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Declutter Your Mind (3 Tips)

Cory Muscara

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Cory Muscara

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Declutter Your Mind (3 Tips)

Personalized support for learning how to integrate mindfulness into your life. Delivered fresh everyday by our world renowned experts. Choose meditation duration:

Hi, welcome back to

your Daily Mindfulness.

In today's session, I'm going to

share three techniques you can use

to declutter your mind in a world

that requires a lot of thinking.

So these are three techniques that

I've found, especially helpful for

me in my life during times where

I've needed to think about a lot of

stuff, where I needed to get things

done, hold ideas, not forget things.

And I think in those moments, which I know

we can all resonate with, there's a fear

of, if I'm not thinking, am I going to be

able to be as productive as I normally am?

So hopefully this will help.

The first tip is by a

gentleman named David Allen.

He says the mind is for having

ideas, not holding ideas.

And instead of holding those

ideas, his suggestion is to

delegate that to something else.

If you have an assistant, awesome.

More power to you.

And you could have them think about it.

But the cheapest way to do this

is just to use a piece of paper

or the notepad in your phone.

Anytime you have something you need to

do or a schedule you need to maintain,

instead of, of holding that in your

own mind, make sure it's outside of

you in a place that you can reference.

That will be really helpful for not

feeling like I need to be keeping

all of these things in my mind

in order to get there than done.

You know, it's there.

You've written it out beforehand and

you can address it when you need to

and be present with whatever it is

you're doing when you're doing it.

This leads to the next thing, which is

planning out your day, the night before.

Now I know sometimes this feels like, Oh,

I'm creating too much structure in my day.

It's going to become more rigid.

I want to be more spontaneous.

But in my experience, if we don't

know what we're doing or the important

things that we need to do and when we're

going to do it, we ended up spending

all of our downtime thinking about

when I'm going to do those things.

Or we're on a call and we're

thinking about when I'm going

to fit in the next call.

We're doing an email.

We're thinking about all the

other emails we have to do.

And so by scheduling out your

day, even if it's just a rough

outline the night before.

It frees up your attention to know,

okay, at 9:00 AM, I'm going to do this.

At 11:00 AM, I'll do this important thing.

And at 3:00 PM, I'll do

this important thing.

It doesn't always go according to plan,

but having a rough outline gives you

the peace of mind to know that you've

already thought it through and you can

be fully present when that time comes.

And the third thing is

scheduling unscheduled time.

Allocate blocks of time throughout your

day where you just don't do anything.

One, this will allow you to feel

some ease knowing that those time

blocks are going to be there.

But two, those are time blocks where you

can let your mind go off, get caught up

in things that you want to think about,

imagine, create, instead of feeling

pressured to have to do that during

your other periods throughout the day.

So hopefully these three tips give you

a little more freedom in your meditation

practice so you don't have to be thinking

about so much, and freedom to not have

to be constantly thinking about what

needs to get done during your day.

Try it out.

Thank you for your practice.

And I'll talk to you in the

meditation until then take care.

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