There’s some truth to the old saying, “out of sight, out of mind”.
When you have a big pile of junk in clear view, it does something to your brain. Depending on how your mind works, it will either cause you conscious stress (“I can’t work in this mess!), or subconscious stress. And putting it away (“out of sight”) definitely alleviates that stress to some degree.
But if there’s one thing we know about our brains, it’s that they’re not stupid. They’re pretty good at thinking and analyzing. After all, that’s why we have them!
If you just shove your junk into a drawer, push it all under the bed, hide it in the closet, toss it into the garage, or do one of the many tricks where you remove it from sight without processing it mentally, your brain knows it’s there. And that knowledge is always hanging out just below the surface in your brain.
If you ignore it, your brain will helpfully remind you of the junk as well, usually at the most inopportune times. You’ll be trying to solve a complicated problem at work, and your brain will suddenly start hassling you about the pile of junk you shoved in the closet. What does that have to do with your work project? Nothing, other than that it’s something else competing for space in your head – and your ignoring it, like ignoring a small child, causes it to pop up at inappropriate times to demand attention.
In fact, every piece of unprocessed stuff is like a little “reminder” piece of string that’s tied to your finger. A few isn’t the end of the world, but if you have enough of them they stop being little strings and effectively become huge chains that prevent you from doing things you want to do. Ever hear about somebody that got a great job offer across the state (or country), and didn’t take it because they’d have to deal with their stuff? They had ten thousand little strings tying them to where they were, and dealing with all of them was too much to handle.
Your unprocessed stuff weighs you down. And in order to get your freedom back, you need to process the stuff and cut those strings.
This is really simple to talk about, but we realize “simple” doesn’t always mean “easy”. We’ll be talking in the future about several strategies for dealing with all that unprocessed stuff, so that you can not only get free of the physical stuff, but reclaim the mental space and allow your mind to focus on more productive things.
We see this all the time when we’re doing junk removal. We don’t get people calling us asking to haul junk out of their mind – they’re asking for us to haul junk out of their house. But after we remove a bunch of actual, physical stuff, when we’re done we see that a mental weight seems to have been lifted as well.
Whether you’re calling us for junk removal or just reading this site, we’re here to serve you. If you have specific things you’d like advice about, please get in touch and let us know. We’d love to help you out in a future article!