This thought was actually triggered when I was preparing for my maths exam last year and I felt necessary to record it because I know a lot of students, actually any individual goes through the same thing. Okay, so what does cluttering of mind actually mean? Remember after studying a whole day which started with intense motivation to study and now at the end of the day even though you know you have studied a lot but still on the inside you feel like you will forget some parts of it. We feel like we have added too much information in one day than we do usually. That state of our mind is cluttered.
The concept is quite simple, when we feel less confident about the input information we feel our minds to be cluttered. This is not only for studies but even while the majority of the decisions that are taken during the day. Any kind of decision making requires some kind of clarity in our mind that clarity only comes when we have complete confidence in the knowledge or information we have. And thus we can say that the confidence in knowledge is inversely proportional to the cluttering of mind thus affecting mental clarity, i.e. more the
confidence on information less would be the clutter.
Now that we understand what a cluttered mind is, let's talk about the ways to deal with it…
DECLUTTERING the cluttered mind.
Okay, let’s get down to the basics. We feel our minds to be cluttered due to unorderly input of information. When the amount of information is more than what our brains can process, the time it takes for us to understand the details lead to cluttering. The ability to declutter the mind can be enhanced by pushing the limit slowly and steadily. Now let’s make the information in order, We can do that by writing down information, that helps to get the information out in a flow and thus make the thinking streamlined. This is literally my favorite technique, I have this rule of “ If you feel stuck or unclear about anything, just write about it”. The idea behind this practice is that our brain tends to overthink some parts of information, we just think about the same thing again and again this would go on forever until it is stopped by some external factor. This makes us feel that we are thinking a lot in terms of content but technically we are thinking about a single thing in a loop.
Write everything down to convert your thoughts into words.
Secondly, slow down the information consumption, now I know when it’s the last moments before the exams slowing down isn’t really a neat option. when I say slow down I mean that take breaks where you revisit some of the initial topics, as more often than not the topic you go through multiple times the more confidence you’ll have in the information you read and thus would minimize the cluttering of the mind.
Constantly revisit initial information.
The third technique is about the internal understanding of the situation, All of us tend to think about multiple things at a time, the human mind is very fickle when it comes to thoughts. It jumps from one thought to another quite easily. We need to find a solution to that. What do we need here? To make our mind more stable, focused or better to say in our control because nowadays it’s really not in our control. This technique is present on earth for thousands of years now. We all know about it and we all have done it at least once in our lives.
MEDITATION. Its such a common thing in our day to day lives and holds the answer to almost all our problems. The only problem with it is, and the reason that it is ignored by many is that it is a long term practice. It takes time to actually affect your lifestyle, but let me tell you when it does, you’ll find yourself way more focused on thoughts than ever before.
MEDITATION
For now, I have only come across these three techniques on my own and by reading a few books. But I think you get the point. All I seek is to de-mistify the solutions for the things we practically feel helpless about. Try incorporating these techniques in your lives and see the result yourself. Especially meditation, that is gotta be a habit to actually reveal its amazing outputs.
So yeah, whenever you feel that your mind is cluttered or feel a lack of clarity about some decisions do remember what you read right now!