08 | Mental Clutter + The Invisible Load
08 | Mental Clutter + The Invisible Load
In this episode, I define mental clutter and why a calm and positive mindset is essential to creating an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. After years of working in-home as an organizer, I realized that our internal experiences profoundly affect our external reality. There is a common misconception that a tidy home guarantees a clear mindset. However, internal and external peace are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, you can have one without the other.
I offer several short and long term strategies to help you listen in and have compassion for the soundtrack of to-do lists and overall noise running through your mind. Women are raised to be always noticing what needs to be done and anticipating what's next, and this is exhausting. I empower you to stop the hamster wheel of thoughts and allow yourself time to breathe. Mental rest and recovery supports an aligned and sustainable lifestyle.
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Intro: Welcome to A Pleasant Solution, Embracing an Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer, and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy and I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast, we'll go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.
Amelia: Welcome to Episode 8, Mental Clutter and the Invisible Load. One of the most profound realizations I've come to in both my personal and professional lives is how much our internal experience affects our external reality. All of my life I've been a watcher. I'm fascinated by other humans and I spend time observing others, their choices, their words, and their actions. I'm not inclined to do this from a place of judgment, but instead from a place of curiosity, I also watch or listen in to my own internal dialogue. I witness my own automatic thinking that occurs and I've learned over the past few years how to be more self-compassionate for the soundtrack running through my mind.
My grandmother and aunt on my dad's side were women of deep religious faith. My family of four attended Sunday surface fairly regularly when I was young. Then attendance trailed as I reached the preteen years. I share this because as long as I can remember, I've also had a deep sense of faith. Now let me be clear, this is not religious faith, but a sense of justice, purpose and positive forward motion. Ever since I was little, I've had a knowing that all will work out. This sense of grounding and safety is what I return to time and time again when the circumstances of life seem to be beyond my direct control. On today's episode, I'm going to share how I define Mental Clutter and why I believe mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. I'll touch briefly on the invisible load that women in particular that we carry and why it's a burden that costs us. Then I'll share a few short term and longer term strategies to address the mental clutter in your life.
In 2006, my husband and I were in the process of deciding our next steps. We were both in our mid twenties and wanted to make concrete progress in our professional lives. He and I both applied to graduate school at the same time. He was heading to business school and I into a PhD program in art history. We had open discussions about the many possibilities ahead, including starting our family. He was accepted into Harvard Business School in Boston, and I was accepted into Northwestern University in Chicago. To top it off, we decided to have our first baby. We moved to Boston for the first year of his two year program. I had deferred my acceptance and our daughter spent her first year on the business school campus. At the conclusion of that year, I packed up our household and moved to Chicago to start my PhD.
I knew I would be shouldering a lot mentally, physically, and emotionally during this year of long distance marriage. I also knew that the weight of regret of not trying would be an equally heavy burden. My mind was cluttered the entire year I was living in Chicago. Although your mental clutter may show up differently than mine, I define mental clutter as fogginess, uncertainty, constantly running chatter or noise in the brain. Its lists. It's “don't forget.” It's “did I remember to…?” It's shaky self-trust. It's questioning choices or decisions that you may have made. It's replaying interactions or situations to see if they could have been handled differently. It's basically the busy soundtrack of your mind when things are not at peace.
Some of us counteract the internal experience of mental clutter by exerting control over our external environment. Cleaning, straightening and organizing your external environment can bring a sense of peace and calm. Less visual clutter and more order does in fact lower your cortisol levels. Your heart rate and stress levels will go down with a clutter-free environment. However, and this is where the nuance is found, an organized environment doesn't always equate to less mental clutter. Please don't be fooled. My apartment in Chicago was beautiful. My 18 month old and I lived on the 18th floor. We had bright big windows and had a stunning view. I decorated the space to suit my tastes without regard to my husband, who was thousands of miles away. Every item in our apartment had a home. Yet, this was before my exposure to coaching.
Yes, I carried with me this deep sense of faith that our marriage would survive the distance and that our daughter would adapt to living away from her dad for the year. However, I wasn't as aware as I am now of how much our internal dialogue and experience would affect my perception of my day-to-day life. My brain was juggling so much. I was an academic reading a handful of books a week, learning the foundations of art history. I was a mother to a growing toddler. I was effectively a single parent. I had no onsite family support or babysitting, nor did I have onsite friends outside of the burgeoning relationships from peers in my program. My mind was cluttered because I didn't have practical strategies with which to handle my inner voice.
