Personal Growth

7 Steps to Clear Your Internal Clutter

7 Steps to Clear Your Internal Clutter
People often invest significant time and energy into decluttering and organizing their homes, closets, offices, and possessions in order to create a more harmonious and peaceful life. Unfortunately, many forget to invest that same amount of time and energy into decluttering their minds, hearts, and spirits.

You have the ability to carry and hold onto all sorts of emotions, feelings, and experiences that can be damaging in the long run. With resentment, past hurt, regret, anger, and sadness, there is no shortage of how you can choose to fill your heart. You may even find that carrying it all around feels easier than sorting through it. Clearing this emotional debris out can be painful, dark, messy, and confronting, and it takes time.

Your fast-paced days, filled with having commitments, working, eating, sleeping, and surviving, often take precedence, and what is most important – internal peace – is all but lost.

As you aspire to create a more abundant life, you simply cannot ignore the fact that creating a meaningful and peaceful life ultimately depends on whether or not you are living with inner peace.

It takes courage, strength, and an enormous amount of energy to clear out your internal clutter, but if it is something you need to address, don’t think of it as some overwhelming task that you have to do; think of it as one of the greatest ways to bring positive change into your life.

Here are seven ways to help clear some of your internal clutter:

1. Don’t Make Problems Bigger Than They Are

A problem is an obligation without a committed solution. The bigger a problem gets, ultimately the more energy it will take to fix it. Confront your problems head-on and early. Sort through them one by one and embrace the real freedom that comes with problem-solving before they get any bigger.

2. Let Go

Letting go doesn't mean you are giving up; it just means that you are allowing yourself to feel lighter and move forward with ease. Learning to let go of control is a major force in finding inner peace. If you have a tendency to control loved ones, family, friends, and situations, then ultimately these things are controlling you.

Allowing people to live their life without worry of your reactions, developing trust, and strengthening your emotional intelligence encourages inner peace. Trust the people you love in your life and allow your life to unfold without demanding terms and conditions from the Universe.

3. Forgive

It can seem almost impossible to forgive someone when you are hurting. Forgiving someone does not mean forgetting a wrongful action or excusing how hurt you are. Forgiveness is a choice and ultimately a gift that you give to yourself. You forgive because of its enormous impact on the state of your mind, body, and spirit. Don’t underestimate the power of forgiveness and the enormous release you will feel when you practice this ultimate act of self-love.

4. Stop Worrying

If you make a list of all the things that you are worried about today, and then put your list away, when you come back to it in a week or two, you’ll discover that most, if not all, of the things you were worrying about never happened. Invest that energy into what is right with your world and stop focusing on what is wrong with it. Just the act of writing your worry list will help to clear out some of what is weighing heavy on your heart.

5. Use Storytelling for Good

What stories are you telling yourself? Learn to cultivate positive energy by changing the stories you tell yourself about each day. By keeping a positive tone and perspective when recapping the day’s events, regardless of what they are, you can enhance the goodness of your life, instead of perpetuating the negative. How your mind interprets any given situation can have a powerful impact on how you view yourself.

6. Makeover Your Thoughts

Pay attention to the thoughts that are running through your head. You have continuous mind chatter, consisting of words both positive and negative, continuously live-streaming from the second you wake until you fall asleep. As vital as it is to pay attention to how you speak and communicate with others, it is even more important to pay attention to the internal dialogue you have with yourself. The power of positive thinking can have an enormous impact on your life. Start to interrupt and clear out negative thoughts as soon as they enter your mind.

7. Center Yourself

When you are completely overwhelmed and stressed out, your internal energy is erratic and out of control. By learning to center yourself, you can harness this energy and redirect it to flow freely through your body, giving you a feeling of peace and calm. Some of the best ways to center yourself is regular practice of:

When you sort through your internal clutter and clear it out, you can make space for the things that matter most to you—which might include increased joy, happiness, wellness, and love.