sets for you and give in every time it tries to pull you into an
overthinking cycle, you might think you are getting it off of your back
for a little while just as a parent thinks they are buying themselves
sometime of relief from their child’s tantrum. However, what you are
really doing is making it so that the anxiety will hit you twice as hard

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the next time you try to deny it attention. It knows it just has to find
the pitch that it has to hit to make you crumble.

ou can resist anxiety and get unpleasant thoughts out of

your mind. Think about an instance where you saw
someone wearing a very nice piece of jewelry that you
loved the look of. You might have felt a moment of envy about it and
wished it was yours, but that feeling came and went. It did not cause
you to try to take the jewelry away from them. You can do the same
thing with any other feeling. You have been angry at someone before
without slapping them. You have been sad but resisted the urge to
cry because you did not deem it an appropriate time or place to do
so.

hink about what you had to do to stop yourself from crying. First, you
set a ground rule for yourself and your mind- “We are not going to do
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this right now. It is not going to happen and that is final.” You were
firm and did not leave room for doubt about the way things
were going to be. The next thing you probably did was look
for a way to distract yourself from the upsetting stimulus. You might
have searched the room for something to read or a picture to focus
on the detail. Maybe you remembered a story your father told you
that made you laugh. No matter what it was, you shifted your focus
to something more pleasant, or at least that did not make you want
to cry. After a little while, you got to the point where you were able to
think about the story or picture instead of whatever was upsetting
you until the effect wore off and you were either at a place where you

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could show your emotions or a time where its emotional effect on
you wasn’t as great.

henever you feel stress coming on and its impact is

becoming too much, remember that technique. You
may not be able to change your circumstance, but you can mentally
pull yourself to another place. As a disclaimer, this is not the same
thing as dissociation. Actually, learning how to do this will help you
prevent yourself from it. Thinking about unpleasant things and
getting caught up in the emotions associated with them will cause
dissociation. In the study of trauma, that is essentially what happens
to an afflicted person when they have a flashback. It is more than

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remembering the event. They are reliving it as if it is happening all
over again.

his same process can happen even if what the person is

remembering isn’t as extreme as being in a life-threatening
situation. They might have had an intense argument with their
significant other. Their boss might have told them they were on
notice for showing up to work late. It can be something as simple as
having spilled red wine onto their favorite outfit that they were
planning to wear for an important event and now they have to figure

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something else out at the last minute. Whatever it was, it upset them
and it has caused uncertainty about the future.

nhealthy Coping Mechanisms

A common but unhealthy way of dealing with stress is

through food or alcohol. You’ve probably heard someone say they
need a glass of wine because they have had a long day. Everyone
has something to drink once in a while to take the edge off. Alcohol
is not bad- alcohol abuse is. It is meant to make you loosen up some

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and liven up a social event.

owever, when it is used as a substitute for dealing with

one’s problems, an entire set of problems will surface
from this. For one, everyone knows when you drink too much
alcohol, the next morning you wake up the next morning with a
hangover, which feels very unpleasant. When a person reaches a
certain point of drunkenness, they become out of control of what
they say and do because the filter in their head is gone. This means
along with feeling physically ill in the morning, you will be dealing
with feelings of shame and guilt about things that happened the night
before. Often the said sense of shame will emphasize the person’s
urge to drink more. There is a misconception that the consumption of
alcohol will help you not think about something upsetting, which is
not true. In fact, it will have the opposite effect. Any emotion you are

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feeling, especially an unpleasant one, will be magnified whenever
your mind is influenced by alcohol.

here are also those who are self-proclaimed stress-eaters.

This means instead of eating because they are hungry,
they are using it as a means of dealing with their problems. One of
the most commonly used phrases by Dr. Phil is that “you should
never treat psychological problems somatically. What he means by
that is that if you have an emotional upset that is affecting your daily
life, you cannot expect to alleviate with something that has to do with
your physical state. When people turn to “comfort food” as an
answer for their problems, the relief will only last as long as the dish
does, and after that the stress comes right back to where it was
before. Then they have to face the decision of being in a state of
distress or eating something else. If this pattern keeps up, the
person will be burdened with a number of struggles, including
becoming overweight and the health issues associated with that.
Liking food is one thing, but using it as a crutch is another. The same
concept can be applied to any habit. To deal with stress, you must
find a productive way to do so. If you feel pain or discomfort while

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doing it, that is a good indicator that it is not.

editation for Stress Relief

Meditation has been talked about extensively over the

past couple of decades as a stress relief method. It is favored
because not only is it perfectly, but you do not have to pay a dime or
go anywhere to do it. To get the best effects, make sure the room
you are meditating in looks nice and put together. This activity is
meant to make your mind calmer and more orderly, so it wouldn’t

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make any sense to expect yourself to be able to do that in a cluttered
room.

ou will want to do this at a time where you can sink into

your own mind without any distractions. This means
unplugging from your technology devices and putting any
work you have to do out of your sight for the time being. You do not
want to have anything around you that could ask for your attention,
because this time is all about you. There are different ways people
meditate, and they are all valid. There are some people who prefer
to do it in total silence, while others like to put on instrumental music.
If you are going to use music, it is preferable that it does not come
with words. This is because if it does, your mind can be lead a

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certain way by them.

o not be afraid of making time for yourself. Everyone

needs some “me-time” so that they can recharge. If you
are always being pulled off in one direction after another, how can
you expect to be able to focus? Mental health days are necessary for
maintaining one’s well-being. It is hard for people with cluttered
minds to give themselves a break because they place a pressure on
themselves to always be “on”- ready to help and take action or
working on something. They do not know what it is like to have
silence within their minds.
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ou have to make some parts of your life fun. Your psyche will not
survive being without any enjoyable moments. Even if you
are low on cash for this week or cannot go anywhere, you

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can still find ways to put some pleasure into your life.

ll Forms of Stress Relief Matter

Not all forms of stress relief are conventional. Your first

thought might be about a quiet activity, but it does not have to be.
Going out for a run or kickboxing count as managing stress because
it provides a release of negative emotions, which you need to have.
While you are doing whatever you do to destress, imagine the
weightlifting and the negative energy that has built up over the day
dissipating. Our minds are powerful enough that sometimes if we just
visualize something, we can make it come true for ourselves. Think
about how many times your mind has managed to ruin entire days

