Decluttering The Mind Is The Best Way To Keep It Healthy

Lessons for the mind while moving home

Photo by Eugenio Mazzone

Moving home, as tough and exhausting as it is, has an effect that is as predictable (once you’ve moved several times) as it is positive: decluttering.

By being forced to go through everything you own, you are forced to make decisions. Some are easy: why did we ever get this? Some are a matter of priorities or practicality: do we really use this enough to justify the required van space? Some are rather hard: I really love this and I would love to use it more, but it won’t fit in the new place, in the new life…

In the middle of moving house and country, I’ve been wondering how often we actually get to declutter our minds. I’ve written before about the benefits of meditation, but I’m also aware that meditation is just the efficient, tested, organised version of something I think I have naturally and accidentally been doing ever since I was a kid: decluttering the mind. Being aware of feelings and thoughts, letting old ideas surface, young worries sink and vice versa, we are simply allowing them to come and go.

I have believed for quite some time now that a great part of our mental health issues come from a lack of mind decluttering. Thoughts, ideas, feelings, they all gather dust too. If we pile enough of them up, they can even become different entities altogether, frankensteined versions of themselves, bigger deals, knotted messes that are almost impossible to clear up without the help of a professional.

I’m not saying that decluttering our minds is all we need to do to heal, but I do believe the tidy mind that comes from habitual decluttering is less prone to getting ill in the first place.