3 Ways To Mentally Declutter
There’s no 2 ways about it — it’s time to roll up your sleeves and mentally declutter.
CLUTTER is something that affects us mentally and physically. Spring in the Southern Hemisphere has just sprung… and so we all know it’s a perfect time to clear things out. If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere it’s also perfect timing. Perhaps you bought a few too many things online during lockdown and more indoors time ahead as the weather grows colder means making your space more liveable and comfortable. We all know Marie Kondo and how her methods are said to do wonders for both emotional and physical health. But have you ever considered doing a Marie Kondo of your mind?
We all have mental baggage and thoughts that loop, ruminate and roll around in our head. But the process or steps to take to declutter mentally aren’t so straightforward. Perhaps you have some old emotional wounds, some unfavourable addictions or old aggressive triggers? Some people have compiled a huge amount of anxiety after the pandemic and the state of the economy and job market is giving them a nervous twitch.
Others are feeling down and melancholic mourning the freedoms we’ve lost, the travel restrictions or the possibility of not being able to see friends and family who are far away. Perhaps you’ve started an online business and you’re procrastinating, stalling, feeling unconfident and just not good enough?
The process of releasing all this mental clutter is just so cathartic.
There are few ways to do this, here are some of my own tried and true methods.
MEDITATE DAILY.
Meditation is mental workout (discipline) so that you can:
1. Realise you are not your thoughts — your thoughts are something separate from you.
2. Recognise the emotions that are tied to those thoughts and work out if there is some old trauma or wounds that need tending to.
- You are not your thoughts, you are able to have strength in your mind to choose thoughts that you want to have.
You know what I mean — those positive, constructive, resilient thought patterns that must leave Tony Robbins high on life each day!
The good news is that diligent and frequent meditation is like a work out for your mind. By noticing your thoughts, you can pick up on negative thought patterns or just ways you might be thinking that aren’t serving your highest good. Meditation helps us to ‘catch’ our thoughts BEFORE they take hold and become negative emotions.
If we are able to stop a negative thought it in it’s tracks we can also move on to better behaviours, better emotions and ditch those we no longer want.
If you’re trying to evolve yourself, meditation also helps you to work on areas of your life that you feel you may be lacking. For example you might want to improve your self esteem or avoid procrastinating. By practicing meditation you’ll be able to pick up on the cues that lead to negative patterns.
You can try saying mantras to yourself while meditating also to lift your spirits and ultimately re-program yourself at the subconscious level.
Ninja hack: Start meditating and get to the place where you feel nothing and think nothing. This is the alpha or theta state of thinking when you access the subconscious. You’ll know the feeling because it’s so blissful and lovely. Once yo’re there repeat a few affirmative phrases, like “you are enough, you are wonderful, I love you, I am proud of you, you are wonderful.” Think of things you enjoyed hearing or wished you’d heard as a child. This is part of what a hypnotherapist does, we re-program you for positive thinking through hypnosis audio recordings. If you’re able to access alpha and theta states in your meditation and then recite mantras — you’re basically doing a type of hypnotherapy on yourself.🧘🏽♀️
2. Meditating helps to tune in with the emotional responses you have to those thoughts.
By noticing the feelings that come up with your thoughts, you’re able to let go of the thoughts and not get involved with the emotional response.
Excerpt taken from “Effects of Mindfulness on Psychological Health: A Review of Empirical Studies” by Shian-Ling Keng, Moria J. Smoski, and Clive J. Robinsa, (link below)
“Lykins and Baer (2009) compared meditators and non-meditators on several indices of psychological well-being. Meditators reported significantly higher levels of mindfulness, self-compassion and overall sense of well-being, and significantly lower levels of psychological symptoms, rumination, thought suppression, fear of emotion, and difficulties with emotion regulation, compared to non-meditators, and changes in these variables were linearly associated with extent of meditation practice.”
This is so handy if you have a really strong stress response to a particular situation. If you’ve trained to reset yourself emotionally (through meditating), it allows you to detach and not go on the emotional rollercoaster. When you meditate — you actively practice feeling nothing and thinking nothing. This state is very peaceful if you’ve ever got there, you know what I mean.
Many people, unfortunately struggle to get there because our brain’s role in our life is to keep us safe. It does this by assessing threats constantly, figuring out what it should do to keep us safe.
