5 Ways to Declutter Your Mind This School Year

By Firdose Khan

Do you ever feel like there’s too much on your mind to properly think about anything? Are you always stressed, even when you feel like you shouldn’t be? Do you find it difficult to know where to start? In this article, we discuss ways to declutter your mind so that you can do more.

The key thing is to make everything as easy as possible for yourself. You want to set strong systems so that even if things start to go wrong or your mental health deteriorates, you’ve already taken care of your future self. The less things you have to think about, the more space you’ll have in your brain to think about important things.

Here are 5 ways to declutter your mind this school year!

1. Declutter your spaces

Something that’s often overlooked but plays a big role in our mindset is our environment and the space around us. One physical thing you can do to declutter your mind is to declutter the spaces you use the most. This can include decluttering your locker, backpack, bedroom and workspace at home. Remove unnecessary items that might distract you, or that remind you of things that are distracting.

It’s also important to declutter your digital spaces. Clear out collected emails that are sitting in your inbox, adding to the total displayed number. Go through old files and delete things you don’t need to increase the amount of space you have on your devices and make it easier to find things.

2. Write things down + Prioritize

This may seem obvious but it is extremely beneficial to write things down and write them all in the same place. Getting everything on your mind onto paper relieves the responsibility put on you to remember everything. You can do this with your general thoughts through daily journaling or morning pages, or you can do it specifically with your tasks through this 3 step method.

3-Step To Do List:

• First, braindump every single task that comes to mind. They can be as big or little as you want, just make sure to get it all down and out of your head.

• Second, you want to sort through the list of tasks and batch similar ones together. An example of this would be batching doing the laundry and folding your clothes, or batching reading and questions as homework.

• Lastly, you want to prioritize your tasks within these batches. Then, begin with the batch that has the most important tasks (or the one that’s most convenient, it’s up to you)

To make this as easy as possible for yourself, have a dedicated notebook or place to write daily task lists. Use it every morning, or every day after school, or whenever is most convenient to you.

3. Schedule and set reminders

Now, you might argue that you’ll forget important things if they are not always on your mind. This is why it’s important to schedule things that you keep worrying you’ll forget about, for example, feeding a pet, working on long-term projects, one-time meetings and appointments and even social meetups. By committing something you had to previously store in your brain down to paper and alarms, you can rest assured that you won’t forget it.

You can even use this method for building habits. Set a reminder of something you want to do that’s always on your mind but you can’t seem to just sit down and commit to doing, and then follow the reminder. It sometimes helps to have your schedules and reminders in multiple places. I personally have reminders in my phone as well as events saved in my phone calendar with 10 minute reminders on them, as well as written down in my physical planner.

4. Routine routine routine

One of the most effective ways to eliminate decision fatigue on a day to day basis is to create routines for choice-heavy times of the day. As a student, this might be the time between your classes, your mornings or your time after school.

You can also build and stick to a sleep schedule during school months. For one, it allows you to have a set bedtime. Creating a night routine is also beneficial because by going through actions your brain associated with going to sleep, your mind will begin shutting down for the night. This will help you fall asleep faster and also eliminate racing thoughts while trying to fall asleep.

Something often overlooked is after school routines. I personally can’t jump straight into doing homework after school, so I like to relax. However, ‘relaxation’ often turns into spending the entire afternoon on social media and then rushing to do my homework before going to bed. I feel like it’s important to have things for yourself to do that you know will help you relax, and create a routine that incorporates them while also giving yourself time to complete necessary tasks.

5. Make things as easy as possible for yourself

We all have those hard mornings, and for some it’s an everyday struggle. Waking up with a million things on your mind is not fun. It makes you just want to curl up in bed and stay asleep. If you have too many things to do, your brain will be overwhelmed and not want to do anything. To fight this first thing in the morning, try to make your mornings as friction free as possible. Make it as easy as you can to get up and get started.

To do this, I make sure to have everything packed and ready to go for the next day the night before so I'm not scrambling in the morning and forgetting things. I keep my charger plugged in so that I can easily connect it to my laptop, and put my laptop in my backpack so I can just unplug it and go.

This idea doesn’t only apply to mornings. It can also apply to starting pretty much anything. For example, if I have healthy food ready to cook, I’ll be more inclined to cook it rather than ordering out.

It’s all about convenience, and it goes the same the other way around. If you want to stop a bad habit, like say getting distracted by your phone while studying, it helps to keep your phone far away from you and make it difficult to get to.

I hope these tips can help make your school year a little less stressful and help take some things off your mind. This is by no means an extensive list, so feel free to do some of your own research online to find more information and methods that may work better for you. We at Neat Mentality wish you all the best this school year!