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over a single thought. That means you can turn that on its head.

o not have the end result of something played out in your

mind before it actually happens. This is how people create
a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is not because you are singled out. It is
because when we feel like people do not like us, we will grow a
dislike for people that shows in our actions. If you do not think you
will be good at anything, you will not try anything because you think
you will fail.

inding your center means you need to remodel the space in your
mind if it does not help you succeed. To succeed, you must have
F confidence in yourself. You cannot expect to have no faith
in yourself and then do well. Gather things that represent
the various talents and skills of yours. Maybe your boss
had something good to say about you on your end of the year
review. If you sew, take a picture of something you have created and
post it onto your social media so you can receive positive feedback
for your work. This will give you a sense of accomplishment and
make you feel purpose for what you do.
 MANAGING YOUR THOUGHTS

I , it is easy to look at others who do not

seem to suffer from this and think they must just be lucky and not have the
same problems with their thoughts as you do. It can make you feel inferior to
them and like they have a secret that is lost on you. The truth is, other people
only look like they have it more together than you because you do not know
what is going on inside of their minds. If you did, you would get a very
different story. There is no such thing as a person whose thoughts do not
come to them in a rush. What keeps their brain uncluttered is that they
actively sort out their thoughts as they come. Imagine a person who takes

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their clothes out of the laundry and throws them all into their dresser drawers
as they can be fit instead of taking the time to fold and put them away.

et Your Thoughts Under Control

Organizing your thoughts is something you have to put effort into. It

has to be a consistent thing because there will never come a point
where your life stops being exposed to new chaotic events. Everyone has
had moments where they wished they could go back to “simpler times”.
However, while they were living said times, there were things that were
bothering them. The reason those problems feel so insignificant now is that
you are not currently experiencing them. You can easily forget how they
made you feel. On the other hand, you feel the full effect of the problems you

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have now, so you think of them as the worst ones you have ever had.

owever, if we spend every second of our lives thinking things are

the worst they have ever been, we will live in a constant state of
distress. This is why you need to get your thoughts under control. Think about
how when there is a traffic jam or other crisis on the road. When this
happens, there will be traffic cops on either side of the road, signaling to
drivers where they need to go, when they can move forward and when they

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need to stay put. They are directing the flow of traffic so that no one gets into
an accident, but everyone gets to go where they were intending to.

se this mentality when you are dealing with your thoughts. The
thoughts that bring harm to you have to take a road that leaves
your mind. This includes you talking down to yourself- dredging up an old
memory of something you feel you did wrong, a past embarrassment, or

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anything to make you feel ashamed of yourself. Any form of insulting yourself
is unacceptable. They cannot stay in any form.

p next, you need to figure out which thoughts are about something
that will eventually need to be addressed, but not right now. Think
about when you are baking a cake. You do not try to put the frosting onto it
before the batter has even been mixed together. Therefore, you put the

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frosting aside and wait until the cake has been baked and cooled down
enough that it will not be damaged by the friction.

hen, finally, there are the thoughts that can proceed. If you are
taking a test, thoughts about the subject material are welcome. You
might wish you were at the pool or able to think about something else, such
as when you will get to go out with your friends, but that leads to another

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section of traffic flow- the ones that will be tempting but are not suited for your
current activity.

here will be many times in your life that you will need to get a
thought to leave, whether that is a temporary or permanent thing.
Let’s say you are having worries about the state of your employment because
there have been a lot of layoffs lately. Without a doubt this is troubling thing to
have to think about. If you are giving your best performance during your work
hours, there is nothing else you can do. At that point, it is beyond your
control. Make preparations so you will be able to recover from it if the worst
case scenario comes to life, but do not let it become an all-consuming force
in your life. If it does happen, you will not be able to react to it with proficiency
because you will have worn yourself out already. It would be like a boxer
training for hours right before he had a match. He would be completely

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ineffective because he would have already used up all of his strength.

ole Conflict

When you participate in your life, there is a certain level of wearing

a mask that you have to do. It does not mean you are being dishonest. You
just need to blend to a certain theme. You are not the same person with your
boss and coworkers that you are with your family. There will be times that
contradicting expectations are placed upon you. This is referred to as role
conflict. Sometimes this goes farther than simply having to assume a more
professional and serious personality than the one you normally have. The
most common form this takes is when a person is forced to make a decision

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between work and their family. When you have role conflict, it is easy to feel
overwhelmed. You feel like you cannot make the right decision.

he harsh truth is that there is no perfect decision. No matter what

you do, there will be someone who thinks you did the wrong thing.
This is why when you have to make tough decisions, you have to learn to
have faith in the one you made. Say you took time off of work because your
child is sick. There might be a few people who say this is being an unreliable
employee. However, if you were to make the opposite decision there would
be people who thought you did the wrong thing by not being with your family.
This is when you need to make the choice you can live with. This means
either you can stand to miss out on family or work.
A
fter you have made a decision, there is often a new source of stress that
replaces the one that comes from not knowing which path to take.
You then will have some doubts about whether you made the right
decision. In this circumstance, you need to make a point to let these
thoughts go. They are only hurting you. You might even need to verbalize
this- not pleading with them to leave but making the resolution that they are
not welcome in your mind, just as you would tell someone that had showed
up uninvited at your house that they cannot stay overnight.

