Declutter Your Mind: How to Stop Worrying, Relieve Anxiety, and Eliminate Negative Thinking - S.J. Scott, Barrie Davenport (2016)

Part IV. DECLUTTERING YOUR SURROUNDINGS

The Value of Decluttering Your Surroundings

“If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing poles.”

- Doug Larson

Where you choose to spend time every day ultimately determines the quality of your life. We know that’s an obvious statement, but many people fail to analyze what they do on a moment-to-moment, day-by-day basis.

In fact, we tend to allow happenstance, boredom, or other people to determine how we spend a lot of our time. We react to what’s in front of us, instead of mindfully deciding how we want to create our lives.

We talked earlier about defining your values, life priorities, goals, and life passion. These actions help you direct the daily activities of your life. But you can’t focus on these big-picture actions all day, every day. That’s because the bulk of your time is often filled with mindless tasks that contribute to feelings of overwhelm, emptiness, and mental clutter.

We’ve become attached to things, routines, and environments. We allow our homes to become repositories for every new whim as we accumulate more and more stuff over the years. We’re obsessed with technology and spend hours on social media, taking and sharing “selfies,” and documenting the minutiae of our lives.

So to get the full benefit of mental decluttering your life, you need to address the more mundane but potentially depleting aspects of daily life. These mindless activities are the small holes in the dam that allow your energy and joy to seep out. With a few changes, you can plug the holes and refill your tank.

In this section, we’ll tackle the final step of the process—how to declutter your immediate surroundings in order to free up mental space for the important goals and people in your life.