In part 1 of this article on mental clutter, I talked about what mental clutter is, comparing it to some familiar situations of noisy environments and physical clutter in our immediate surroundings.
Recall that mental clutter was defined as anything that makes the mind feel disordered, over-full, messy, distracted, and overwhelmed. It comprises a disorganized accumulation of thoughts, ideas, emotions, worries, impulses, memories, and distractions that fill up the mind. Our intrusive thoughts, overthinking, racing ideas, ruminating, excessive worrying, unresolved issues, conflicting priorities, and information overload are all examples of mental clutter.
In the last article, I argued some instances and examples of things that inevitably cause mental clutter: multi-tasking, a lack of emotional boundaries, overabundance and overconsumption of information. I talked about some causes of mental clutter, and the effects it has on our emotional and mental well-being. I argued that managing mental clutter is a learned skill that comes with conscious reflection, self-awareness, and constant practice, and emphasized that this is one of the most elementary emotional intelligence skills, perhaps the easiest and most universally worthwhile one to learn.
In this second part of the article, I talk about ways not only to clear out mental clutter but also to nip it at the bud and prevent it from accumulating.
0. Decluttering Physical Space
As mentioned already, a cluttered environment can contribute to mental clutter. Particularly in an environment that one regularly occupies, like one’s bedroom, work desk, or kitchen, physical clutter can cause several thoughts to accumulate and choke one’s mental space. Organizing one’s physical space can create a more peaceful and productive atmosphere and clear out pending cleaning-related tasks.
1. Take inventory
To get a grip on one’s mental clutter, one needs to start by understanding its components. Which thoughts, emotions, behaviours and reactions occupy one’s head most of the time? How does this change depending one’s circumstances and environment? By making a note of the overarching themes and particular components of our minds, we can start to sort out and organize it, and take further steps, both to avoid growing the clutter, and to clear out the existing unnecessary components. This is best done in writing, since this makes it easy to dump thoughts out as they come, and to keep track of changes and progress with time. A simple example may be a journal entry that says “Today, my code refused to work in the morning. I felt angry and frustrated the whole day and found myself thinking non-stop about all my past mistakes from the last year.” This simple entry captures a factual event (code not running), the thoughts that followed it (memories of mistakes) and the emotions that accompanied them (anger, frustration). Without any mechanism to keep track, one may forget the content, context, and source of one’s negative emotions over time, and only recall a general sense of unhappiness, unable to figure out what causes it from day to day. Taking inventory helps one understand the components of their mental clutter, and sometimes even their cause. This is essential to the following measures.
1.5. Don’t add what’s unnecessary
The world is buzzing with an unimaginable amount of information, some true, some false, some relevant, and most irrelevant. Most of the information we encounter neither helps us, nor does it present us with opportunities to do something good that helps others. Some examples are gossip, sensational news, untrue information, and legitimate news and information that does not have any relevance to our own lives and endeavours. To maintain mental clarity and reduce cognitive and emotional clutter, it is essential to be selective about the information one allows into one’s mind. While it is normal to engage in some small amount of harmless gossip sometimes, it is important to be mindful that gossip can quickly fill the mind with unnecessary and negative information and emotions. Similarly, sensational news stories designed to grab one’s attention often provide little actionable or beneficial information. It is important to limit our consumption of information to that which is relevant and beneficial to one’s life. When mental space is freed from unnecessary and negative information, this creates space and time for content that enriches the mind, supports one’s goals, and aligns with one’s values.
2. Get rid of the old
Clearing mental clutter also involves letting go of outdated and unhelpful elements from the mind. This can be as simple as crossing out finished or outdated tasks from your to-do lists, which not only provides a sense of accomplishment but also keeps your focus on current and relevant activities. However, it also includes releasing old emotions and memories that no longer serve one. Letting go of anger, sadness, past mistakes, and grudges can be transformative, freeing up mental space and emotional energy. It’s essential to forgive oneself and others, as holding onto these negative emotions only harms one’s own well-being. Finally, one should embrace personal growth by shedding outdated versions of oneself, acknowledging one’s progress, and allowing oneself to evolve without being weighed down by past identities or expectations. By continually clearing out the old, one makes room for new experiences, insights, and a more focused, positive mindset.