Prioritize Thoughts

You need to recognize when you are giving a thought more time than it
deserves. It will seem impossible to abandon a thought that is troubling you at
first, but I can assure you that you can and you will. The first thing you need
to do is release the expectation on yourself to do so. This will make it so that
there is stress surrounding the thought. When we do this to a thought, our
brains will automatically become more drawn to it. It becomes a sore that you
cannot stop picking at even though you know doing this will only make it
worse. When you have such a wound on your skin, what you need to do is

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put some ointment on it and then leave it alone. If you do this, before long it
will disappear.

o manage your thoughts, you need to be mindful of what

information enters your brain. When you get on a roll of thinking
about negative things, it can take on a life of its own until that becomes the
entire content of your brain. You cannot let it get to that point because that will
color how you feel in your daily life. Since this is so often a source of both

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information and anxiety for many, I will discuss the news first.

edia Management

Keeping up with the news is a good thing because it will allow

you to stay up with the times and respond to information that you need to
know. However, there is only a certain extent to which you should do this.
When you have gotten the gist of what is going on, it is time to switch the
channel away from the news. You will feel tempted to go through every single
story and all of the theories behind them. You spend hours at a time watching
videos and reading articles about it, probably losing sleep in the process.
Before long, you will look up and find that it consumes your every thought.
Since the big stories on the news are typically negative ones, such as a
murder or serious illness, your mind will solely focused on something that
brings you down. This will cause you to go through your day with a cloud

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hanging over your head. You will not be able to interact with your day
because your thoughts are with something morose.

ocial Circle Management

Another source of information you need to manage is your social

circle. Yes, the people in our lives flood us with information constantly. It is in
the stories and jokes they tell you. It happens when you are discussing your
opinion about current events with them. Even when they are showing you a
song they like, they are giving you information that will have an impact on
your brain. We become the people we surround ourselves with. This is
because when you spend enough time with a person, you become
consistently exposed to their ideas. You will repeatedly hear them voice their
opinions, and this will have an effect on how you feel. It is true that moods are
contagious, both good and bad. However, the thing about a bad mood is that
it is almost impossible to pull someone out of it, especially if that is where
they want to be. There will be people you meet during your life that are
consistently negative. They do not have anything good to say about anyone
or anything. Your conversations with them will always have a borderline angry
tone because any time you try to get excited or talk about something you like,
you will be shot down. They like to watch your face fall when they tell you that
they do not like or care about what you are talking about. They do this to feel
a sense of superiority over you.
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here is also the person who always has a conflict going on with someone
else. The conversation can never be about something besides their latest
drama. You might even make an effort to veer the conversation
away from that and onto something else, but they will not have that.

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They want to pull you into it and give your input, putting you at risk because
they might tell that person what you said.

hen there is the user. This person only calls you whenever they
need something. The favor tends to be big and costly to you,
whether it is monetary or simply taking up a lot of their time. Once you have
given them what they want, you will not hear from them until the cycle repeats
itself. The roles will never switch in this relationship, where you are the one

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receiving help from them, no matter how much they declare that you are their
best friend and that they will give back to you later on.

ou will feel exhausted after talking to any of these people. That is

the one common trait between them. This is because they are
something known as an emotional vampire. This kind of person
gets their name because like the mythical creature gains life force by draining
living people of theirs, this person does the same thing with your energy. You
cannot give enough to them, and you will never get anything in return from
them. It is an abusive relationship because they do not take you into
consideration and you often feel bad about yourself after your interactions

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with them.

o not wait for a time where things change with this person. There
will not come a point where they realize everything you have done
for them and show gratitude and reciprocation. You will only waste your time
with them. It does not have to be a big, eventful scene for you to cut them out
of your life. Simply do not talk to them- this means answering their calls and
text messages. When they try to pull you into an emotional argument, stick to
whatever you need to talk about and stick to the facts- a technique often
referred to as gray-rocking. Do not have conflict unless you need to. You’ve
probably heard the term “pick your battles.” This is because they cause stress

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and you have to invest a lot of time and energy into them. You might never
even see a resolution to it.

nvironmental Management

Along with managing your relationships, make sure you are also
placing yourself in a good environment that will give you more positive
thoughts. These changes do not have to be extreme. If you generally keep
your blinds closed, open them up for a change. Exposure to natural light will
have a surprising effect on your energy levels and mood. When you spend
too much time in an enclosed space with the lights off, you will begin to feel
depressed about it. You will feel contained. Even though you are physically
free to leave this room, you will start to feel like you are trapped in it because

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the space outside of it is so unfamiliar.

uch of the clutter in our minds comes from concerning yourself

with what is going with other people. You do not need to take
on the problems of everyone around you. This will be difficult being the
empathetic person I know you are, but to try to pull an emotional vampire out
of their slumps is impossible. What they really want to do is feed off of you
and bring you down with them. You cannot help them any more than they
want to be helped, and if they really want to see a change in their life, it is up
to them to do the legwork. You can send positive thoughts their way, but after

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that you must let go. It is not lacking compassion to do that. It is an act of self-
preservation.

omplainer Management
Limit the amount of time you spend listening to someone else talk about a
problem. It is one thing to be there for a friend who needs to vent. However,
the difference is that there comes an end to the discussion about the tough
times. Eventually, they find a solution to the problem and then you move on. If
they cannot do that, they will become a burden on you that is too heavy and
consistent to carry long-term. It is true that with every close connection we

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have with others, we will deal with a certain amount of drama, but it cannot be
the only thing that comes out of the relationship.

e’ve all had that person in our lives who just wants to complain.
They’ll be talking about the same friendship, relationship, or
other problem that they were six months ago, and nothing has changed. They
claim to wish things were different but make no move to make that so. You
will spend endless hours and evenings on this, but they will never do anything
about it in the end. When this happens, it is not friendship. You are being
used. They don’t want to change their situation but they do want to complain
about it. You do not owe it to anyone to listen to something you don’t want to.

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It is stressful to be that friend who is always there. It is also unlikely that they
will be there for you in your times of need.

ou might think someone is making a poor choice, and you might be

right about that, but it is not something you can impact. It is not
your place to say what they do, and if you try to insert yourself into
the situation it will do more harm than good, and you risk creating conflict. Do

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not waste time and energy worrying about things you cannot control. The
choices other people make fall into this category.

hen you think about the people you associate with, you need to
pay special attention to your romantic relationships. This person
could potentially become the one you live with, marry, and have a family with.
If this happens, you will spend every day of your life with them. This means
they will have the biggest impact on your life, so you want to make sure you
are entering a relationship with someone for the right reasons. The media is
infamous for making emotional pain seem romantic. Two people have a
relationship that is filled with pain but they cannot stop pining over one
another, and this is depicted as a great love. It is one thing to enjoy a story,
but you need to make sure this stays fictional and does not become a fixture
in your real life. If something feels hopeless, more often than not that is

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because it is.

