Summary - DECLUTTER YOUR MIND How to Stop Worrying, Relieve Anxiety, and Eliminate Negative Thinking

 

Book title: DECLUTTER YOUR MIND How to Stop Worrying, Relieve Anxiety, and Eliminate Negative Thinking

Author: Barrie Davenport

Publisher: Oldtown Publishing LLC

Date published: August 21, 2016

The number of pages: 157 pages

Genre (Type of book): Tips

Why did you decide to read this book? 

Because I want to know how to stop anxiety

Were you glad that you decided to read it? Explain!

I enjoyed reading it because there were many useful tips even though this book was a little difficult to read.

What did you like best about this book?

Explain in detail good tips for us if have an anxiety

What did you like least?

There are too many prefaces for each sub-chapter and too many words. Many languages are difficult to understand

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Explain!

I highly recommend this book so that we can reduce anxiety

On a scale of 1-10, how difficult was this book for you? (1 easy, 10 difficult) Why?

8, the language is a little easy to understand even though there is a lot of scientific languages

 

 

PART I: DECLUTTERING YOUR THOUGHTS

·         Mental Declutter Habit #1: Focused Deep Breathing

You may not pay much attention to your breathing and your posture, but by simply becoming more aware of how you breathe, you foster a calmer state of body and mind. Start paying attention to your breathing and simply become aware of how you are taking in and releasing air throughout your day.

·         Mental Declutter Habit #2: Meditation

If you’ve never practiced meditation or you’re not familiar with it, you might be put off by the idea of sitting quietly in the lotus position and emptying your mind. But don’t let the clichés about meditating cave dwellers prevent you from giving it a try.

·         Mental Declutter Habit #3: Reframe ALL Negative Thoughts

Our thinking processes are necessary for survival and for competing in a modern world. Critical thinking gives us the ability to solve problems quickly and effectively. Creative thinking allows us to develop original, diverse, and elaborate ideas and connections. But it’s the uninvited negative thinking that clutters our minds and often drains our enthusiasm for life.

·         Mental Declutter Habit #4: Teach Your Old Mind New Tricks

Interrupting cluttered thinking is only part of the process of retraining your brain and learning to disassociate from negative thoughts. Your mind abhors a vacuum, so you need the fill the void with constructive thought so you don’t careen back into old patterns.

 

PART II: DECLUTTERING YOUR LIFE OBLIGATIONS

·         Strategy #1: Identify YOUR Core Values

If you have never defined your values, you are sailing the sea of life without a compass. You’re allowing the winds and storms to define your direction and accepting the outcome without question. Even if you have defined them in the past, it doesn’t hurt to revisit them, as your values can change over time.

·         Strategy #2: Clarify Your Life Priorities

Without knowing our priorities, we allow the pressures of life to determine our actions and decisions. An email comes in, and we respond. An enticing offer appears on our Facebook page, and we buy it. Someone interrupts our workflow, and we allow it. When we don’t know the bigger “why” of our lives, there are no rules, no boundaries, and no priorities to help us.

·         Exercise #3a: Focus on Mindful Goal Setting

A natural outcome of having values and setting priorities is considering how these apply to your life in the future. Although worrying about the future contributes to an unsettled mind, planning for the future is an important and valuable exercise that can set the stage for true fulfillment in the years to come.

·         Strategy #3b: Create Quarterly S.M.A.R.T. Goals

The simplest way to focus on what’s truly important in life is to create S.M.A.R.T. goals that will be achieved in the immediate future. This means you’ll set goals for each quarter (i.e., three months) instead of the yearlong goals that often take you out of the present moment. To begin, let’s start with a simple definition of S.M.A.R.T. goals: George Doran first used the S.M.A.R.T. acronym in the November 1981 issue of the Management Review. It stands for: S pecific, M easurable, A ttainable, R elevant, and T imebound.

