(Use this declutter your life checklist to clear your personal life from emotional clutter. These 3 areas are most often overlooked by even top declutterers!)
Every 40 seconds a person ends his life. Mostly, one of the causes is over accumulated personal life clutter that eventually overpowers them.
While hopefully most of us are not at that extreme stage, but it is critical to pay importance to personal clutter for mental health and stability.
How To Declutter Your Life And Reduce Stress
Last year we decluttered and deep cleaned our entire house and my overall stress lowered greatly.
But this year, even though we’re keeping our physical belongings under check, my stress is at an all-time high.
And even when things seem fine on the surface, the feeling of unrest had been gnawing at me.
So I started working on decluttering my life at a very deep and a personal level.
I’m following a training by Denise Duffield about manifesting good things in life and to break the old cycle of bad things happening repeatedly.
Guess what? Decluttering is the first of the 5 steps in the training. Denise talks about 4 kinds of clutter.
We dealt with home clutter in another post you can read here.
Let me share the things I have been working on in the other three areas of my life following the training.
Physical Declutter
This step involves taking each and every part of our body into consideration to see the issues we are compromising with.
As I went through the checklist of my body parts, here’s what I realized about my:
☑️ Hair: I had not been happy with how my hair texture got after baby #2, because I didn’t take the time to oil or apply egg and yogurt masks like I always used to. I even stopped coloring my hair.
☑️ Scalp: The cold weather made my scalp dandruffy. I used to apply lemon juice back in the city every time half an hour before the shower and I never got dandruff. Why was I holding onto this dandruff?
☑️ Face: I gave up daily almond masks and weekly deep cleansing and scrub a while back because… it’s just so easy not to do it. But the resultant dull skin has not been pleasant. During this training, though, I started doing this again. These days I’m applying the mask while brushing my teeth, brushing my son’s teeth and washing my baby in the morning.
☑️ Ears: My allergy makes my ears dry and itchy. In order to avoid medicine, I would hold onto the irritation and just try to sleep away the issue, but now I have been taking medicine or steam every time I’m uneasy.
☑️ Eyes: One of the questions in the training made me think, am I happy or is there anything I know I can do to improve? So about my eyes, even though I don’t have any problem, I thought I would still love to have longer lashes, I have made it a habit to apply coconut oil on them every day. Takes 5 seconds max.
☑️ Nose: Working to remove any blackheads regularly.
☑️ Neck: I felt that because of computer work over the years, I’m not very mindful of my posture. Now I keep my neck straight as much as I can remember instead of keeping forward heads.
☑️ Upper lips: Lose that mustache!
(Yuck, sorry!)
☑️ Shoulders: I intentionally relax my shoulders which are otherwise stiff and raised due to routine stress and workload and I don’t even notice.
☑️ And so on for the rest of the body down to the toes…
Key Points…
Solve any pending issues like doctor check-ups, due hair cuts, etc.
If there is no problem, we can still think of ways of improving every part of the body at the best level possible up until we feel happy about ourselves.
You don’t have to do all this in one day, just keep your eyes on decluttering all and any, as Denise says, ‘niggling’ thoughts and feelings in our mind about ourselves.
Keep in mind,
Compromise is a slippery slope.
There is a lot more to work on regarding this. If you would like to dig into further detail on this, then do check out the Advance Manifesting course by Denise Duffield. She will take you into past thoughts and hurts that come up around our image of our body that needs decluttering strategically since they may be super sticky.
(I get no money for endorsing this resource but it’s helping me heal from the inside and out so well, I feel rejuvenated and really want to share with you what’s working for me.)
Lifestyle Declutter
Denise says,
If you’re putting up with annoyances daily, you’ve got a huge amount of mental and emotional clutter.
~ Denise Duffield in Advanced Manifesting Formula
The biggest lifestyle annoyance for me was living in one tiny guestroom for the past 4 months because of my husband’s military posting. Yes, seriously. One room and a bathroom, that’s all.