elationships are difficult by default, but this comes with a caveat-

they should not constantly be this way. There should be sometimes
where you just have a nice dinner or enjoy an afternoon together. If it is
always a life-or-death struggle with one another just to keep the relationship
intact, this is only hurting you. If you find that you are always thinking
negatively about yourself, it is time to look at the relationships in your life with

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a more critical eye than you have before.

eplace Negative Thoughts with Positive Ones

It is not enough to just try to stop unpleasant thoughts from

entering your mind. You need to replace them with positive ones or they will
just come right back to you. Try to think of what the opposite of this thought
could be. For example, you are going out with some new friends. Your mind
might be conditioned to think “what am I going to do to embarrass myself this
time?” This will cause you not to look forward to the event and maybe even
cancel. Instead of this, try thinking of what could go right. Get dressed up

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nicely and imagine them complimenting your outfit. Maybe they will like your
sense of humor.

ne of the secrets to decluttering your thoughts is to not have so many

of them. You might be thinking right now “How do I do that? You can’t
stop thoughts from coming into your head!” To an extent, this is true.
However, people with anxiety tend to think about things from every negative
angle possible. Try letting life happen a little. Have you ever gripped onto
something extremely tight with your hands? Did you notice they were red and
even stung a little afterward? When you try to keep such a heavy hold on the
way things happen, it will cause you harm. If you are going out with someone
for the first time, you do not need to think about whether or not the
relationship is working in just one date. Think of it this way- you are first
getting to know them. This is to see if you have any common interests. If you

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end up going on a second date, you do. If you do not, at least you got some
social experience and you may even gain a friend from it.

o manage your thoughts, you must keep a handle on your

emotions. This does not mean holding them in- the opposite is so.
You need to express them in a healthy time, place, and way. If you have
clutter in your brain, it invariably means there are feelings you need to get
out. Emotions that have been bottled up over a long period of time will come
out in a rush. Think about how when a container of soda is opened after it
has been out in the sun for a long time and shaken around. It will overflow,
spraying around everywhere and you will have absolutely no control over
where it goes. Our emotions mimic this. You might not know how to express
something that is bothering you, but if you wait too long to do so you will
cause that choice to be taken away from you. Humans are emotional
creatures, and when we are highly charged in this area, we lose the filter in
our head. We will say whatever comes to our mind in exactly the way it first
come out, meaning we will not take any time to see if there is a better way to

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word it.

on’t Bottle Up Your Emotions

You are not doing anyone any favors by holding all of your
emotions in. First, you are harming yourself. Emotions like anger, sadness
and fear are poisonous to keep to yourself. In the short run, you might be
sparing them hearing something they don’t want to, but in the long run, you

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will hurt them just as much as you have hurt yourself up to this point.

oth fear and sadness will evolve into a more volatile form over time.
You might think you are doing your friend a favor and salvaging the
relationship by not letting them know that something they do hurts your
feelings, but when you think about it for a moment, it doesn’t hold up to logic.
When we feel like someone is doing something to harm us but does not care,
it will eventually equate to anger. Even if we do not tell someone about an
issue we have with them, we can often feel like they should have picked up
on what we are feeling through our facial expressions, tone of voice, body
language and way of wording things. When they do not, our brain will give the
message that the person does not even care about us enough to notice. This
will cause the resentment to build up even more. If this keeps up, it will not
take long for you to develop a deep and seething anger toward that person,

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and meanwhile they will not have been given a chance to defend themselves
or change their behavior so that it creates a better relationship.

hen it does finally come out, it will be too harsh. You will likely
use terms like “you always” and “you never”. There will be more
force in the message than necessary and pieces of it that are not meant to
get your point, but to cause emotional pain. You might feel vindicated for a
little while afterwards and glad that you have finally been able to get that big
weight off of your chest, but that feeling will be short lived. Pretty soon, you
will start to feel guilty and wish you could take your words back, which is

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impossible. Your relationship with that person will be strained.

irect Communication

In order to effectively communicate with others, you need to get out

of the habit of trying to “say it without saying it.” If you want to go to a certain
sandwich shop, say that explicitly. Don’t just say something like “It would be a
good day for a sandwich” and then assume the other person does not want to
do that or does not care what you want if they do not respond. You need to let
them know that is the type of sandwich you are thinking of as opposed to just
making one at home and that you have an active interest in going out to get
it. Otherwise, they might think you are just having a passing thought about it.
When you are conveying a message, you need to say exactly what it is.
People are wired to think there is no problem if you do not bring one up. They
also do not respond well to finding out there was something wrong after the
fact and then being told something like “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want
to bother you.” Even if you genuinely mean that you were trying to preserve

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their well-being, they will think this means you do not trust them or that you
are implying that they do not do their part in the relationship.

lso, when you try to go for the “beat around the bush” type of
communication, you will be consistently upset. Your words will be
vague and therefore misinterpreted. For example, you tell your partner you
want something red for Christmas, and you are expecting them to think of the
type of perfume you like. When they get you a red locket, you will be
disappointed and it will show on your face, so they will know. You will feel like
your needs are not being met, and this will continue if you do not ask for what
you want. Think of the saying “the squeaky wheel is the one that gets the

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grease”. This means if no one will think you need anything if you do not say
so.

ow that we have discussed the thoughts that need tended to, let’s
talk about times where a thought needs to be ignored. In order to
keep your mind healthy, you must not hold yourself to every thought that
passes through your mind. If someone does you wrong and you have a
momentary wish for them to have misfortune, you do not need to punish
yourself over this. We are only humans, and we have more thoughts per day
than we can process. There are going to be times where you have thoughts
and impulses that do not sit well with you.
B ad Thoughts Do Not Make a Bad Person

Not every time you have a bad thought does it mean something is
wrong with you. What is wrong is holding onto anger and ill wishes toward
others. It would be great if we could never think anything unpleasant about
anyone, but that is not a realistic thing to expect of yourself all the time. When
we are disappointed by and angry with people, we are going to have some
rogue thoughts fly through our heads. They come and go, and then it is as if
they never happened. You do not have to disclose or confess to everything
you say and think. I can assure you that for everyone in this world, down to a

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person, if you were to have access to every thought they have ever had,
there would be things you would find that would shock and disgust you.

