Old Tapes: We carry a lot of old emotional baggage around with us. It's as if we have a constant film loop running in our heads that replays everything that ever went wrong in the past (but omits all the good stuff). That spat we had with our college roommate, the guilt from a careless comment we made to a friend, the hurt from not having a date for the Senior Prom - things like this clutter up our thoughts and distract us from more immediate and important issues.
Worries: Another source of mental and emotional clutter is worry, plain and simple. We lie awake at night, what if-ing ourselves into a tizzy. We construct dire and improbable possibilities, then treat them as if they were real. We create scenarios which paralyze us with fear. When we worry, we are projecting ourselves into the unknown future, instead of taking care of business in the here and now.
Gremlins: Let's not forget all those little voices in our heads. Call them Gremlins, call them negative self-talk, those negative messages we send ourselves repeatedly clutter our self-confidence, our will to go on, our courage to change. Those voices are the ones that tell us we can't, we shouldn't, we're not smart enough, hard working enough, brave enough. They clutter our lives as surely as those piles of paper hiding our desk tops from view.
Commitments: We also contribute to this unnecessary mental confusion with our attempts to have it all and have it all right now! Our To Do lists are so full that there is no way we'll get to a tenth of it. We've cluttered our schedules with so many events we don't really care about that there's no time left for the things that really matter, such as ourselves, our loved ones, or chocolate.
No Clear Goals: Our plans are just as cluttered. We're too busy to set clear goals and determine priorities. We put stuff off because we are so busy, until suddenly it's been put off so long that it's become an emergency. We waste our energy putting out fires instead of preventing them. We don't know where we're going, or why, because we don't have the time to stop and figure it out.
Unfinished Projects: We have too many things going at once to see any of them through to completion. We leapfrog from one project to another. We start in on one thing and work on it until something else comes along. So we drop the first one and start the second, only to drop that one when yet another one seems more interesting. Soon our uncompleted projects clutter our minds and our storage space.
So what's a person to do?
