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Declutter for a stress free life by focusing on four primary areas of your life. These primary categories are emotions, thoughts, time, and your physical environment. What occupies your mind creates your reality, so focusing on emotions and thoughts are key to improving all aspects of your life. How you spend your time and the condition of your physical environment is a byproduct of what is going on in your mind. So, when you are stressed out, what should you do?
Doctors recommend managing stress, but by trying to manage stress you actually create more stress.
You cannot manage stress.
What does managing something entail anyway? Most people correlate management with efficiency. Makes sense. Financial and time management is the practice of spending your money and time wisely. A career in management can involve managing personnel to maximize productivity.
Why would anyone want to spend their stress wisely or maximize its productivity?
Don’t manage stress, release it. Four ways to release stress is:
– Declutter your emotions
– Free your thoughts
– Audit Your Time
– Declutter your physical space
Declutter Your Emotions
Emotional stress can affect you physically, mentally, and behaviorally. You need to be the practitioner of your own health to find balance. Therefore, to reduce the affect stress has on your body and mind, you need to establish a self-care practice.
A self-care practice is what you intentionally and proactively do to take responsibility for your overall health and wellbeing.
Restorative activities make up self-care practices. These activities include eating a well-balanced diet and physical activity. Healing behaviors also include being present, mindful, showing gratitude, and expressing compassion. Personal development is also an excellent avenue to restore your true self. This does not have to be formal education, it can also be the pursuit of hobbies and interest.
Free Your Thoughts
Improve your mindset by regaining your focus. False and limiting beliefs is what the ego creates to make you lose focus. Even if you are unaware of these untrue beliefs you hold about yourself, they dictate your thoughts. Believing thoughts such as “I am not worthy,” “I am ugly,” or “I am not good enough” are limiting beliefs. You cannot focus on your goals if you do not think you can achieve them or you don’t deserve them.
Limiting beliefs encourage more than negative thoughts. Believing untruths about ourselves stop us from pursuing dreams or trying silly things just for fun. In this mindset you lose spontaneity and passion for life. Self-care necessary to help reduce mental stress is what I call supporting activities. Support yourself by challenging your own assumptions, practicing meditation, grounding activities, and showing yourself kindness.
Audit Your Time
Emotions and thoughts create stress in our lives causing us to have issues with time. Issues with time include the obvious, you are never on time.
However, you may also engage in procrastination, experience sleep disruptions, and have unrealistic ideas for how long things take to complete. Therefore, you never finish your tasks.
Unrealistic time expectations cause frustration to grow within yourself regarding personal goals. Consequently, not experiencing personal change within the expected timeframe creates stress.
The best way to deconstruct current perspectives and use of time is to document everything you do. Compare the time you spend on social media and television to the time you do something constructive like household chores. Also take note of any time you spend on restorative and supportive activities in your life.
Auditing your time identifies what you could do differently to create more time for productive endeavors. Identify behaviors such as procrastination that diminish effective use of your time. Avoid spending too much time on one activity by setting an alarm on your phone so you know when you should switch to another task.
Distractions in life can pull you in different directions. So, reduce distractions by not answering the call or responding to a text or email right away. Also, try saying ‘no’ to others more often.
The more time you take for yourself to practice self-care to reduce mental and emotional stress, the more your life will improve.
Declutter Your Physical Environment
The physical environment I am referring to is your personal space such as your home and your electronic devices where you interact via as social media and email.
Your physical environment should be a place of calm.
Cluttered in-boxes contain more incoming emails that you immediately delete compared to the ones you read. Unsubscribe to the junk mail in your inbox you never read. This small decluttering techniques for electronics can have a large impact on your life.
Social media can negatively affect emotions and thoughts. In my blog about fresh beginnings I state, “To start new, you must do new.” You must act, so reduce your friends list, block people, or unfollow pages to reduce stress in your physical environment.
Having a cluttered, disorganized, or unclean home is also a sign of emotional and mental stress, up to and including depression. The first step to creating calm in your home is to get rid of stuff you do not need or use anymore. Bring nature into your home buy buying house plants. Organize things; if an item doesn’t have a place, then you don’t need it.
Start Decluttering
You don’t need to declutter everything at once. That would crate unwanted stress! Restorative and supporting activities can help bring calm to your mind and body diminishing the chaos and stress in your life. Change perspective about things you feel you must, should, or can’t do to improve you time management skills. If you believe you can’t do something, obviously you never will. But you also tell yourselves you can’t practice self-care because [excuse].
That excuse is the perspective you need to change. Change your perspective on things you feel you must complete to experience a shift in your energy. These are things you do for others. Focus on what you need to do for you to reduce your stress.
Declutter everything in your life that causes you stress. This can be your living space, social media, and your email. The hard part about taking inspired action to create change in your life is that something must inspire you into action. Declutter your life before your emotional and mental clutter create physical dis-ease in your body.
Normalize loving yourself, committing to yourself, believing in yourself, and respecting yourself, i.e., normalize self-care. When you do this, you shift your perspective, and when your energy shifts, you mind shifts, then your life will shift.