69. Mental and Physical Clutter: How to Clear Your Space and Your Mind

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger explores the powerful connection between mental and physical clutter and how clearing both can enhance your focus, reduce stress, and boost productivity. Learn practical tips for decluttering your mind and physical space to improve decision-making, prioritize self-care, and stay aligned with your goals. Discover how mindful planning and eliminating distractions can help you achieve lasting weight loss and overall wellness. Tune in for actionable strategies to create more mental clarity and make space for healthier habits!

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Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Weight Loss Made Simple. I’m your host, Dr. Stacy Heimburger. Today, I want to talk about a topic that always comes up for me, and it’s clutter. So, I’m not just talking about our physical clutter (although we are going to touch on that too), I’m talking about the mental clutter for so many of us. These are really intertwined.

I read something interesting about our physical clutter: when we see things—whatever things, things out—things aren’t about it, feels like they’re asking us to take care of them, right? Clean me, put me away, use me, whatever it is. And that can create stress. So, that’s the whole basis behind decluttering to de-stress. It’s this idea that those objects require attention. And I would argue that the same thing happens in our mind. So, when we have a lot of mental clutter, it’s the same idea.

So, there are a few things we’re going to talk about today. I’m going to give you some tips and tricks on how to hopefully delete some of your mental clutter, but also how to maybe organize what’s left in there so that it’s not just buzzing around all day.

I don’t know if you’ve been following me, but last year was a big declutter year for me. I did not reach my goal. I had gotten—I forget exactly how many now—like 250 colored trash bags, and I did that so I would have a visual and would know how much I cluttered from my house. And there are still a fair number of those trash bags left heading into 2025. So, I know I didn’t quite make my goal, but I did make enough of a difference that I can feel the difference in my house. And so it’s really just added some fuel to the fire for this year. So, 2025 is going to be another big declutter year for me. I’m actually challenging myself to know by 2025—so now that I’ve said it out loud, hopefully, it’ll be even harder to break. But it’s the second half of your physical clutter, right? We can throw things out and donate things and get rid of, but if we keep bringing in, that’s kind of defeating the purpose. And so that is one of my big goals for this year, is to not bring anything else in and to continue to declutter. So just to really clear up my physical space, because I think I’ve done a pretty good job with my mental space. And again, I think cleaning both of those things can be really helpful.

So, let’s talk a little bit about mental clutter. So, we talked about a little bit that indecision, right, adding in there. But our mental clutter is this constant stream of thoughts and worries and distractions that are always fluttering around in the back of our brain. I know when it used to get really bad, I would almost feel like a physical buzzing in my body, just trying to mentally keep track of everything that I needed to do, everything the kids needed to do, everything that was going on with the business. It was a lot. And so these worries, these things we are not taking care of, these decisions we’re not making, these things we haven’t committed to paper, they really take up a lot of room. And this type of clutter can really prevent us from focusing on whatever our big goal is for the year, or whatever our big goal is for ourselves for that day. It can really stop us from focusing on tasks that need to be done.

Right? And I don’t know about you, but I know when I have too much to do, I sort of dip into the well of overwhelm, and then I get stuck there. I don’t have any progress. I don’t get anything done. The best thing I’ll do is pick up my phone, start looking at the internet, doom-scrolling, and I won’t complete tasks that need to be done. So, clearing out this mental clutter can prevent dipping into overwhelm. Where I think a lot of people are like me, you get kind of paralyzed there, and then there’s no forward momentum. It’s a place that’s really just not useful. I always found it very ironic because that would happen when I felt overwhelmed, and the way to feel more overwhelmed the next day is to get nothing done on your list that you were supposed to get done, and you sort of find yourself doom-scrolling.

So, mental clutter can really impact everything. Of course, it impacts your productivity, but it can impact your mood, your ability to focus, your ability just to take self-care. Right? When we have a lot of things we haven’t accomplished and our brain is buzzing with all the things we need to do, sort of taking that 10 minutes for self-care doesn’t feel right, right? It feels not relaxing. So, clearing up some mental clutter is just really, I think, super helpful.

