Copyright © 2020 by Justin Moore All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Created with Vellum CONTENTS Introduction 1. What is Brain Clutter? 2. Slowing Down 3. Retrain Your Brain 4. Focus and Find Your Center 5. Managing Your Thoughts 6. Living an Organized Life Conclusion INTRODUCTION “I forgot about that meeting, I have to run to get there. I’m going to be late paying that bill. Where did I put my keys? Why can’t I remember anything these days? I feel like I’m going crazy!” Does this sound familiar? If you, you have the symptoms of a cluttered brain. This means you are juggling a lot in your life and it is pulling you in a lot of different directions. This leaves your thoughts jumbled up into an incomprehensible mishmash. This will leave you stressed and exhausted, which will keep you from putting your best foot forward in your daily life. You don’t need to worry. You are not going to go crazy. Nothing is horribly wrong with you. You just have too much noise playing in your head right now, and some of it needs to be shut off or quieted down. It will be easier to do than you might think. To make your thoughts come to you in a more organized way, you need to create order in your mind. This means you need to reduce your stress, which is the major force driving your brain to the cluttered state it is in now. This might seem like a daunting task, but this book is going to take you through the process. You will find out why this happens to you and how to make it stop. If you commit to it, before you know it you will find a sense of inner peace. I WHAT IS BRAIN CLUTTER? D� you ever have those days where you feel like you cannot put two thoughts together? You have a lot on your mind and are trying to fulfill all of your responsibilities, and it does not seem like there is any way to accomplish everything you need to. You might have some problems in your interpersonal relationships and you are worried about whether or not you are going to be able to find a solution for them. Something might have slipped your mind and you are trying to figure out how to correct that mistake. You feel like a million thoughts are running around in your mind at once and you cannot keep up with them. You are stressed to the high heavens and you feel like your mind is a car that is driving straight off of a bridge at a hundred miles per hour. f this is happening to you, it means you are suffering from a cluttered brain. You might have been worrying that you are losing your mind and are going to have an inevitable breakdown because that is what prolonged stress does to your mind. That is the source of all of your troubles- a term you have probably been hearing your entire life. It is one of the most common problems in the world and yet it still has a way of sneaking up on people, and that is understandable. Everyone feels pressure from society to always have it together. Those who seem like they do are lauded for doing so. Picture that “supermom”- she goes to work looking perfectly put together every morning and is the most productive member of the team, and then she goes back home to cook dinner for the family, and even then she still has the social life and energy to go out with friends. Everyone wants to be that person. Unfortunately, they are aspiring to live up to an impossible standard. That person is a fictional character. You are not always going to be at your best. Stress T Y gets to the best of us. Many times we do not share when we are feeling overwhelmed because that comes with a sense of shame. You might think you have failed and have concerns about others not thinking you are mentally stable. he fact that you worry about this proves that you are sane. You know that there are limits to what you can give out per day. The mentality that is actually “crazy” is when someone thinks a constant fast- paced lifestyle is sustainable. Think about a time when you had to exert a great deal of physical or mental force for a long period of time, such as renovating a room in the house or staying up all night working on a project. It takes every ounce of life force you have to complete your task, and all you want to do afterward is go to sleep. When you wake up, it will probably be late in the morning and even after sleeping for a long period of time, you will still not feel like getting up, probably feeling tired or sore. After you finally manage to get out of bed you come to the realization that it is going to be a slow day. You need to have time to recharge. If you do not rest, your body’s immune system will be unable to fight infection and your mind will be vulnerable to stress. ou might think it’s strange when I tell you stress is not actually the big bad monster it is made out to be, but it is true. Life naturally comes with stress. Everyone deals with it on a daily basis. There are things we have to do that we would rather not do. You will have a lot of expectations placed on you at once. You will run into unexpected problems. Our relationships are not always harmonious, and when they are not it is an uneasy time. How we respond to stress is the key. It becomes overwhelming when we internalize it, which is why it is so important to learn how to handle it in healthier ways. I T P rioritize Your Mental Health You need to prioritize your mental health for many reasons. First, you want to do this for yourself. A person with a cluttered mind tends to loathe to put themselves anywhere on the priority list because they fear being selfish, so just humor me for a minute and think of it in another way. You are helping the people in your life when you prioritize your mental health. We only give what we can. It is a romantic thought to believe we can give everything we have and then still find a way to give some more, but it is not realistic. When you are low on fuel, you will feel tired. This means even small donations will seem like too much. magine a printer that has run out of ink. You can order it to print out well-defined pictures all you want, but it is only going to produce less colored and more faded content until eventually, you will not be able to get anything from it. That is because something that has not been given good things cannot be expected to put out good things. The same thing goes for yourself. When you are overwhelmed by stress and do not feel like you could ever get everything done that you need to as you come up with more responsibilities to pile onto that already impossible list, there is no way that you are going to be giving your best performance. here is a common misconception that a higher level of stress will lead to increased productivity. Actually, the opposite is true. Some people will even go as far as to say they work the best pressure, not realizing that what that really means is that they procrastinate, meaning they have to put everything together at the last minute, and because they did a lot in a short amount of time they confuse that for motivation. The two could not be any more different. Motivation is what will cause you to go the extra mile in your work life. There are stimulated W T nerves involved, but that is different from anxiety, which comes out when we feel like we need to fight for our well-being on some level. This means you are in survival mode. This does not bring about the sort of creativity and feeling of freedom needed to be productive. hen you are feeling stressed, you will actually be much less likely to do the things you need to do. We do not like feeling negative emotions and will avoid them if at all possible. That is what causes you to put off a big project until the last minute. You look at it as this impossible task and this is how you end up discouraging yourself from working on it. This is because the project is a source of stress, so you would rather look away from it and take part in something that does give you joy. You tell yourself “I’m just going to take this one night off, and then tomorrow I am going to power through the entire thing. However, when tomorrow comes, you feel no better about taking on this challenge than you did yesterday. In fact, you probably feel even worse, so you tell yourself you are just going to give yourself one more day off. The cycle repeats itself until there are not any more days to put it off and the deadline has arrived. Any task that is done in a rushed and panicked state is going to be riddled with errors. his means while you created a lot of content in a short amount of time, you were not productive. True productivity comes from a place of caring about your work, putting thought and effort into it, and considering the best possible way to present your idea. You do not have that option when you are throwing something together at the last minute. You will not remember much of what you did because you were just trying to achieve the bare minimum in a strict time constraint.