lso remember this. Thought does not equal action. That is what
separates civilized people from the uncivilized ones. You may think to
throw your drink at someone because they said something rude to you, but
the important part is that you do not actually go through with it. It may feel like
you have done something whenever you have a thought or fantasy because
the image of it plays in your mind, but in reality nothing has happened. This is
because our thoughts are only as real as we make them. I make this point
because people with anxiety often suffer from immense guilt. You consider
yourself to be a bad person because you hold yourself to a morality that
cannot be attained. There is no such thing as that hero on the cartoons that
always makes the right decision, battles evil, and wins. You need to rid
yourself of the notion that you are never going to do anything that causes
harm to anyone. Of course, you would not seek to perpetrate violence or
other serious harm to anyone, but there will be times that you lose your
temper and say some choice words to someone. You will not be as
emotionally available for someone as they need you to be at times. You will
continue to suffer immensely for as long as you place the pressure on
yourself to not ever make a mistake.
A llow yourself to have a thought come and go without thinking it needs to
placed under scrutiny or thinking there must be some big hidden
truth, whether within yourself or something or someone else, that you
need to figure out because of it. When you have a thought that is intrusive
and unhelpful, such as one that puts you down or makes you think you might
be a bad person, it is time to tell that thought that it is silly and holds no
weight.

Turn dissociation on its head. Tune out the unhealthy thoughts with things
you would rather think about. Dissociate from the negative self-talk and
intrusive thoughts by keeping your eyes trained onto the task at hand, even if
it is small. If your task is to go to sleep because you have a long day ahead of
you, that is where your thoughts should be. If you have a performance, focus
on having fun, not what others might say or all of the mistakes you might
make. Only humor thoughts that are useful or give you comfort and
happiness, and throw the rest of them away.
 LIVING AN ORGANIZED LIFE

Y the idea that a cluttered house is a

good indicator of a cluttered mind. This is true because we tend to
replicate what is going on inside of our minds in our surroundings. In
times where you are too busy to have much register in your mind, it
is likely that your living spaces will have that chaotic look- dishes not
put away, clothes in places other than the laundry bin, the surfaces
dusty, and overall an unpolished look. This will be unpleasant to look
at, which will go on to increase your stress. On the other hand, when

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your living space looks nice, you will feel a sigh of relief whenever
you open your front door.

he Tranquil Type vs The Anxious Type

Also, think about the way people with a tranquil mindset

live their life as opposed to people who are constantly anxious. The
anxious type invests in relationships that are volatile, whereas
people with organized lives gravitate away from people who are
causing them too much stress. This does not mean there will never
come a point that they reconnect with that person, but it will have to
be when some changes have been made and a conversation with
them can be productive. When a tranquil person is hit with a setback,
their mind goes to how to get to a solution rather than wallowing in
how severe the problem is. When they take on a project, they take it
on in smaller, more manageable bits. When your life is organized in
other aspects of your life, your mind will fall into the same pattern.
You have to begin this in your daily ritual.
I magine a person that wakes up every morning in a
bedroom with sheets that were not made the night before,
and they look around at a room that has trash strewn about it. Things
are piled haphazardly on top of one another and the surfaces have
various food containers and glasses sitting on them, leaving
nowhere to place anything. Their laundry basket is piled up to the top
and starting to brim, causing some dirty clothes to fall onto the floor.
They are trying to find their keys and something acceptable to wear,
which takes a while because of the disorganization of their
possessions. They realize there is a paper that they cannot find and
it is only five minutes until they have to leave for work, so they
realize they are just going to have to explain to their supervisor that
they do not have it and hope for the best while they rush out the door
without having any breakfast. They are feeling groggy because they
were up until a disturbing hour of the morning finishing a project that

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had been assigned to them a long time ago and they are hoping it
will be deemed acceptable.

here is no way this person would be able to draw any

organization into any aspect of their life, especially not
within their mind, if they kept going on a pattern like this. When we

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put out chaotic energy, not only will we not attract things that are
positive, but we will repel them.

e all have stressful lives that are filled with demanding

daily schedules and responsibilities that clash with one
another. There is no getting away from that. If you are waiting for a
time that this comes to an end to have a less stressful life, that is not
going to happen. You need to become responsible for your own
stress relief. You may not be able to anything about how heavy the

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expectations placed onto you are, but you do have the power to
decide what your experience with these tasks are.

lanning Ahead vs Dreading the Future

There is a difference between planning ahead and

dreading the future. It is good to be prepared for what bumps in the
road would come along. For example, if you are going outside and
the sky looks cloudy, it is wise to bring an umbrella. This is proactive.
However, it would do nothing but cause you distress if you were to
board up all of your windows even though the weatherman had given
you no indication that a storm was coming. You would be putting a
great deal of work into something that turned out to be pointless

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once the storm was over and it turned out that there was never a
need to do such a thing.

ou can choose to make your life less cluttered. At the

beginning of each day, figure out what tasks you are going
to need to take on. Living moment to moment puts you in
a position where you are always uncertain and feel like you are just
about to fall behind. This means you need to prepare for what could
happen (realistically, not reaching for a hypothetical situation) in
advance instead of not doing so and then becoming frantic when a
situation comes up. As I said before, you do not want to cause
yourself undue stress, but you also do not want to avoid reality
because you do not want to experience unpleasant feelings. When

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we let life happen to us without us, we will never feel like we are
keeping up.

rganize the problems in your life. If you do not do this,

everything will feel like a crisis. This means you will spend
your life in a constant state of anxiety. The top of the list is
emergencies. Very few things in life will live up to this category.
Someone’s life typically needs to be in danger for that to be so.
Below this are the very significant responsibilities that cannot be
shirked- taxes, work, and so on. Then there are things that you need
to do but can be put off a day or two if you need to- extra credit
projects, changing your bedsheets, etc. Finally, there are the things
that do not matter at all, and will not make one bit of difference in
your life. The most common thing in this category that people of the

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anxious sort worry about is what other people think of them.

earn to Say No

If you have a cluttered mind, there is a good chance that

doing too much for others plays a role in it. You must learn to say no

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to people. You are not putting them out. In fact, you are passing their
request off to someone who does have the time and means to do it.

