Mental clutter is anything you allow space in your mind that does not serve you. We all have mental clutter. It’s the things that bother us and cause us stress, those lingering things we haven’t dealt with yet, and those things that don’t really matter or belong there in the first place. If it doesn’t serve to your benefit and it isn’t important, then it’s clutter.

The problem with clutter is that as it builds up, it becomes an ever-increasing nuisance until it renders one practically incapable of accomplishing anything productive. Mental clutter builds and eventually starts to compound stress until its detrimental effects manifest in poor health and poor health leads to more stress and the pattern continues from there.

Clearing out mental clutter is like maintaining the mind fortress. What is the mind fortress? Well, it’s a concept centered on building and maintaining mental fortitude to make one a more effective and successful individual. By likening our minds to a fortress, we can use metaphors to understand how mental fortitude is established and maintained. The concept of the mental fortress will be explained in depth in a later post, but it will be referenced here to assist in understanding how decluttering supports building mental fortitude.

When you visualize the ideal fortress, I’m sure you don’t imagine the streets littered with waste and rubbish. I imagine the streets of my mental fortress clean and the homes neat, the walls in pristine condition like a place you would want to live and take refuge in. So, make your mental fortress reflect that visualization.

Mental clutter is like the waste in the streets that festers and spreads disease amongst the residents, it makes traversing difficult and cumbersome, making business and defense difficult and inconvenient. The walls are crumbling and practically invite the enemy in.

As clutter builds in the streets and festers, the productivity of society plummets along with general health and safety. All it takes is one flaming arrow flying over the walls to meet its mark on the waste in the streets and the whole fortress will burn to the ground in no time.

The most effective way to deal with mental clutter is to take care of things that are bothering you right way. I’ll never forget Joe Rogan interviewing David Goggins, asking him how he looked so young for his age and Goggins’ answer lives on forever in my mind. He said, “Anything that bothers me, I take care of right away.”  

The significance of Goggins’ answer cannot be understated. Imagine your mind as your house instead of a fortress for just a moment. If you have any sense of sanity, then you feel relaxed and peaceful when your house is clean and neat. Likewise, when your house is a complete and utter mess you probably feel a sense of chaos in your life. Now imagine the things that cause you stress, your problems, your unresolved issues, and those things you’ve been putting off as bags of garbage. Each one is its own bag of garbage taking up space in your house.

Imagine how you would feel if you walked into your house and saw bags of disgusting, smelly garbage sitting in your hallway, your kitchen and living room. I wouldn’t be able to live. That is what it is like in your mind when you allow unresolved issues permission to exist in your mental space.

The longer you take to clear that garbage out, the longer it has to decompose and as it decomposes, the smell and bacteria begin to spread across your house. My sister recently told me that she was stressed out because she couldn’t seem to cut an ex-boyfriend out of her life. She had blocked him on social media, but she hesitated to do the same to his number on her phone and every now and then, he would slither back into her life and bother her again with an emotional text message. Unfortunately, that pattern would cause her to spiral back into patterns of stress and anxiety, and her health suffered as a result.

I told her to imagine him and that situation as an enormous bag of trash that she left out in front of her kitchen sink. Now, every time she has to cook or do the dishes, she has to work around that big bag of trash. At first, it might be manageable, but over time it starts to smell, and she becomes even more reluctant to move it.

Eventually, her reluctance to deal with what she knows she should do allows the situation to get so bad that nightmare-worthy liquids start to seep from the bag and now she completely avoids the kitchen. She stops cooking healthy meals and doesn’t do her dishes and now the residue of old food festers on uncleaned dishes and compounds the smell.

Soon, her health is negatively impacted by the spread of bacteria and the smell filling her nostrils and she retreats to her room, afraid of her own house and left with a larger mess to deal with than when she started, and the thought of having to clean it up seems an impossibility, adding additional weight to the already overwhelming stress. Her mental stress led to corresponding poor physical health and now the problem has sufficient time to grow into a major issue.

We all do similar things with our mental clutter. We leave it to fester because we fear dealing with it until it grows into a monster of a problem. The acute stress felt when having to deal with our problems is what we seek to avoid, and in our foolishness, we allow stress to linger in our minds until it has compounded into a far more stressful situation than it would have been to just deal with it when we first saw that bag of trash in our kitchen.

The effects of lingering stress should not be underestimated. Not only does it have the potential to grow into a larger problem, but it serves to compound stress that may already be present as well as to compound unforeseen stress that may present itself in the future until we eventually have a mental breakdown, and recovery is nearly impossible.

We seem to forget that although initially dealing with problems can involve a lot of stress, the relief also comes quicker and that when our minds are decluttered, we can navigate our lives with more energy and resolve.

Even if the clutter you imagine isn’t bags of garbage and maybe you’re more of a hoarder that collects various piles of useless objects, eventually you will trap yourself in your mental space, unable to traverse except by narrow paths between the mountains of clutter, unable to find anything you might need, to include safety in an emergency.

To keep our mental fortress free of clutter, we must seek refuge in the Virtue of Industry to take care of things as they come, the Virtue of Courage to act despite the fear involved, and the Virtue of Strength to build our willpower into a force powerful enough to execute the necessary action.

Another way to maintain a clutter-free mental fortress is to filter your life and control what you expose yourself to. That movie you just watched that doesn’t support your mindset or your values: mental clutter. Mindlessly scrolling on social media: mental clutter. Exposing your mind to information and experiences that support the mindsets you are fostering and the values you live by is like repaving the streets, reenforcing the walls, and remodeling the buildings of your mental fortress.

Save yourself the stress and free up your mental energy by decluttering your mind and deal with problems as they arise. Your mental and physical health will be grateful, and you will live a more productive and successful life.