Creative Minds at Full Speed
As Creatives, we are often in a hurry to complete deadlines and unfortunately, stress is very common in our daily lives. This happens to be one of the many reasons why we must practice simple ways of decluttering our minds. Follow some steps that we can take to feel stress-free and to worry less. Our creative minds never cease working. We’re on a constant struggle dealing with the fact that our minds are processing thousands of ideas at once. Most of the time it feels like having 50 browser windows open–simultaneously! But we can’t forget the fact that we can ‘teach’ our minds.
We can teach our minds to set some things aside, to relax, and to recover. Our thoughts have the power to make things happen. Therefore, what we think is what we create. So…why are we creating so much chaos around our lives? Why do we put our efforts into feeling stressed–instead of feeling at ease?
The key to decluttering our minds lies primarily in self-discipline. We have to want to teach our minds to declutter. We have to accept that’s it okay to divide tasks and leave ‘something’ for later. It’s okay to finish your work on the next day. Sometimes being a Creative Professional, or an Entrepreneur, makes us think that we have to work 18 hours of the day! And while at first, this is the reality for many of us, we still need to take a break. As Creatives, we need to take our minds off of things and just feel ‘normal’. Being a Creative doesn’t mean that we are entitled to have burnouts every week.
Decluttering our Minds is Crucial for our Creativity
To give our creativity a boost, or an impulse, we must first have mental clarity. Constantly being in stress, and over-consuming the media, eventually takes a toll on our creative flow. Most of the time when we’re not working on a project, we turn to social media–podcasts, web surfing, online gaming, and we binge on Netflix way more than we should. But just as we enjoy focusing on all of these things, we also have to learn how to enjoy not focusing on anything at all!
We have to acknowledge the fact that FOMO (fear of missing out) is real and it causes anxiety stress that we really don’t need. To avoid this, we have to let go of the fear of missing out on things. The world will still be here when you come back from taking a break! But instead, we find ourselves falling into the trap of consuming everything that is hurting our creative minds in one way or another. The worst thing about this is that we don’t even realize it until we are completely burned out.
This is when we begin feeling mentally exhausted. We start feeling extremely tired and drained, we procrastinate and even lose our appetite. Sometimes when this happens, we don’t even want to see the light of day. Hence the reason why we have to take a step back and pause. We have to start decluttering our minds in order to create a mental space that allows our creativity to flow, and that allows us to maintain a healthy way of living.
7 Simple Ways of Decluttering your Mind
Finding ways that can help you let the stress out is crucial for maintaining a healthy mindset. It’s also super important for our creativity! Our minds are filled with thousands of thoughts and never-ending to-do lists. And without even noticing it, this can become a harmful clutter. It can slow us down, give us headaches, and we’ll end up with countless sleepless nights. So have no question about it–we have to start taking our creative minds seriously!
Here are some great ways to start decluttering our minds
- Practice gratitude. Research from Harvard Medical School has shown that giving thanks can make you happy! Expressing gratitude improves your overall health and increases positive feelings.
- Leave a whole day unplanned. This can be very hard for some of us who are strict about planning. But taking this weight off your shoulders for one day can really help your creative mind be more at ease.
- No screen day–grab a book instead! Read a physical book–sorry Kindle, not today! Feed your thoughts and your imagination by flipping the pages of a great novel or book of your interest.
- Automate your work. There are a million reasons why you should be doing this, like…yesterday! Tools like Hootsuite and Tailwind can really help you save up some time to just relax.
- Meditate at least 5 minutes a day. Meditation will change your life! But don’t take it from me. Research from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health suggests that meditation may physically change the brain and body. It can also potentially help to improve many health problems and promote healthy behaviors. So even if it’s in your bathroom, just start meditating!
- Practice Yoga. Just like meditation, yoga is about centering the mind. And when we calm our minds, all of our thousands of thoughts can instantly become mute. This means less stress and more mental clarity.
- Engage with your subconscious. Our subconscious mind holds emotions, intuition, habits, and imagination. This means that our subconscious mind can lead us in the right direction when trying to solve a problem. In the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, the author talks about a doctor who used to sit in a dark room for as long as it took, to come up with solutions to his problems. Sometimes, all we need is to take time with ourselves in order to have mental clarity.
Final Thoughts
While our creative minds are always at full speed, it doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy some quiet time. On the contrary, pausing to recover from our stress, can in fact be very beneficial for our creativity. Next time you plan out your week, or your month, write down a reminder to reboot and declutter your mind!
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