Spring Cleaning for Your Mind: 4 Ways to Spruce Up Your Life
Out With The Old, In With The Spring
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Wherever there's spring, there's spring cleaning.
Jews have a ritual around Passover of purging their homes of chametz, any traces of food with leavening agents that are forbidden during the holiday of Passover. Persians have a tradition of khooneh takouni, a thorough housecleaning from carpet to ceiling in honor of the Nowruz festival on the spring equinox. The Eastern Orthodox Church has Clean Monday, a day of leaving behind sinful attitudes on the first Monday of Lent. The Chinese have housecleaning on Xiaonian, the Little New Year.
As is our wont, Americans have turned these cultural particularities into a universal custom with commercial overtones. Spring cleaning is now as much a chance to sell us stuff as it is a chance to dispose of stuff. Witness this Martha Steward checklist that begins with, you guessed it, restock your cleaning supplies.
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And we dutifully follow this advice: The American Cleaning Institute may not exactly be an unbiased source, but a survey it conducted found that 72 percent of households engage in some form of spring cleaning, with the bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom topping the priority list. Windows are the top target (79 percent), followed by blinds and curtains (73 percent), closets and drawers (71 percent), and ceiling fans (68 percent).
Enough of trying to guilt us over our dirty blinds and expired toilet bowl cleaner. How about this year we focus on what really needs cleaning: Our cluttered, overwhelmed, anxiety-mottled lives.
Here, based on actual scientific studies, are four ways to perform spring cleaning for your mind.
1. Berry Up
During Covid-19, people began talking about the Covid-15, the 15 extra pounds many of us put on beginning in quarantine. Harvard Public Health examined 15 million patients’ weight changes and found that 39 percent of patients gained weight during the pandemic, with gaining weight defined as more than 2.5 pounds. Around 27 percent gained less than 12.5 pounds, and about 10 gained more than 12.5 pounds.
With day-to-day life nching closer to pre-pandemic levels every day, now is the time to burn off that Covid-15. One beneficial way to start: Eat more berries!
My friend Dr. Lisa Mosconi works at the intersection of neuroscience and women’s health. She’s the director of the Weill Cornell Women’s Brain Initiative and the author of Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Health. As she wrote on TEDIdeas, one of the best ways to improve our brains is to increase the number of antioxidants in our diets.
Of all our organs, the brain suffers the most from “oxidative stress,” which refers to the production of harmful free radicals in the body and our ability to counteract them. The more free radicals your brain harbors, the more damage done.
Antioxidants are vitamin warriors, she says. Among the most powerful are vitamins C, E, beta-carotene and selenium and plant-made nutrients like lycopene and anthocyanins. Those antioxidants are found in berries, oranges, grapefruits, and apples, along with leafy green and cruciferous veg (broccoli, cabbage, spinach, kale).
Spring is berry season, by the way. Someday I'll tell you the story of the time I marched in the Strawberry Festival parde in Winchester, Virginia. In the meantime, berry up your fridge.
In my work on life transitions in the last five years, one idea that clearly emerged from my interviews is that people shed things in moments of change. Just as animals routinely molt horns, hair, skin, fur, feathers, even gonads, humans molt mindsets, convictions, routines, dreams.
Ingrid Fetell Lee is the founder of The Aesthetics of Joy and the former design director at the global innovation firm IDEO. She recommends following a similar habit and molting bad feelings from our homes. “Along with clutter, our emotional baggage can get stored in our homes — often in plain sight — and clearing it out of our homes can help us feel more positivity and ease.”
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On her list of possible culprits: stuck-ness, guilt, shame, anxiety, and regret.
“Noticing regret in our homes reminds us to live in the present. If we look around and see remnants of relationships that didn’t work out or other disappointments, it can yank us backward and make it hard to move on.” Discarding an object that reminds us of those disappointments can free our minds from the constant act of ruminating on those blemishes and is great way to free our minds from mindless, needless stress. Another way: Stop following someone on social media who makes you upset every time they post.
3. Throw Stuff Out
Forget spring cleaning; how about spring purging?
Joseph Ferrari of DePaul University and Catherine Roster of the University of New Mexico study clutter. In a 2016 paper called “The Dark Side of Home,” they point out that our psychological connection to our places of residence is almost universally positive. Our homes make us feel safe, secure and protected.
But there's one unexpected downside, they say: Clutter, which they call “an antagonist to the normally positive benefits and consequences of home.”
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As Ferrari explained, “Basically, what this study found was that on the macro level, there is an attachment to our place, but on the micro-level, it's our possessions that we identify with.” Clutter is the state of mind in which we become overly attached to those possessions and lose sight of the well-being they’re supposed to advance.
The danger of clutter, Ferrari adds, is when "the totality of one's possessions" become so overwhelming that they "chip away at your well-being, relationships, and more."
You don’t need to go full Marie Kondo, but throwing away some stuff in your home is another way to free up some space in your mind.
4. Re-Make a Friend
As I wrote recently on The Nonlinear Life, the pandemic has been brutal on friendships. The comprehensive Americans Perspective Study released last year found that nearly half of Americans report losing at least a few friends during the pandemic. Ten percent reported losing touch with “most of their friends.” The study also found that those friends we have managed to maintain during the pandemic, we talk to less frequently and rely on less for personal support.
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My friend Noreena Hertz gathers impressive evidence of what she calls our epidemic of loneliness in her book, The Lonely Century. Up to 50 percent of people now say they feel lonely. And as she reminds us, “Loneliness is linked with higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide.” If you’re lonely, you have a 32 percent higher chance of getting a stroke, a 29 percent higher chance of having heart disease, and a 30 percent higher chance of dying prematurely than someone who is not lonely.
“In fact, loneliness is thought to be as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day.”
This task may be the most urgent for all of us: Make a new friend this season, or, better, re-make an old one. You’ll make both of you happier, healthier, and hardier.
And you'll do you part to make sure the epidemic of loneliness does not become even worse, even as the pandemic of Covid-19 becomes a little bit better.
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Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, or scroll through my other posts.
You might enjoy reading these posts:
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Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.
Or, you can contact me directly.
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