So, with the physical clutter, I’ve found that when I’m trying to get rid of things and I ask myself, “Will I use this one day?” I have a hard time letting it go, because most of the things that have been brought into the house were brought in with the intention of using them someday, right? We very rarely go buy something with the intention of just sitting in our closet not using it, right? We purchased it with the idea that we’re going to do something with it. So asking, “Will I need this one day?” you’re much more likely to get an answer, yes, than an answer, no. So, I needed to find a better question. So, I heard about the question, “Can I live without this?” which makes it much easier to say no to things. So, just thinking about this parallel with our physical clutter and our mental clutter, I feel like it’s kind of the same way.

Okay, so this mental clutter happens. We talked about indecision, but it also can happen when we take on too many tasks. And I was working through this in bearing forms with all of my clients this week, because things have a tendency to come up in patterns. And the idea is when we are offered an opportunity or asked to take on a new task, we are going into it with the mindset of, “Will I use this one day?” We’re like, “How might this be good?” And it’s easy to find reasons why that opportunity might be useful or that task might be helpful, where it might do some good, or might add to my life in some meaningful way, or might help me get promoted, or might help me, you know, get a return on my investment. We’re asking the wrong question there too.

So, what we need to ask ourselves is, “Is this something I like that’s aligned with my values, with my strengths, with my skills? And is it important? And do I have to be the one to do it?” Right? So, every opportunity that comes in, we need to kind of run it through this gauntlet: Is this even something that is meaningful to me? Is this meaningful to me, not could it be meaningful to me? Because we’ll find a way, it’s just what we do. We’ll find a way—like, oh yeah, it could be good for this reason. Is this already meaningful to me? Is this more important than something I’m already doing? Because we’ve already filled up our task list for the year, I can guarantee it. Is this more important than something I’ve already committed to? Am I willing to delete something else off my list to accomplish this?

So, we went over in our other episodes sort of getting aligned for the year and picking some goals and tasks, and so I want you to start understanding, just like I’m not buying anything new in 2025, I really need to look at taking on any new task in 2025. It’s the same concept, right? If I get good at delegating and deleting things from my schedule, but I just keep saying yes to everything everyone brings me, then I’m not really doing mental decluttering. I’m just adding. So all the hard work I did to free my schedule, to build back in personal time, to build back in self-care, can easily be undermined if we don’t do a no-by-25 for our mental tasks as well.

This constant demand for attention from our physical belongings is just as stressful as the constant attention that our brain wants for our mental task list. When we take all the time to declutter, when we take the time to go through our task list and put it on our calendar and sort of clear some space, it does no good if we just bring it back in on the other side. So, when we have sort of figured out what important tasks we have, I can’t stress calendaring enough. I think I’ve talked about a process called "Monday Hour One," and it’s basically taking your to-do list, writing every single thing you could possibly think of down, and then putting it into your calendar. And I put it in multiple places. Some of the things, like my kids don’t always get school lunch, sometimes we have to make lunch, so I have to put it on the family calendar, and we have like a sticker system. And last week was a disaster because I accidentally put a sticker on the wrong day, and somebody didn’t have lunch, right?

But once it’s written down, once the sticker’s on the calendar, it’s a “set it and forget it.” Now that mental clutter is gone. That mental load has now been put in stone, and it doesn’t need to float around in the back of my head anymore. I can let it go. So that’s how you can actively declutter some of your mental load, is by getting it out on paper. My husband and I have a shared Google calendar, right? We put things on the calendar. We invite the other one. That way we all know where we’re going. I’m in charge of the family calendar for stuff for the kids, and I make sure practices are up there. I make sure games are up there, and I make sure lunches are up there—any of these wonderful dress-up days for school. I do that once in the beginning of the month, and then it’s done. And then I do not need to waste mental space on that. So all that hard work I do at the beginning of the month, if I don’t have a “no buy ‘25” for my task list, opportunities, or things people ask me to do, all that hard work was for nothing.