eople who cannot say no will often find themselves having

to explain why they could not get done what you promised
that you would. This is an embarrassing and uncomfortable situation
to be in. You will have to deal with others being frustrated with you
because things they are coming to find out that they still need to
worry about what they thought would be taken care of. This is why

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turning down a request you know you cannot fulfill is the actual kind
thing to do.

t is easy to get the wrong idea of what it means to be a

good person. There is such an emphasis on being “nice”- if
you are nice, it means you never disappoint anybody. If you tell them
no, you are giving them bad news, and therefore you are being

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mean. You need to do whatever they want, even if you do not want
to or have time for it.

rue kindness is giving to others and yourself what you can

realistically do. It is telling them the truth even if it is hard to
hear. Say your friend asks you what you think of their outfit and you
notice that the patterns they are wearing clash. If you nod and say
you like it, you are setting them up to go out in public looking bad.
Therefore it is telling them what you think they want to hear. The true

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kind thing to do would be to suggest a different shirt that is a better fit
for the pants they have on.

ou also back yourself into a corner when you try to always

please others with your answers. If you pretend to like a
TV show that you really do not for their sake, they are
going to start constantly playing it. You will be bored and feel
yourself becoming upset with them for always wanting to watch it.
You will eventually have to do the uncomfortable task of telling them
how you actually feel and deal with the discomfort they feel about
that knowledge. They will be upset to hear that you never really
enjoyed this activity that they thought was your thing, and that all of
the time the two of you were having fun in their mind, you had a very
different perspective. You will have to live out consequences of being
insincere. Your life will be chaotic on both an internal and external
level. You will have emotional turmoil from not being honest with

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yourself and have conflict with others because there will be a lack of
honesty as well.

nformation Overload

Let’s talk for a minute about a couple of things you need to

watch out for in your work life. You’ve probably heard the term
“information overload.” You go to a business meeting or lecture, and
the speaker fills an entire hour with facts, information and other
things they want you to remember. By the end of it, you can barely
name one thing that was mentioned during the entire discussion
even though you were listening. This is because you did not get
enough time to process anything, and it is why we cannot
procrastinate and then expect to jam-pack a large amount of
information into a short period of time. Think about a time you had
slacked off on studying for a class, and then tried to study and learn
all of the material the night before. You were lucky to remember
anything. Often, procrastinating becomes a habit that spreads into
everything one does, which is how they get the idea that they can
pull everything together at once by multitasking. There is no such
thing as true multitasking. Something will have to be neglected. Have
you ever tried to talk on the phone while writing something else down
that was unrelated to what you were talking about? You cannot

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concentrate on two things at once.

eclutter Your Space

I cannot stress enough how important a clean house is to

decluttering your brain. You cannot expect to have a cluttered living
space and an organized mind. Disorganization around us naturally
causes anxiety because it creates the feeling of being out of control.

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You also know that if you had to find anything, you would need to sift
through a jumbled mess of junk trying to find what you do need.

et rid of things you do not need anymore. Letting old, used

and unnecessary things pile up will lead to hoarding. You
need things that either currently serve a purpose or that
make you happy to see in your house. This means decorations. It
doesn’t need to be anything elaborate. Artificial flowers that cost a
couple of dollars at your local store counts as a decoration. It may
not be much, but just a little item here or there can go a long way in

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beautifying your house.

ake little changes to your house depending on the

season or time of year. If you don’t like to completely
deck your house out, you do not have to, but get some Halloween-
themed cups near the end of October. Put up a tree and stockings
for the holidays. Send someone a card on Valentine’s day. When
days that are supposed to be festive pass by and you do nothing,
this will cause you to become depressed. Also, participating in these
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events will make you feel more connected to the outside world and
you will be putting your energy into something positive.

e all have energy and inspiration. It is just a matter of

where we channel it into. Some people do not tap into
it. Others pour it into something that will not be good for them. You

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need to look at what you are putting first in your life with a critical
eye.

dopt a Routine

One thing you need to adopt is creating a routine for

yourself, meaning things you do on a daily basis. They should
include self-care and enrichment. People with such routines live
more organized lives and have a clearer mental space because
these habitual practices create a solid ground for you to stand on.

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This way, even if something unpleasant happens to you, there is still
something good waiting for you at the end of the day.

hese routines also serve as a positive force to drive you. To

declutter your brain, you need to be able to recognize
when you have something in your life that is only causing you stress.
It could be a friendship with someone who starts arguments with
other people on a consistent basis and drags you into them. It could
be a relationship that is always hanging on by one finger.
I
t is important to figure out what you do not need anymore. Old
receipts, candy wrappers, assignments from years ago, and things
that are cracked or broken are all junk. They do not serve
any purpose for you at the current time. They just take up
space.

You need to be careful when you are judging what is a sentimental

item because this can lead to its own form of hoarding. If you feel the
need to keep everything that ever once carried some meaning, you
will never be able to throw anything given to you by anyone. You will
pile up every card you’ve ever gotten for any occasion- holidays,
birthdays, etc.- no matter how many years ago they were given to
you. Your friend gave you a trinket that was beautiful at the time, but

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now it has age on it and it does not look the way it did when it was
first given to you.

hink about the intention from the person who gave it to you.
They wanted you to have something that looked nice and
gave you joy. If they found it in the condition it is in now, they never
would have thought of giving it to you. They thought this trinket
would make you happy for a little while, and then when it no longer
did you would pass it on. It was not their intention to make you feel
beholden to keeping something even though you no longer like the

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way it looks. If you indiscriminately keep anything that might be
sentimental, that means nothing is special.

here are very few material things you will keep throughout
your entire life. For the most part, they will come and go,
and that is the way it should be. Things break down over time and
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then they are no longer useful. When it comes to inanimate objects,
you are allowed to be cold.

here will be times that you are sure you will not have
enough hours in the day to complete everything you need
to. Say you have a lot of things you need to get done this week
because there is a big holiday event happening in the company
soon. When you initially look at it, it can seem daunting and this will

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cause you to put it off, but that doesn’t do you any good. That just
causes you to have more to do in a shorter amount of time.

reate a Task Hierarchy

Focus on one task at a time. What is the most important

thing to do? That is the one you should tackle first. When you have
made this decision, let thoughts of whatever else you have to do go
for the time being. When we put all of our energy into something, not
only will it turn out better, but it will get done in a shorter amount of
time. For one, your thoughts and actions are aligned and linear. This
means you have a direct stream of energy flowing into one task. You

A
will not have to pause, turn your attention to something else, and put
yourself into the mindset fitting for that one.

fter you have completed all of these tasks is a crucial time.

