Three Tips for Clearing Mental Clutter
What is mental clutter? Anything that takes up space in your head but doesn’t really serve a practical purpose! Fear and anxiety, regrets and grudges are all good examples. They aren’t particularly productive or helpful, and it’s a great practice to clear them out from time to time!
In today’s Vlog, I want to talk about clearing the mental clutter of regret.
Maybe you regret purchasing something expensive and feel guilty letting it go.
Or you struggle to move on with an important life decision because you are worried that you’ll regret it later.
Regardless of the situation, living with these feelings can really hinder us from stepping into a more authentic, intentional life. Think of it as organizing your thoughts, sorting through them and letting go of what doesn’t serve you. I hope it helps! You can watch the video itself or simply read the transcription below.
Happy decluttering!
Hi, everybody. I want to talk about living in the past and regret, and how to move forward from that. This is something a lot of us struggle with. It’s real. And it’s sometimes really hard to deal with.
When something doesn’t go the way that we want it to, we tend to hold on to that. It distracts us. It keeps us from living the life of intention that I talk about so often. It keeps us from having hope for the future because we’re always looking behind us.
It’s really easy to say, “Oh, just let it go, don’t give it another thought.” But it’s really hard to do that! So I want to give you some tools that hopefully will help you look forward and not always look back.
The first thing I suggest doing is actually intentionally giving yourself permission to look back one more time.
Remember where you were in that place in time when you made a certain decision that didn’t turn out the right way. Maybe you’ll see that to do it all over again in those circumstances, you’d maybe make that decision again. Or maybe as you go back and think about it this one more time, you’ll realize, you know what? There was a little gut feeling, something inside of me that told me something wasn’t right. And now I know that I need to listen to that a little bit more.
Then the next thing you do is ask: what did I learn?
You either learned, “Hey, give yourself some grace, you did your best and it didn’t work out.” Or you might learn, “there was something not right, and I’m going to remember that feeling, put it in my back pocket, and use it another time.”
The third thing you can do is talk to someone.
Find your person. You can pray on it. You could live a life giving yourself grace, forgiving yourself for whatever didn’t go right, and look to the future, not to the past.
And so the next time you’re in a similar situation, think back to what didn’t go right. Keep those lessons in your back pocket. It’s like a little extra turbo that’s going to push you forward in the future because you now have more tools to make decisions. And you know what? It’s not going to always turn out the way that we want. That’s life. That’s okay. We’re evolving, we’re learning.
And I just want to impress upon you, we all struggle with this. I struggle with it too! Let’s try to make a plan and have some strategies to help us look back one more time. Learn from it. Take the lessons, learn from the lessons, and use them in the future. And then give ourselves some grace and some gratitude along the way for the experiences that make us who we are.