In the old days it was expected that employees leave their home life "at the door" and come to work as a separate person from who they were at home. These days it is much more accepted that we are whole selves and that it isn't particularly easy (or healthy!) to separate ourselves into work and home personas.
This helps in terms of acceptance, but doesn't provide any practical strategies for the need that still exists for finding head space when you need to apply yourself to work - whatever that means to you.
Showing up for work mentally cluttered is not going to benefit you or your employer and I expect you can see a clear link between mental clutter and finding work difficult. Perhaps you recognise some of these in yourself:
Difficulty concentrating
Snapping at colleagues
Slower processing speed
Harder to make (good) decisions
Brain fog
Tricky emotions bubbling up
Over-reacting to things
Feeling overwhelmed and stressed more easily
And so you can see that being able to clear mental clutter will have a direct correlation with achieving more at work as you begin to experience the opposite of the list above - which can mean a successful business, a promotion, better pay, more recognition, sense of achievement, better work relationships, more client empathy - the list is endless!
So how do we begin to clear mental clutter? The answer to this can be different if we are thinking about short term clutter or long term. (Much like we can have daily physical clutter around us or long term like doom piles or dusty boxes stuffed away)
Short term mental clutter may feel like we just want to simply get through the meeting or the day so we can get home and deal with something specific; long term mental clutter is more of a chronic problem that you have been dealing with for a while but you may only now be realising that it is mental clutter that is draining you - this is completely understandable as our culture can be very much "keep calm and carry on".
Short term mental clutter can be relieved in a few ways:
Working with your breath can be helpful- breathing out for longer than we breath in for, for example, or making sure we are breathing deeply instead of shallow breaths.
You can try writing things down as they come into your mind (I don't mean making a to-do list) this can help by externalising things as well as by giving your self a bit of a brain-extension to lighten the load in your head.
If any of your mental clutter is related to small quick tasks then just do them!
If your mental clutter is more long term and chronic then the above strategies may still give you short term relief but you may also need to take a step back and consider whether you have too many priorities or what unmade decisions are running around in your mind?
If you sense that you have too many priorities or decisions to make then you may find it useful to talk things through with someone. Consider what support you can get to reduce the priorities ahead of you - could you identify your non-negotiable top priorities such as sleep and nutrition and then de-prioritise the other things. Once you are managing the top priorities ok, then take one thing at a time from the other things.
Again with decision making, you can reduce mental clutter by identifying the decisions you have to make without adding on the pressure of actually making the decisions! This can be quite freeing and again gives you some head space to start using your processing and judgment abilities when you are ready to tackle each one.
Don't forget, I offer free calls to help (no strings!) so please feel to reach out if you would like to talk anything through.
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