Living in a tiny space with 2 kids AND our everyday use items had been getting on my nerves and we quarreled over the smallest things out of frustration too often.
But I couldn’t gather the courage to solve this problem which would definitely mean taking strict measures or doing hard work like moving back without him.
Until after the lesson I learned about lifestyle clutter. (Still midway, so details later.)
Examples of other lifestyle clutter I’ve gotten more conscious about are:
☑️ Why am I holding onto unnecessarily painful positions when I have better opportunities?
☑️ Is everything around me in good working order?
Mostly we compromise on thoroughly cleaned, unbroken or average belongigns that don’t even make us happy.
☑️ Do my food choices make me feel good after I’ve had a meal?
☑️ Am I happy about my:
- current friendships?
- clothes?
- sleep routine?
- exercise?
- finances?
Related: Cluttered mind? Try a step by step brain dump!
Emotional Declutter
This one is the hardest.
You need to get rid of:
- Hidden Beliefs (mostly coming from past experiences, environment, learning, etc)
- Fears (also because of past encounters or because of our negative thinking)
- Memories that hurt us but we haven’t forgiven or forgotten them.
Emotional decluttering is the most important one of all as Denise says its the key to manifesting your ideal life or like I shared, in some unfortunate cases, the key reason why people even end up taking their life.
☑️ Uncovering hidden beliefs: For example, one of the hidden beliefs I have had has been that I’m unlucky. (So hard sharing this hidden belief publically). Voices from the past (mostly family) constantly drill this in my head every time I’m about to do something big- I stop and think I’m going to mess this up too, I won’t make it just like the other past XYZ experiences. I start looking for proof from my past to validate this belief instead of looking for proof to disqualify it.
Also, I tend to blame everything by default to people in my family. Like, I’m short-tempered because I’m just like so and so. I’m sad because of this or that person who did blah blah to me.
Do you do that too?
☑️ Forgiving: The training also makes us start a list of every single hurtful memory of the past that you can think of.
Then one by one forgive everything in your heart. I have cried my eyes out and this part has taken longer than I want it to. Even then, every time a memory hurts me, I go back to forgiving the person.
I cried my eyes out and secretly even got mad at Denise for not understanding our problems.
How ignorant of me, because that exercise alone eventually turned my life 180 degrees.
Great things have happened to me since then. As if, I cleared out the heavenly path for good things to be able to enter into my life once again.
Forgiving is freedom. That the thought or event no longer hold power over us.
Want to remember this declutter your life checklist for later?
As a side note, do you struggle forgiving things that are still in your present and hurting you routinely?
Maybe these things need a lifestyle declutter? I dunno, what do you think?
☑️ Overcoming fears: Denise suggests to try everything possible, like affirmations, afformations, EFT to overcome fears that stop us from taking action.
My Results
As I work on decluttering my personal life at such a deep level, strange things have been happening, every small thing I wish, somehow appears in my life. There are some things I say that I don’t even mean to have very badly but they appear out of nowhere.
My stress is sooo much lower as long as I’m doing this decluttering work bit by bit. I used to feel my nerves would explode one of these days but my mom mentioned to me the other day that she’s heard a calm and happiness in my voice after a long time. Way to go!
I’m still at step 1 (declutter your life) of this manifesting game. I will keep you posted on more results as I make progress.
Declutter Your Life Checklist: Conclusion
To sum it all up, this cleaning season, declutter not just your physical possessions, but the thoughts, habits, relationships, feeling and circumstances that don’t serve you. No matter how slow you go, keep the trajectory of decluttering your life of unnecessary things upward. Improve at least one bit every day. Working on at least one of these things has made a huge difference. New opportunities and solutions have started showing up because I’m making space for them in my life. Do try this declutter your life checklist for yourself too.
This was eye opening, Hena. I will look into her training. Thank you!
Thanks for reading, Joni!