·         Strategy #4: Connect Goals to Your Passions

Too many people live lives of quiet desperation. They wake up with a low[1]level sense of dread, anxiety, or sadness. At work, they feel underutilized, unappreciated, and underwhelmed. And when they get home, they feel mentally and physically exhausted, with just enough energy to take care of the kids, fix a meal, and plop onto the couch to watch a few hours of television. Then they wake up and do it all over again.

PART III: DECLUTTERING YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

·         Relationship Strategy #1: Be More Present

A University of North Carolina study of “relatively happy, nondistressed couples” revealed that couples who actively practiced mindfulness saw improvements in their relationship happiness. They also enjoyed healthier levels of “relationship stress, stress coping efficacy, and overall stress.” The practice of mindfulness allows us to be present with our partners, to be less emotionally reactive with them, and to more quickly overcome stressful situations in the relationship.

·         Relationship Strategy #2: Getting Unstuck from the Past

Because relationships are so integral to our lives, it’s not surprising that people from our pasts continue to cause us pain weeks, months, or even years after an encounter or relationship has ended. You replay these “mind movies” so often that you start to identify with them. Dragging the past around in this way is a heavy burden that drains you of energy and inner peace.

·         Relationship Strategy #3: Mindfulness with Your Partner

With your spouse or romantic partner, you have the opportunity for tremendous emotional and personal growth, especially if you view your partner as someone who is in your life to teach you something. It’s through this relationship that you can learn to be more present and compassionate.

·         Relationship Strategy #4: Let Go of Certain People

Decluttering your relationships sometimes means just that—letting go of people who cause you suffering. Sometimes the only course of action is to say goodbye to those who continue to undermine your mental and emotional health. Letting go of a relationship is painful, even if it’s draining you, holding you back, blinding you to your true self, or, worse yet, toxic or abusive

PART IV: DECLUTTERING YOUR SURROUNDINGS

·         Simplify Your Home

You can declutter your home in less time than you think—and without feeling completely overwhelmed—when you tackle it in small chunks of time every day. Set aside just 10 minutes a day to work on your clutter, and within a few weeks, your house will be in order.

·         Simplify Your Digital Life

We’ve become obsessed with technology, and it’s impacting every aspect of how we live our lives. We are slaves to the gadgets that were supposed to simplify our lives and prefer the quick fix of instant information and low[1]quality entertainment over real-world interactions and experiences. We spend hours on social media. Our inboxes are flooded. Our desktops are littered. Our laptops are bursting at the seams with more documents, photos, and downloads than we can absorb in a lifetime.

·         Simplify Your Activities

According to a 2014 article in The Economist, “Individualistic cultures, which emphasize achievement over affiliation, help cultivate this time-is[1]money mindset. This creates an urgency to make every moment count, notes Harry Triandis, a social psychologist at the University of Illinois.” Do you find yourself running around like a chicken, mindlessly checking items off your list so you feel productive and worthy? Sometimes our schedules take over our lives, and we don’t give much thought to whether or not we are spending our time in ways that contribute to the mental clutter and stress that is so debilitating. We get trapped on the treadmill of tasks and obligations, leaving little time for those things that allow us to be present and fully engaged.

·         Simplify Your Distractions (to Overcome Procrastination)

Distraction breeds procrastination, but procrastination is also the result of fear—fear of failure or fear of success. It’s the great “What if” standing between you and the action you want to take. Even though most of these fears are unfounded, we allow them to pull us away from the task at hand. We also procrastinate because we dread difficult tasks. We don’t want to tax our brains or expend the energy necessary to get started. As you’ve likely experienced, the getting started part is the most difficult. Once you start, momentum carries you forward, but if you keep procrastinating, you’ll never catch that wave of momentum.

·         Simplify Your Action

Real-life requires that you deal with the more mundane but necessary activities of daily survival in an organized society. They are the tasks we try to “get through” in order to enjoy the real excitement of life, whatever that happens to be for you. Unless you’re a cave dweller or live in a monastery, these “real-life” obligations take up a lot of time and energy. Even if you can cut back on these tasks, you can’t escape all of them without some unpleasant consequences.