Your body and mind will be telling you not to do anything
heavy-duty for a little while, and it is right. Everyone needs
downtime. You cannot constantly go on full speed ahead with no
rest. It will not take long for you to become burnt out if you do this.
We hear that phrase so often but rarely think about the true meaning
of it. Burnout is much more serious than just being tired. You have
been tired for a long time but ignored it to keep moving forward. It is

I
a physical, mental, and emotional state because you have been
giving too much on all fronts.

t is dangerous to let yourself get to this point. For one, you

will become ineffective. You might be denying yourself
breaks because you want to be the “special, secret weapon
employee” who always goes the extra mile. However, if you are
drained, the work you put out will not be good. It will be sloppy
because when you are tired and your brain is frazzled, you are prone
to making more errors. On an emotional level, you will not be able to
tolerate much. This will cause you to become irritable, which will
make you prone to snapping at others. You cannot hide when you
are in a bad mood. It will show in your mannerisms and tone. You
know what it is like to be around someone who clearly does not want
you in their presence and sees you as a bother. This will not have a
good effect on your relationships. You will find it difficult to retain new
information. A flash drive can only hold so much data. Our brains

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operate in much the same way. Take just one day to yourself. You
need to rebuild your defenses and energy levels.

hen you feel yourself getting to this point, you need to

take immediate action- or rather, inaction. You are in
desperate need of a restorative day. This means not responding to
any more social media than is absolutely necessary and doing what
you need to do. When we feel like all we ever do are things other
A
people want us to do, we will become both frustrated and
unmotivated.

free day like this is also a good time to eliminate smaller

tasks from your docket so you do not have to think about
them anymore. This will actually be beneficial for your memory
because then other information can take its place. When you want to
place something onto a flash drive that is full, you must make room
for it. This means deleting old files that are not needed anymore and
data that is just taking up space. When our brains are cluttered,
there are at least a couple of things we could shuffle out of it. When
you get a free day, take a look at your to-do list. Is there anything
you could take off of it? Maybe you have wanted to clean out your
fridge because it is in need of it. If there is some paperwork that
needs to be done, do it. These things will not take long to do or
require a great amount of energy, but they still will take up space in
your drive for as long as they go unattended. Sometimes we put
things off because they are tedious to do, such as housework and
errands. However, as time goes on, more and more of them will pile
onto your plate. No amount of dreading it is going to take your
workload away from you. It will only cause you to pile up more
anxiety. When you are thinking, “I need to do this, I need to do that, I

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have a million things to do!” See if there is anything you can tackle at
that moment.

nventory of Your Brain

Take inventory of your life. Before, we discussed cleaning

out your physical living space. Now you need to do the same with
your mind. You are likely carrying things that should not be there
anymore. This is why you have to find a way to stop worrying about
things that are out of your hands. It is a completely unproductive
investment of time. It creates clutter in your mind that does have to
be there. However, we all do it. When you go through the things you

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are worried, you will likely find that most of these things are either
beyond or control, impossible to predict, or both.

t is easier than you might think to develop a consistent fear

of something unlikely. Throughout the day, you hear horror
stories on the news. This can cause you to think the world is a
violent and dangerous place. We are often exposed to people
coming to public places and doing violent acts, which can warp the
way you view strangers. You see a picture of the perpetrators of
these vicious crimes and their faces are not grotesque. They do not
have the “look” of someone who could do that. That strips us of the
security in the idea that you would be able to spot that kind of person
immediately and know to stay away from them. To an extent, this is a
good lesson because you want to only give people the trust they
have earned. However, you do not want it to escalate to the point
where you are paranoid. This will be extremely limiting for your life

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and can even escalate to a disorder.

e Mindful of Your Mental Health

Keep a vigilant watch on your mental health. This is

something that can easily slip through the cracks because it does not
show up in obvious ways like coughing or a headache. You can
repress emotional struggles and keep going- but not forever. There
will be little signs that all is not well which will actually often manifest
as physical symptoms. One of the most common ones is fatigue. You
feel tired no matter how late you sleep in or how early you get in bed.
However, when you try to sleep at night when you are supposed to,
your mind will not slow down. This is a heavy indicator of anxiety and

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depression, and these symptoms can escalate over time into a
meltdown.

hen we hear the term “meltdown”, your mind probably

conjures up images of disgraced celebrities in highly
inebriated states, screaming profanities and doing bizarre things
such as going on prolonged social media rants. Often, it is more

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subtle than that. Essentially, a meltdown is the release of stress and
other negative emotions that have been bottled up for a long time.

t the end of the day, check your mental vital signs. They may
be subtle, but if you take a closer look you will be able to
easily spot them. For instance, things that you normally don’t even
notice begin to aggravate you. People coming up to you and asking
you questions might suddenly cause you to feel resentment towards
them. This is because you do not feel like you have anything left to

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give.

e Mindful of Your Music Choices

Pay attention to the type of music you are listening to. This
might seem trivial, but this can reveal a lot about your psyche. Of
course, sometimes you simply like the way a song sounds, but what
you listen to consists almost exclusively of sad or angry songs, this
might be indicative of something deeper going on in your life. This is
especially so if you get more emotional than usual over the music.
There is truth to the idea that you are what you consume. If you are
consistently listening to words that convey the message that
everything is hopeless and nothing will ever get better, you will begin
to see evidence of this in reality. In a way, you will develop a
confirmation bias. In scientific research, this refers to when someone
is conducting an experiment to prove a theory they have and only
acknowledge the evidence that points toward their theory. If
something comes up that contradicts it, they do not look at it. When
you surround yourself with stimuli that place you into a negative

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mood, you will only notice the bad things that happen in your life. In
addition, you will magnify the severity of them in your mind.

