Friday, November 6, 2015

Cleaning (My Mental) House

I just deleted over 1,800 email messages from my Gmail account... without even looking at them. Wow, it feels so good.

I mean, I had read most of them (all but 128), but for some reason they were all still sitting there, clogging up my Inbox. In the past, I would have carefully looked at the Subject line of each one and saved all of them that contained photos or nice notes or memories or receipt information, and it would have taken me hours.

But just now, as I sit in a coffee shop, trying to plan my classes for next week, I decided to just do a blanket delete. That hovering red number next to my Mail icon was just stressing me out too much! *Unread messages!* *More things to do!* *Bleh!*

Now I have 4 messages in my Inbox. ~Big, cleansing breath~ ~Big smiley face~

Does anyone else feel like their life is full of mental clutter? I try to keep my house clean and organized, but somehow my life still feels chaotic. I think most of it is mental clutter: keeping in touch with too many people, overstimulation from commercials and advertisements everywhere I look, being pulled in too many directions (and my life is not even that complicated)! Things should be a lot simpler than they are, and part of my Baby Steps program that I wrote about in the last post is to slowly clear out the mental clutter.

The next step is a technology cleanse. Wait a minute, this is sounding familiar... I feel like I've blogged about this before... But seriously, I was laying in bed in a half-awake state yesterday morning, thinking about all the things I had to do that day, and I suddenly realized that I was organizing all these tasks in my head like a computer. My thinking was literally along the lines of swiping from one task to the next just as you would swipe between screens on an iPhone and plugging each task into a grid-type calendar in my head, adding notes, reminders, etc. Whoa! I need to lay off the iToys.

On Monday Ted and I are starting our 3rd Conscious Cleanse (just on our own - not as part of the program), and I think I'm going to also consciously limit my screen time. As always, I'll let you know how it goes. ;)

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