What people refer to as our reptilian brain, is the issue. The problem is that back in cave man days we needed to keep safe and secure. So our brain was on constant high alert. But when we have constant stress and struggle it can get stuck in — “I didn’t do a great job of protecting my human, she got fired from her job, she spilled coffee on her jacket, she tripped on the street, she’s constantly dealing with a workplace bully.” Our brain can’t fix these issues, so it ruminates on them, trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Stress hormones like cortisol are so bad for us in excess. Unfortunately our society is rife with stress, anxiety and all sorts of toxicity as mentioned above which is why stress is the leading factor in so many diseases such as high blood pressure, heart issues and even some cancers.
Practicing meditation daily is so healthy. It gives your body a chance to feel relief from stress (cortisol), it enables you to get more resilient to stress and it enables you to pick up on unhealthy habits and just release them.
CLEAR YOUR MENTAL TO-DO LIST
To-do lists in your mind are a burden energetically and physically.
I recently saw the best meme recently — it was about how self-care is actually so much more than getting a manicure, having a hot bath and a glass of wine… it’s actually getting your proverbial sh*t done! I was on a call this morning with my gorgeous group of women and one of them reminded me of this… and I nearly didn’t include it!
I want you to think of the unglamorous stuff that you avoid. Like doing your taxes, creating a budget, making sure you have a retirement plan, sending that thank you note to a kind neighbour or dinner host, scheduling those social media posts, cleaning out the bottom of the pantry/fridge, updating your C.V and sending it out so you can leave that dead-end job, writing that complaint to someone… the list goes on.
All of our ‘life’ tasks loop around in our brains and keep us mentally ‘busy’. You know how Nike says “Just do it?” There’s some good reasons why.
These mental ‘to-do lists’ are literally eating up your energy. You know how we eat food and drink water each day? Because we need energy. Energy to walk, do the dishes and most importantly think.
According to this article, thinking uses approximately 20% of our daily energy consumption. One fifth of your food — goes straight to your brain!
By firing those mental neurons a few times a day repeating those same annoying things like, ‘I have to call the mechanic about that strange in my car’, we are robbing ourselves of our precious life force.
If you think about it, you could be spending that mental energy being present with your child, not getting distracted while in a chat with a friend or concentrating 100% on your job at hand. No wonder many of us complain about being scatterbrained.
Spending our time thinking about these things is literally a waste of the time and energy we have within us. By clearing up our to-do list, it’s freeing up valuable mental space. We can then use that precious energy to actually do what we want to do or enjoy doing. And it ultimately gives us more capacity to think creatively.
The other thing is that these ‘chores’ or thoughts elicit emotions.
Perhaps they evoke a sense of guilt, stress or overwhelm and ultimately they ‘feel’ like a burden. By making us ‘feel’ burdened, these tasks literally weigh down our well-being and make us feel stressed.
Thought loops can make us feel stressed or anxious because your brain is trying to remind you so you do something about it. When the ‘issue’ doesn’t get resolved it can add to our stress levels, make us feel inadequate or lower our self esteem. No-one needs that.
We’ve spoken about the bad chemicals that stress or negative emotions create in our bodies. Once again “Just do it”. Just clear out your to-do list and you will feel better. Simple.
RTT® HYPNOTHERAPY is deep diving into the subconscious to resolve issues at the root cause.
Sometimes we have meditated for a while, we’ve been eating healthy, we’ve done the hard work on ourselves, but we just can’t figure out why the looping thoughts, anxiety, addictions or stress triggers won’t go away.
You may have dealt with your issues at a rational level through your own processes or with a counsellor but you can’t quite work out why your problems keep coming back to haunt you. It is often because they have become so ingrained that we don’t actually know where they have come from.
Our subconscious holds many of our memories, experiences and operating systems for how we act, how we behave and how we see the world. Deep diving into the subconscious is so helpful to get to the root cause of your issue and remove it permanently.
To understand what the subconscious is and how it works, imagine you hop in you car, you drive to work, but you get there and think, I can’t actually remember the route, what I saw on the way or even putting your indicator on. You were in flow. On autopilot.
The part of the brain that got you there was your subconscious. It is also the part of us that dictates how we speak, how we act in relationships, how we behave in response to stress and many more of our ‘automated’ actions.