3. Identify and categorize patterns
One important strategy to manage and reduce this clutter is by identifying patterns in your thoughts and emotions and categorizing them. By recognizing how multiple problems might stem from a common source, one can address the root cause, thereby reducing the overall mental load.
Recognizing patterns involves looking for recurring themes or issues that appear across different situations or times. For example, frequent feelings of tired, irritability, and unfocusedness might seem like separate problems. However, upon closer examination, one might realize that these symptoms often occur after nights of staying up late watching TV or scrolling through social media. This behavior, known as “revenge sleep procrastination,” is when one sacrifices sleep to gain some personal time, often because one feels one’s daytime is too controlled or busy. Recognizing this pattern helps one see that the root cause of one’s tiredness, irritation, and lack of focus is actually one’s late-night habits.
Once patterns are identified, the next step is to categorize the related problems, analyze the underlying causes, and prioritize strategies to address them. The first steps themselves drastically simplify the bothering thoughts and habits and clear out a big part of one’s mental clutter. This approach not only reduces mental clutter but also leads to more sustainable and meaningful solutions, enhancing one’s overall quality of life.
4. Sort out and detangle thoughts and emotions
Mental clutter often arises from a tangled web of thoughts and emotions whose ends (origin and purpose) become lost, and whose meanings get mixed up. It is important that we ask ourselves, from time to time, what exactly we are trying to achieve with our actions and behaviour, and whether our methods make sense in light of our goals. Sometimes, simply, “so, what is the plan? Is it going to work?”, “what is it that I truly want?” or “is that really true?”? go a long way in exposing the hidden knots and inconsistencies in our thoughts. For instance, one often hears people saying how someone else made them feel angry, hurt, or disappointed, when, in most cases, no one can truly “make” someone else feel a certain way. Yet, this simple separation between someone else’s actions and one’s own emotional response so often gets missed.
Unquestioned assumptions and illogical jumps in thoughts and conclusions comprise another example of something that needs to be made explicit and sorted out. So many intelligent people are prone to thinking black-and-white statements, making unquestioned, untrue assumptions, and ignoring all but one piece of evidence, like “I made this one mistake which caused a lot of problems. I must be a total failure, I don’t deserve this job”, or “X person says that I should join them at their party. I want to be a good friend to X, so I should go to this party, even though I am exhausted and need rest.”, or even “X person says that I should join them at their party. I did not go the last time X invited me for a hike. If I say no again, X will hate me, and so will my other friends.” Without an objective examination of these thoughts, it is easy to miss the times one did not make a mistake, and that one mistake does not make one a failure, or that missing a party does not make one a bad friend, or that people usually don’t start hating you for saying no twice. When put explicitly, these thoughts sound silly, but when they zoom past at top speed in our subconscious mind, we believe them without questioning.
To achieve clarity and emotional balance, it is essential to sort out and detangle these thoughts and emotions. This process involves introspection and critical analysis of the origins, underlying beliefs, logical coherence, perceived goals, and actual outcomes of these mental states. Some deeper lying beliefs and patterns of behaviour may become so ingrained in our subconscious mind and automatic behaviour that detangling them needs support from an outside perspective, perhaps a friend or a professional therapist.
The sorting out and detangling step may be seen as an analogy to getting organized when starting to clear a physical mess. One often starts by categorizing the objects in the mess, where they are found, where they begin, where they end, how they got there, and whether they need to be thrown out entirely or simply re-located, and if the latter, then to where. At the end of this step, one may have a figurative or real “mind map” with one’s intentions, goals, values, actions, and their consequences listed out. One also sees on this map some of the distortions in one’s thoughts and beliefs, which could be discerned at the time. Of course, this step never ends, and is something to repeat passively every day, and actively regularly.
5. Clearing out the memory: to-do lists, time-blocking
It can be surprising how much mental space and energy can go into holding things in memory, be it a fact to be remembered, or an important task to be done. Luckily, this is one of the easiest issues to resolve. SImply offloading tasks and plans from the mental space into structured, external systems can be wonderfully effective in reducing mental clutter, anxiety, and incidents of forgetting. Two highly effective methods for achieving this are creating to-do lists and practicing time-blocking.
To-do lists capture tasks, both small and big, in a single, centralized, easy-to-access space. This helps prevent tasks from lingering in the memory and causing mental clutter. Tasks can be organized by importance and urgency, and thereby put into a priority-ordered list. Further, larger tasks can be divided in smaller, manageable steps that can be tackled at different times based on the time and energy available. This makes them less overwhelming and easier to tackle one step at a time.