his isn’t to say you should invalidate your feelings when

they are hurt. However, on the other hand, it is also
detrimental to a person’s mental health to feel the full effect of every

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disappointing or difficult event. You cannot survive under those
conditions for that long.

t all starts with your internal dialogue. We need to keep an

eye on not only the way we speak to ourselves directly, but
the way we word it whenever we narrate what is happening to and
around us. Pay attention to your choice of words- for example, when
you spill your drink onto your shirt, is this a “horrible” event, or is it an
inconvenience? When you have a date that doesn’t go anywhere,
was it “the worst date ever”, or was it just unfruitful?
I f your spill was a minor embarrassment, you will be able to
move past it and not think about it after it is over. If you
think of it as this awful mistake you made that everyone will
remember forever, you will think about it every day and it will have no
small impact on you mentally- your confidence meeting others, the
way you value yourself, and much more. When this is how you
interpret every unpleasant thing that comes along, you will be a

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mess internally. Everything will become insurmountable.

ove Along

People with a cluttered mind often have difficulty

moving past something after it is over. They think of all of the ways it
could have been prevented, better decisions they could have made,
and they will go on to create an entire gallery in their minds of
should’ve, would’ve, and could’ve. Let’s say an interpersonal

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relationship went sour. You had been very close friends with this
person for a long time but now you have grown apart.

ometimes things happen that are out of our control. It is

difficult to give up the idea that we have the power to
influence and prevent everything that can go wrong. However, it is
the only thing that will give you peace of mind whenever bad things
happen. When you give yourself powers that you do not have, you
will blame yourself for things that are not your fault.
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any times, people with anxiety will punish themselves even though
they have not done anything wrong. They feel like they
have, and therefore they assume they must have done
something that needs punishing. This is an example of emotional
reasoning. Essentially, when you do this, you make judgments about
the real world based on feelings that are going on inside of you. One
of the first experiences a person will often have with this is in early
childhood when they are alone in their room at night after they have
watched a scary movie. They will hear something and picture it being
the monster from the movie. They will feel scared and instead of

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attributing it to what they saw on the screen, they will think the
monster must be under their bed or in the closet.

motional Reasoning

Emotional reasoning drives us to paranoia and negative self-

talk. Even stimuli that are supposed to be positive will turn on the
anxiety. For example, someone tells you they like the way your hair
looks today. Instead of appreciating the compliment and allowing it to
make you feel good, you start thinking “What if they are being
sarcastic and not only do they think I look bad, but they’re laughing
at how stupid I am for not noticing that? Are they saying my hair

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doesn’t look good most days? Have I been walking around for years
with a terrible haircut?”

ou will bring a lot of bad days onto yourself with emotional

reasoning. It will cause you to jump to the worst possible
conclusions. Your friend doesn’t respond to your text so
you will think they must dislike what you said and that you will never
hear from them again. A few hours later you find out they were called
by a friend to pick them up because their car broke down. This

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means you spent that entire time being consumed by anxiety and
there was never any need for it.

t isn’t hard to get into the habit of assuming the worst in

times of uncertainty. Any relief you get will be temporary
because before long your mind will be occupied with another worry.
It can actually become addicting to play worst-case scenario. You
might think it is a crazy idea that you could actively seek out ways to
torture yourself, and it does not mean what you might think it does.
When people do this, it is not because they enjoy pain. It is because
they literally do not feel comfortable when they are not stressed out.
It is an unfamiliar feeling, so the unconscious part of their mind tells

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them there is something wrong. We go for what we know even if it is
unhealthy.

ou deserve better than this. You need to do better for

yourself than to keep yourself in a constant state of
distress. Deep down, you want a life beyond this. The fact
that you are reading this book is proof of that. Bad habits can

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become old habits. The first step to that is getting a handle on what
happens to unhealthy thoughts once they enter your mind.

ocial Connectedness and Support

In order to be able to handle the stresses of daily life, you

need to be connected socially to someone. Life is too much for any
one person to handle all on their own all of the time. This is why it is
not only good but necessary to cultivate friendships in your life.
There will be times that you have had an extremely rough day and
need to vent about it to someone. There will be inconveniences in

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life, and you will be setting yourself up for a very difficult life if there
is never anybody you can call to help you out.

f we do not talk about an issue, it will continue to fester

inside of us and influence what we say and do. In order to
manage and organize your thoughts, you will need to talk them out.
Sometimes after you talk about a problem with someone you trust, it
will feel less overwhelming. This is because your friend is now
sharing the burden with you. Even if they cannot do anything about it
except for listening to you, you will feel better after you have spoken
about what is bothering you. Up to this point, your thoughts will all be
bunched together and seem impossible to overcome. Even if they do
not advise you on what to do, you can sometimes be lead to a

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solution.

ife comes to us in disorganized bursts, but we still have the

opportunity to then take these events and compartmentalize
them into organized places in our minds. When you are at
work, stay there and focus on your projects. When you are at home
with your family, be in that moment with them and engage in
whatever activity is going on there. That is the ultimate key to
decluttering your life, and therefore your mind.
 CONCLUSION

What happens in the outside world is beyond your control, so you

have to focus on what is going on inside of you. Your mind is the
most important part of yourself to keep healthy. Whenever our
mental wellness is suffering, it gets in the way of our ability to
function in our daily lives. It will impact your ability to make good
decisions, how you respond to hardship, and your overall quality of
life.

You can get a handle on your thoughts. If you work for it, you will get
to the point where you can say what thoughts have a place in your
mind instead of being led by them. Keep at mind what is at the core-
stress and burnout. Do the practices we talked about daily.
Transform your life into a more tranquil experience. Focus your
energy on what needs to be done right now, not your end goal, what
happened before, or what could happen in the future. If a thought
comes in that falls into the unnecessary category, let it go. You make
thoughts go away not by repressing them, but by allowing them to
come and go without paying any mind to them.

If you feel yourself becoming overwhelmed again, that’s not horrible.

It just means you need to renew your commitment to decluttering
your brain. All you need to do is make today better. Sometimes it is
as simple as reminding yourself to breathe and that there will be a
solution to whatever is troubling you today.