'Tis the season for renewal in nature as well as in our brains! It is the perfect time to prepare our brains' fertile fields for yields of positivity and reduced anxiety! Following are some tips on spring cleaning your brain and increasing its tendency for more positive energy!
Spring Clean Your Brain!
The 1st day of Spring has sprung and new signs of life and renewal are everywhere! As the winter begins to fade away, it is a great time to check in on your brain and clear out the cobwebs. Tanya J. Peterson, MS, NCC, an Anxiety, Mindfulness, and Wellbeing expert wrote a great article with some very helpful tips for re-energizing your brain this season. Her article is titled “Five Ways to Spring Clean Your Brain” and is as follows:
“Spring is here, and with it comes spring cleaning! Spring is about freshness and renewal. It’s about new life and life lived anew. The ritual of spring cleaning is an important one. The idea of spring cleaning conjures images of freshening up a house, but there’s more to this ritualistic refreshing than just our living spaces. To enhance our mental health and wellbeing, we need to spring clean our brain.Before diving into the task, it’s important to note what spring cleaning is not. Deep cleaning is reviving our living space both external (our home) and internal (our brain); it’s not, however, completely throwing away everything we own or torching the house to start over completely. Spring cleaning of home and brain is sprucing and freshening and making things airy and enjoyable.
How to Spring Clean Your Brain
To wash and cleanse involves two primary activities:
- Removing those thoughts and emotions that are stagnant and murky
- Adding fresh thoughts, emotions, perspectives, attitudes, and actions that “disinfect” and invigorate.
The following actions for spring cleaning your brain involve a combination of removal and addition to effectively increase mental health and wellbeing.
Sweep out your cobwebs and brush away the dust and crumbs. What old, habitual thoughts keep running through your mind? Is your brain stuck in negative thought patterns? What about the way your brain responds emotionally to what’s happening around you? Identify these patterns, and then sweep them out of your brain by replacing them with more effective thoughts, emotions, and responses.
Let in fresh air. Open your windows to let in fresh thoughts and perspectives. Get outside into the sunshine. Sunlight is essential to mental health, as is movement and deep breathing. Take a walk in the spring air, and spend time sitting quietly in mindful contemplation while breathing slowly and deeply. Your brain will love this cleansing treatment.
Be nosy about the process. Smell is a powerful sense, stimulating memories, affecting mood, stimulating energy or inducing relaxation. Smell has a direct effect on the brain, so using it in your spring cleaning rituals makes sense (or scents, if you will). Essential oils can be used in many ways to enhance wellbeing. The wide field of aromatherapy puts essential oils into specific practice. Experiment with oil burners, diffusers, lotions, sprays, and more. Pick oils that will be good for your brain and unique needs. (see Julie's recommendations for scents below)
Clear the fog. Nutrition is crucial for proper brain functioning. In the winter, we often turn to comfort foods that are high in deliciousness but pretty low in nutritiousness (since I spring-cleaned my brain, it’s been free to do things like fabricate words). When we don’t consume proper nutrients, we can develop a sense of brain fog—sluggishness, thinking that feels slower, memory problems, etc. A spring cleaning ritual that involves eating healthy foods, taking vitamin and mineral supplements (with a doctor’s approval), and drinking plenty of water while avoiding heavily processed foods and beverages will boost your wellbeing.
Spruce up your surroundings. Spring cleaning for your brain involves adding things that enhance your life. Consider what it is you want in your brain. What adds to your brain and makes it a wonderful part of you? Identify and pursue passions. Add hobbies. Strengthen relationships. Create and do things that make you feel alive.
Mindfulness: How You Do These Things Matters
For extra cleaning power, engage in these five activities mindfully. Mindfulness involves giving your full attention to the moment you’re in. When you are mindful, you experience more of your life, and do it peacefully because you remove yourself from the trap of your anxious thoughts and emotions.
Pay attention to what you are doing. Are you using an oil diffuser? Pause to notice it, concentrating on the scent and breathing it in deeply. Enjoying a healthy snack or meal? Experience it fully rather than multitasking on your phone or ruminating over stressors.
Mindfulness makes each of these five activities more effective and enjoyable. Doing them mindfully makes each moment more peaceful and fresh.
Embrace spring, and enjoy the act of spring cleaning your brain. Taking action to increase your mental health and wellbeing is in itself the ultimate act of spring sprucing. Happy cleansing!”
Side Note: If you are interested in perking up your nose as part of your spring cleaning, I highly recommend getting flower essences from Lotuswei! I have been loving the impact their products have on my life and most specifically my nose. They have many different mixtures of floral, herb, and plant scents, aimed at helping you in specific ways. Try them out by purchasing through my Lotuswei affiliate link and please do bring up your thoughts on them with me!
What Are You Feeding Your Mind? Advice on lowering anxious thoughts and increasing positivity
You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you spend time with, the conversations you engage in. Choose wisely what you feed your mind. ~ Jac Vanec
We are bombarded constantly with reminders to feed our physical bodies with healthy and nutritious food. As important as those reminders are, we need to be mindful of what we are feeding our brains. Many of my clients experience anxieties, worries, fear and stress in their daily lives stemming from the negative things that happen in our society and experiences. These are legitimate reactions to the world around us, however, if all we focus our minds on is the negative, then all we will see is negativity.