Time-blocking is a technique in which one reserves certain “blocks” of time for certain pre-decided tasks and activities. Not only does this reduce the likelihood of procrastination and distractions and increase focus, but it also takes the decision burden off one’s mind, to constantly think about what one should do next, which task to start with at a given time, or how to get a set of tasks done within some period of time. Without planning, one may lose a significant amount of time simply thinking about getting things done without doing them and decisions on what to do next, leading to decision fatigue, procrastination, worry, and frustration. Time-blocking is an efficient way to push all the decisions to one instance and utilize the blocks of time for their allotted tasks, thereby quickly ticking off the members of the to-do list.
By implementing to-do lists and time-blocking, one can effectively clear out one’s mental memory, reduce stress, and enhance overall productivity and well-being.
6. Don’t multi-task
As explained in part 1, multi-tasking leads to constant shifts in brain energy and focus, leading to increased mental fatigue and an inability to focus on any one of those tasks. With multi-tasking, not only are the tasks not done well, but one also feels all the more distressed, unsatisfied, and unable to stay in the present. Focussing on one thing at a time, whether it is a task to be done, or simply enjoying a meal, book, or podcast, is a simple, easy, and effective way to keep mental clutter at bay.
7. Identifying hidden and suppressed emotions and thought patterns
While clearing out everyday clutter on objective decisions, tasks, work, gossip, and habits is essential, one cannot neglect the fact that a majority of our mental space is, in fact, taken up by emotions, subjective thoughts, impulses, and sensations.
Content like this is all the more hard to clear and sort out, because so much of it remains hidden to our conscious selves. When one does not realize the presence or meaning of these factors, how does one go about clearing out the clutter they cause? While this step is an ongoing, perhaps lifelong, process, it is undoubtedly worth undertaking, little by little. Some practical methods that help with it are listed as follows.
Identification and labelling through mindful practice in daily life
This step requires no preparation, no prerequisite knowledge or practice, and no material. It can be and should be done anywhere and everywhere, within reasonable limits. It comprises simply tuning into one’s own sensations, thoughts, and emotions without judgment, taking note of them as they arise and subside, and labeling them when possible. The idea is simply to get to know one’s internal world better and recognize which situations bring out which thoughts and emotions. With time and consistent observation and labeling, certain responses can lose their power and intensity, becoming more manageable when they are expected and understood better.
8. Trace the causes and origins
In this step, one considers the events or situations that triggered these identified thoughts and emotions, asking oneself, “When did I first start feeling this way?” or “What happened just before this thought appeared?”. Often, one finds that current emotions are linked to past experiences. This has the effect of removing the mysteriousness and strangeness behind many emotional reactions, helping us understand what causes them, giving ourselves empathy, and working towards resolving the issues.
This step also involves examining underlying conscious and unconscious beliefs. For example, “I feel anxious about the presentation because I believe I must always perform perfectly.” The validity and original causes of these beliefs should also be examined and questioned for logical coherence. often, this gives us a reality check on how aligned our emotions and beliefs our with the situation at hand, our own goals and intentions, and the produced consequences and effects.
Sometimes, doing this step by oneself is challenging and time-consuming. If so, it may help to opt for therapy techniques like Cognitive Behavioral Techniques (CBT). Regularly engaging in meditation can also work wonders.
In this second part of the two-part article on mental clutter, I wrote about the methods and actions that need to be put into practice to clear one’s mental clutter. These techniques deal with the root causes of accumulating clutter discussed in part one, and mitigate their negative effects on one’s life. While some of the methods discussed, like to-do lists and time-blocking, are very practicable and concrete, others, like those in points (3), (4), and (6), are complex, ongoing efforts, and must be implemented regularly. When implemented properly, they may be as large as an entire positive personality change, leading to a new and improved version of oneself, and a letting go of old and ingrained negative patterns.
Some effective (in my opinion) practical techniques on how to go about this, make progress, and get better at these methods are meditation, mindful breathing, journaling, radical honesty, self-acceptance, and self-compassion. In a separate article, I will write in more detail about these methods. Until then, I hope that this article provided sufficient insight into what mental clutter means, what causes it, how it affects us, and practical tips to start clearing it out and mitigating its effects.