Declutter The Mind

It is said, “Happiness is how you arrange the thoughts in your mind.”

It’s kind of like decluttering, organizing and rearranging your physical stuff and things when you feel distracted, frustrated and out-of-control in your outer environment. This is just Inner Clutter!!

Learning how to order, choose, organize and arrange our thoughts, beliefs and perceptions is the key to not only our happiness, but our present and future life experiences as well. There have been plenty of mornings I’ve awakened to mental chatter. High volume. Imagery rich. Not all positive. Creating chaos and panic before I even open my eyes. I hate that!

If you ever have this happen, whether in the morning, at night before you go to sleep, or anytime of the day, you know how distracting it is and how it can create a downward spiral of thoughts, laced with fear and insecurity, running and ruining the rest of your day. One of the techniques I use to stop my mental monkeys from flying through the trees of my head is to use self-inquiry.

Self-inquiry is the use of clear, self-directed questions over and over until the thought storm stops. When I do this, I feel more at center, relaxed and then begin again from a clean slate and peaceful place to choose my next thoughts and actions. Some of my self-inquiry statements include:

- What does this have to do with me?
- Whose problem is it?
- Where did I just go? (Fear and panic thoughts take us out of the present and into the past an future.)
- Where am I going with this thought?
- How does this thought/beliefs serve me?
- What else could I be thinking right now?

Our thoughts affect our adrenaline and hormonal balance. There is a mind/body connection. The more we let chaos reign in our minds, the more our lives will mirror these thoughts and feelings and the more stress we ping around in our body creating disease and illness.

In order to stop thoughts-gone-wild from taking over our mind, we must become conscious enough to know it’s happening, get that it’s not for our good, that we have the power and responsibility to change it, that worrying about things won’t make them change, and that we can change our thoughts and options in an instant . . . or over a few minutes of time.

Bigger picture: changing our thoughts helps to change our actions and behavior