Decluttering Our Minds Of Negativity Is More Important Than Ever Now

Marie Kondo may have made getting rid of junk a fancy thing, but it feels that we are more in need of talking about decluttering our minds. A Psychology Today article says that we may have about 60,000 thoughts each day, many of which involve thinking the same things over and over again. In times when our lives are all about competitiveness, dissatisfaction and finding validation both online and offline, most of these thoughts aren’t happy ones. Amidst the rare streaks of happy thoughts, we host innumerable unhappy ones. Some of these are playing inside the brain on a loop.

SOME TAKEAWAYS

• Amidst the rare streaks of happy thoughts, we host innumerable unhappy ones in our mind.
• Negativity only lets mental health problems like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, etc., to slip into our lives.
• Self-pity, self-doubt and anguish play a big role in harbouring negativity in our minds.
• We fail to unlock our potential of problem-solving skills, all because it is easier to let negativity take over.

Naturally, this negativity only acts as a trap door for mental health problems like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder etc, to slip into our lives.

It seems essential that we learn to declutter our mind of this traffic of negative thoughts, for the sake of our mental and emotional well-being. There is no escaping negativity today, call it our lifestyle or the omen of the times that we live in. It is difficult to stay positive when the threat of unemployment looms overhead perennially or when you watch others pretending to be living their lives to the fullest courtesy social media.

Someone is vacationing in Hawaii, someone has lost twenty pounds, an acquaintance, on the other hand, has switched to a better job, while another just had a baby. The sugary digital lives of others which we ingest on a daily basis, may not give us the whole picture but it tells us enough to fill our heads with negativity. Look how so and so has lost so much weight after childbirth, while my scale threatens to break under my weight. Or while I am stuck in this mundane routine at home and work, a certain friend is vacationing on a beach. Even outside of the virtual world we have our plates full of demanding family members, impending deadlines and tiring schedules.

We go around all of these tasks physically, investing a major part of that 60,000 per day quota on festering negative thoughts.

Why does this happen to me? Why do I only find success the hard way? How come others are so happy but I am not? What if I forget something important? I am sure many of you will agree when I say that I spend too much time building multiple outcomes, all bad, in my head for all these questions, further dragging myself into a mess of negativity. It took me a while to realise that I was wasting a lot of time over-thinking problems. Did I find solutions for them? No. In perspective, it feels that the size of my problems was much smaller than the amount of thought I gave to them. The clutter of negativity makes it impossible to find a solution. It is like trying to find an apple in a store full of oranges.

Get rid of the pity parties, challenge your self-doubt and distinguish worrying and ruminating from problem-solving. - Amy Morin, Psychology Today

Author Amy Morin wrote in the above-stated piece in Psychology Today that there are three ways to declutter your mind. Get rid of the pity parties, challenge your self-doubt and distinguish worrying and ruminating from problem-solving. She says that magnifying your misfortune and convincing yourself that your problems are worse than anyone else's can suck you in. Thus instead of pitying yourselves, try to find a solution to your problem. On the other hand, self-doubt tends to be too deep-rooted to respond to superficial platitudes that you don't actually believe. So consistently challenge your self-doubt and prove to your brain that you are more capable and competent than you think.

If there's nothing you can do to fix the problem, work on changing your mindset.

Morin also sheds light on how rehashing the same things over and over, imagining catastrophic outcomes, and second-guessing your decisions won't get you anywhere. According to her, if it's a problem that can be solved, work on changing the environment. If there's nothing you can do to fix the problem, work on changing your mindset. I know putting all these virtues into practice is a big task, but for your mental well-being it is worth it. We fail to unlock our potential of problem-solving skills and staying positive, all because it is easier to let negativity take over your mind. But once you train yourselves to stop taking the easy way out, it becomes clear that this shortcut was only complicating things further.

Picture Credit : Roar.Lk

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Yamini Pustake Bhalerao is a writer with the SheThePeople team, in the Opinions section. The views expressed are the author’s own.