I specialise in treating my clients with anxiety, stress and trauma. I often see patterns where the brain has gone through some really bad experiences (trauma) and it just doesn’t want to switch off because it simply doesn’t feel safe to. Some psychologists call this hypervigilance and others, anxiety.
In our world of overstimulation, endless to-do lists, endless emails, WhatsApp chats, Zoom meetings, Facebook chats our brains are often overstimulated and burnt out. I see so many people on the brink of burn-out — just feeling exhausted. Some label it anxiety, others just say ‘I’m so tired’ or ‘I’m overwhelmed.’
Often we experience trauma, poor self esteem, low self-worth, loneliness, sadness, anxiety and many other things and we just get along with it. We ‘just do it’ — and go along as if everything is normal but after a while, health problems, relationship problems and work issues creep up on top of us and make us address what’s wrong.
But as you’re gathering, I don’t believe in letting old things fester. This is not the time to keep going with life. It’s time to address the emotional, behavioural issues, addictions and triggered behaviours because they are symptoms of something wrong deep inside at the subconscious level.
The best way (and I’ve truly gone through an exhaustive list finding the answers here), is to look at it, from the subconscious level through RTT® hypnotherapy. Let me explain what RTT® does through my own experiences.
My experience with RTT®
I found RTT® back in 2018 when I was in a dark place living overseas as a new mother. I was sad, lonely and hated my job. I felt desolate. The universe threw me 2 newly graduated RTT therapists into my friendship circles so I tried it.
It was the surgery I needed to heal the pain and negative ideas around motherhood I’d developed as a child. I would have never known I was reliving my mother’s own struggles as a new mother. It helped me immensely. Even though I had regularly meditated for over 8 years, seen counsellors, psychologists and a host of other mind/body practitioners I just couldn’t shake this sadness — or get to the bottom of it.
It was the only thing that cleared out that niggling sadness. I was determined to get rid of it because I could see that I wasn’t being the mother that I wanted to be. I could sense my child was worried when he saw me crying and when a child feels like they can’t do something about the sadness of their mother, they develop insecurities, low self-esteem issues and blame themselves.
I now know my mission to heal my mind without medication was the right path to take, even though it was a long and challenging path. I definitely advocate medication to assist with mental health issues — especially when it gives so much relief and assistance to those who need it.
Diving deep into my subconscious allowed my mothering to get better, my understanding and presence in my relationship blossomed and I was able to choose a career that was right for me.
By healing ourselves at the subconscious level, we are able to come to our jobs, to parenting, our relationships and our creative projects/hobbies with the 100% version of you, instead of a diluted 40% or 60%.
It is the true feeling of lightness, freedom and empowerment that every human deserves.
I know you have the potential to become greater than the sum of your current thoughts. The next step, is to implement one or all of the tools above to get to that next level of your powerful potential.
If you’re curious to learn more about how the tools above might help you, please get in touch via my website at www.estateofbeing.co
If you are ever struggling emotionally, please get in touch with myself or a local mental health practitioner. If you are sturggling with thoughts or suidcide or self harm, please call lifeline USA, lifeline Australia or medical practitioner in your country.
Quote taken from: “Effects of Mindfulness on Psychological Health: A Review of Empirical Studies” by Shian-Ling Keng, Moria J. Smoski, and Clive J. Robinsa, (link below)
Athena Maroulis is a mother, partner, friend, daughter and passionate mental health therapist. She’s been meditating regularly for 9 years and is restarting her mindfulness groups in 2020. Within her practice, Estate of Being, she works at the subconscious level to release past sadness, traumas and mental blocks using RTT® hypnotherapy to elevate her clients into a new level of freedom and empowerment. Athena especially enjoys working with mothers from prior conception, through to post-partum and all the way until they become grandmothers. She knows that through healing their own traumas, mothers are able to heal and repair their relationships with their children and often even improve the behaviour, health and wellbeing of their children on a quantum level. This phenomenon is now mainstream science and she sees family miracles occur regularly with her clients.
Her second passion is working with beautiful souls who are awakening to the fact that there is more to this universe than what we can see, hear, feel, taste and touch. She shares wisdom and tools based on quantum science, indigenous spirituality and Buddhism to her clients. Athena doesn’t believe people should endure a ‘dark night of the soul’ alone or for long and is an expert at ‘lovingly’ pulling people into the light. See www.estateofbeing.co for more.