So, we have to declutter, but we also have to stop bringing in. When we have mental space that is clean, that is relaxing, what we can get accomplished is amazing. We are more focused, we are more relaxed, we get more done. We can sit in silence and not be afraid of what’s gonna come up, right? When we declutter our space, it’s the same exact thing. So, our physical space and our mental space are very linked. But for the purposes of today, I want you to link the concepts because I want you to link the questions and the same idea of I declutter on one side, but I have to stop bringing in on the other side. So, I declutter and then I “no buy ‘25.”

So, I declutter my mental load by delegating, deleting, putting it in writing so I don’t have to think about it constantly. But then I can’t let anything else in. Or if something needs to come in, if I look at something, if it’s an opportunity, someone asks me to do something, and I’m like, “Nope, I definitely wanna do that,” like I’ve gone through it, it aligns with my values, and it aligns with my strengths and my skills, I need to get rid of something, right? Isn’t that the other sort of pillar of decluttering? One in, one out. So, if I need to take on a new task, I’m gonna have to delete or delegate something else. So, is this new thing more important than all the other things I’ve already committed to?

So, our checklist: We need to mentally declutter by being very mindful about sort of what’s on the to-do list. We delete and delegate whatever we can, and then we put the rest in writing, and we share it with whoever needs to know so that we can set it and forget it—not for the crockpot, need a crockpot, or glitter at the beginning of the week and the beginning of the month. And then we can free up space. We can do the same thing with our thoughts in our decision-making process. We can write it down. We can make decisions, small ones, to start getting rid of that mental clutter. Writing down helps with that too, right? We can do a pros and cons list. That clears some space. Then when someone tries to add something to our freshly cleaned brain or freshly cleaned task list, we have to be super mindful about whether we’re gonna accept that or not. Same thing with our physical space, right? We’re not gonna do the whole house in one day. We’re gonna do these small little pieces. But then, when everything gets a home where it’s supposed to be, we have to teach everybody the same thing as sharing our calendar: “This is where scissors go now, everybody!” Or whatever it is.

And then we don’t bring anything in. No buy ‘25, right? If I need to bring something in, if the kids grow out of something, my personal resolution for that, how I was gonna do that this year, is I’m gonna thrift some of their clothes back. So, I’m gonna send their clothes to ThredUp if they’ve outgrown them, and then I will get those. ThredUp is like an online consignment shop, an online thrift store. I will get their clothes from a thrift store, and I’m not gonna add new if I can at all avoid it. So, I’m gonna thrift their clothes, and I’m gonna give away clothes. So, it’s gonna be an even exchange. One in, one out. Same thing with our mental clutter. New task in, old task out.

So, pick one thing, one area that you wanna declutter. So, maybe it’s just calendaring, maybe it’s making one decision, maybe it’s writing one thing down, maybe it’s sending one thing on the calendar so that we can forget it. I actually think the easier way to get started with this is just to not let anything else in. Can stop the hose on the front end, and then start cleaning up a little bit at a time.

So, I hope this episode made sense. It’s been hard for me to verbalize it over the last few weeks. I’ve been trying to put it together mentally. I can see how it absolutely runs in parallel and makes sense. I also just think it’s very easy to get cluttered, because we love to take on tasks. We love to do things, right? All my people-pleasers and perfectionists, we like to be the one to do it. We like to be in charge. So it’s easy to keep taking on. Keep taking on. Keep taking on. The same way we’re really encouraged to buy new, buy new, buy new. So, we’re gonna have to kind of fight the system on this one, but I think it’ll be really great. Like I said, after a year of decluttering, my house is by no means uncluttered, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I think I’ve done a better job mentally decluttering, and it’s made a really big difference in how I’m actually so much more productive. I get much more done than I think I should be able to, and it’s because I’ve got space there. I’ve left space open to be able to focus and have clarity and really get things accomplished.

So, I hope this is helpful. Please share it, or I would just really love it if you would rate and review the podcast. It would make a big difference to me, so I would appreciate it. Alright, until then, I will talk to you later. Get rid of one thing. Get rid of a task. Get rid of something in your house. See if it helps. Alright, bye guys.