What are you consuming?
As Zig Ziglar said, “What you feed your mind determines your appetite.” In other words, what we focus our attention and minds on will only focus our desire to consume more of those things. If we watch soap operas, reality TV, or politically venomous television shows, we will more likely want to consume more and more of them. Our thoughts throughout the day will return to the dramas that we have seen played out on TV and soon we will only see drama surrounding us.
Similarly, the more we read/hear about negative news in the world or gossip, the more we will conjure those things into our daily lives, even if inadvertently or subconsciously. What we lend our attention to is what paints our realities.
Just as eating unhealthy foods can cause our physical health to deteriorate and end up in the gutter, so too can negative thoughts and media. Our brains are great at finding things to worry about and stew over. If we reinforce the thought pathways which activate anxiety and fear we can powerfully alter our own views and realities with the world around us.
These changes can come on slowly but surely and they have the potential to lead us down a path to depression and ill mental health. In contrast, when we focus our thoughts and attention on positive, constructive, creative, and uplifting thoughts, we are likely to experience more joy, peace, happiness, and contentment in our daily lives.
Tips for injecting more positivity into your life
- Take an inventory of your thoughts and time. Pay attention to what you feed your brain. This can establish a good baseline and help build awareness of where your time and energy are going. If the scale of your thoughts leans toward the consumptive and negative, then it may be time to work toward shifting that balance.
- Pay attention to how much of your time goes into consumptive versus creative activities. Are you always consuming media, food, tv, gossip, products, or things that others create versus creating and contributing things that help and benefit others? The more we can focus on giving back to society and others the happier we as humans become.
- Try reading a physical book on a topic that interests you. Reading can help activate positive actions in our lives; it can even activate great conversations with others.
- Write! Writing a letter, a blog post, or even just jotting down something that has happened in your life in a journal can increase the positivity you experience. The act of writing can help you to pull your head away from negatives and toward positives.
- Feed your mind a good podcast. There are some truly great podcasts out there these days. The modern world and its technology has made hearing from different experts and understanding a diverse array of experiences, one of the joys of living. Try it out! Ask Julie for recommendations if you feel stuck in coming up with a good podcaster.
- Watch a documentary! We are all probably guilty of having the habit of watching a lot of tv, myself included. One way that I like to feed my mind is to watch a documentary on something interesting so that I am actually learning while spending time in front of the tv.
- Practice meditating. This involves practicing just sitting still and experiencing the here and now. Working on being present in our daily lives has been proven to quiet the chaos in our minds and reduce the anxieties that we often feel.
- Be curious! Talk to yourself and ask about why you do what you do or why you believe what you believe. The more we can question ourselves and get to know why we do what we do the better able we are to steer ourselves towards positive changes.
- Exercise! Even just a short walk can help our bodies and brains to release stress. This in turn allows our minds to be in a state where they can participate more creatively and productively in our daily lives.
- Help someone else. Helping other people will help our minds to think less about ourselves. Reducing selfishness increases happiness in most cases. Recognizing that we can make a difference in other people’s lives also helps us to keep our life and our problems in perspective. Don’t believe me? Visit a children’s hospital and you will soon realize how blessed you have been in your life and how lucky you are currently. Watching others with tough struggles and in tough situations remain positive can be very inspirational.
- Practice increasing your gratitude! There are always things to be thankful for and giving gratitude returns that energy back to us.
- Don’t compare yourself to others. We are all on this journey of life in our own unique ways. Don’t try to view yourself through the filter that others have built for their own lives. Life is too short to allow ourselves to be shackled by the expectations and lenses of others.
- Try something new! Eat something new. Try a new recipe. Visit a new place. Meet a stranger. Try a new hobby or sport. Including new things into our lives helps us to stay creative and realize that the world is way bigger than we often perceive. It is easy to get stagnant so add new streams to your “brain pond.”
- Reduce your consumption of brain “junk food” such as trash tv, talk shows, celebrity gossip, etc. Producers of such content are good at making the junk on tv addictive, much like sugary junk food can be to us physically.
- Drink less alcohol. Alcohol can negatively impact our brains both physically and through thought. Alcohol is a depressant so in small doses it may relax us but in larger doses it may also push us toward depression and anxiety.
- Watch who you spend time with. Try to spend time with like minded people who help inspire you to become a better person. Also take an inventory of the people in your life. Are they supportive of you becoming a better person or are they tied to an older version of you that needs to be left behind? Your feelings when you are around these people will be your best guide.
Working towards feeding our brains inspirational and positive content can help us to grow and prosper in this life. Even small steps can be taken which have big payoffs and increase one’s happiness.
Want to talk about these things in more depth while working through your emotions and how they tie to tension in your tissues? Consider trying it in your next session at Posture Massage! Happy Spring Braining!