When I say that I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives, I'm talking about finding the alignment between the inner mindset and external reality. Again, you can have one without the other. Things can look beautiful and in control on the outside and be a bit of a mess on the inside too. That's what life in Chicago was like for me. Permanent change is having strategies to create calm and purpose internally and externally. My coaching clients come to me for both approaches. It's the alignment of the inner and outer that leads to a sustainable lifestyle. 13 years after my solo stint in Chicago, I became a certified life coach. I've been organizing clients in their homes for over a year when I went through coach training. My in-home clients were also experiencing mental clutter. Their lived environments were different than mine, in that my clients felt stifled by the over abundance of objects, the lack of order or systems in their homes, and general desire to create more space in their homes and schedules.
As we worked side by side, I watched, I listened to their stories. I observed how they made decisions, the fears, the stories, and the emotional layers of their lives. This was a gift. I was witnessing in real time how their external clutter and disorganization was a direct result of their internal dialogue. Again, this was a gift that they were giving me. When your brain or mine is running rampant with to-do list, self-judgment, decision fatigue, a desire for more help, more time, more support, I could go on. Of course, the state of your home is going to fall to the bottom of the priority list. You don't have the mental capacity to toss out clothing items you've outgrown, go through a stack of papers, or to donate toys your kids have long abandoned. When your mind is spinning on a hamster wheel, it's exhausting. Which brings me to point two today. Another term for mental clutter is the mental load or invisible load.
You'll hear these terms being used interchangeably and in future episodes I'll highlight some excellent pioneers helping to shift this societal narrative. Each of us, irrespective of gender, always has an inner narrative running through our mind. For those of us socialized as women, this inner narrative often goes beyond ourselves. The dialogue isn't simply about keeping track of our own personal responsibilities. It extends to the many other members of our household, extended family, our workplace, and around the general operations of our home as well. Women are taught and raised to care for others beyond themselves. Even when I was living apart from my husband, I was keeping track of what celebrations or losses were happening in his family. I was regularly checking in on my extended family. I was managing myself, our daughter, and the supplies and travel arrangements for us all. I'm sure you'll hear the volume on your mental load turn up as soon as this podcast ends.
The invisible load costs us as women, as humans, and it costs our communities. When your brain has reached capacity or is strained by the constant pull of noticing, anticipating, keeping track of and planning, your wellness suffers, it's hard to be present and engaged with what's happening right here and now. The constant chatter means there's no time for mental rest or mental recovery. Mental clutter makes it hard to settle down for peaceful sleep, which in turn makes waking up and getting started even more of a challenge.
The 40-hour standard work week does not account for the mental load of parenting and household management. This patriarchal employment model was built on the idea that one partner was at home full-time performing care tasks. This partner's unpaid job was the mental and physical load, and you and I both know that person was historically and still often is a woman. One of the consequences of the invisible load in today's society is that it stereotypically overburdens women in the workforce, inhibiting professional advancement because as the default parent, you are expected to be the one to leave work early or to stay home when a child is sick. Full attention is challenging to dedicate to a task when the mental load of life is buzzing in the background.
Less advancement in the workplace means less female wisdom at the upper echelons of companies. It may translate to less personal satisfaction, which then makes its way back into the home through strained relations with your partner. You may struggle communicating your mental load to others. I totally get it. When I was living halfway across the country from my husband, the first time, communicating how full my brain was to him was work. He was solely focused on the successful completion of business school and handling the emotional burden of not seeing his toddler daughter on a daily basis, nor was he the primary person running our collective household. I was paying the bills, completing forms, managing healthcare, giving updates to family, and keeping a toddler alive and safe.
However, keeping the invisible load to myself short changed him. He couldn't see or understand my stress because I wasn't sharing it with him. Instead, my burden was communicated via my tone of voice. If we had decided to continue to live long distance, it's possible resentment could have taken root.
Now, I've learned to manage my invisible load with ease. It's the most valuable gift I've given myself as a human, a wife, a mother, a small business owner, a caregiver, and a manager of multiple households. I've expanded upon the deep seated faith of my childhood by learning to trust in myself in addition to the larger trajectory of life. When I work with coaching clients, we identify strategies that will lighten their mental load. In between sessions, they practice and make adjustments to their inner dialogue. Then we troubleshoot or coach around sticky topics in our sessions together. This process is the act of permanent change. Your invisible load will not disappear. Instead, you'll know exactly how to watch it, to lessen it, and to distinguish between what's important and what's just noise. It's a skill that works with both internal and external clutter, and this is where the alignment begins.
So before I move into a few practical strategies for you to take away with you today, I want to recap. Mental clutter is real and it weighs differently on each of us. When your thoughts are cluttered, you may seek to create temporary calm through tidying, or you may find that your space and your schedule are cluttered. You're more likely than not moving through your day seeking to conquer the internal noise with external actions.
Second, this invisible load radiates outward, affecting others within our lives and beyond ourselves. One easy to apply strategy that will provide short-term relief is the brain dump or thought download. When practiced regularly this strategy becomes a long-term strategy. The more you do it, the quieter your mind will be because with frequency, your brain will be holding less overall on a weekly basis. I have a portion of my journal dedicated to downloading my thoughts. You can do this in any format you like, a voice note, typing it out, writing it on a scrap piece of paper. There's no right way, nor did you need fancy paper or - I see you - colored gel pens. Set aside about 15 minutes for your first few attempts. This exercise can be done anytime in the day. Step one, write down everything that comes to your mind, stream of consciousness. It's called a dump for a reason. You're literally dragging everything out of the garage in your brain and putting it in the driveway. The download should not make sense. It may sound like “order pet food, tell Sheila I can't help her with the project, broccoli, toilet paper, ice.” “I'm super embarrassed I wore my shirt inside out yesterday. Return form for roller skating.” “I can't believe my sister said that nonsense. I can't stand it when she does stuff like that.”
Your brain is holding onto hundreds of tiny bits of thoughts, feelings, and to-dos. If there's a pause in the flow of your brain's clutter, take a breath. Ask yourself, what else? Think about work. What else? Think about your family. What else? You'll know when you're done.
Step two, don't judge what you wrote. Just look at it with wonder and curiosity. See the jumbled set of words for what it is. The mental load you've been carrying around invisibly. There's probably way more in there than you expected. Step three, and this is an important one. Remind yourself that this is NOT a to-do list. Let me repeat. A brain dump is a strategy to put down the mental load, not to create more work for yourself. There may be items on the download that require action, yet this is not a to-do list. Some people throw their downloads away, which is a great idea. I turn the page in my journal. I don't go back and reread them unless I want a really good laugh. It's an exercise for creating a blank canvas in your mind and to exhale the clutter in your mind. It's about giving yourself permission to stop remembering and to let your mind rest.
Meditation is another excellent strategy. If you just clenched your teeth, that's totally okay. You're already familiar with the official benefits of meditation, I'm sure. Yet now that you know about the thought download, I encourage you to start your meditation practice with the download as a reference. Expect the noise, expect the clutter. Meditation is as much about slowing down, sitting still, and breathing as it is about clearing out your mind. Hear all the list of thoughts, just like in a brain dump, yet allow them to race through, then walk through, then crawl through your mind.
The key is to not judge them or be attached to them. They can be there and it's this permission to allow them that in time will help them slow down and dissipate. If you're a busy body, try foam rolling or yoga as a way to move while you meditate. Moving your body is another excellent way to unload the burden of the mental load. It's an easy way to get out of your head altogether. I've taught myself to run, something I never believed I could do, and jogging or running brings me immediately into the present. I can't worry, I can't fix, all I can do is run. So seek movement to eliminate clutter. Go for a walk or a swim. Learn to pole dance, play pickleball, surf, double dutch, or try a boxing class. These are all straightforward ways to rest your brain from the repetitive loop of thoughts.
Therapy, coaching and or a self-expressive creative outlet are three of the longer-term strategies to clear mental clutter. Therapy will heal old wounds and bring you to a space of day-to-day healthy functioning. Coaching will take you from functioning towards a specific personal growth goal, like building deeper self-trust, powerful decision-making skills, and speaking up more often for what you want. A creative outlet will re-energize you by reconnecting you with your true self and inner passions. By engaging in something personally fulfilling, you'll create a clutter-free mindset through fun. Well, that's what I've got for you today. I invite you to get curious about your mental load. Hear it as the chatter moves through your mind. Decide to set aside 15 minutes this week to let it all go. Try different strategies, build the practice into your routine if possible, your friends, family members, and health will thank you for it. Talk to y'all soon.
Outro: Hey, y'all my monthly Second Friday's Workshop Series is here. Join me on the second Friday of every month in 2023 for a practical, no frills, come as you are hour of teaching and coaching. I'll show you exactly how I handle one area of home organization, then the floor will be open for questions and coaching. We'll troubleshoot what's feeling challenging for you and get you unstuck on the spot. Find out more and register at www.apleasantsolution.com/workshops or via Instagram @apleasantsolution. Can't wait to meet you.
