and the other detritus that tends to accumulate on the kitchen counter.
You don’t need to live in a Martha Stewart Living spread to reap the benefits of tidying up. If you complete your cycles, your spaces will probably look tidier, but tidiness in and of itself isn’t the point. By streamlining your spaces, you can streamline your thought process, and your brain won’t have to work so hard to tend to life’s details. The point is to maintain a level of organization that allows you to find your stuff when you need it.
I’m easily overwhelmed by messy spaces (although my standards are admittedly low, and I’ve decided book stacks are not in the mess category). These few tricks have helped me gain control of a situation that’s gotten out of hand:
When I can’t find something, that’s my cue to clean up. I nearly always find what I’m looking for in the process, and approaching the search with purpose keeps me from growing flustered. (Plus, by the time I find my keys, my space functions a lot better because it’s tidier.)
When I’m overwhelmed by the state of disarray, I stake out one clear area. In my office, it’s my desk. In the kitchen, it’s the island. In my bedroom, it’s the bed.
After I have one clear area, I clean up left to right. I learned this trick from a dystopian literary novel—and it really works. Instead of debating how to tackle the messy space, I move straight to the action stage. And my progress is visible and obvious.
Clutter, by definition, distracts us from what’s important and makes it harder to focus on the things that matter. This affects some of us more than others. I have long loved Susan C. Pinsky’s book Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD, even though I’m not technically in her target audience. She says that to those who find clutter especially distracting, simple is more important than pretty, practical is more important than aspirational, and clutter is deadly. When we don’t have our stuff under control, we pay for it with extra effort, time, stress, and money. The less we have, the easier it is to keep things in order. As Pinsky says, “The straightest path to efficiency is reduction.”
Don’t Duplicate the Work
Saving mental energy means not repeatedly tackling the same tasks. If you can do the work once and enjoy the benefits repeatedly, do it. Don’t duplicate the work!
For example, every time I travel, I use the same packing list (that someone else created for me, a strategy we will explore in chapter 9). Prior to working from the list, I felt anxious about forgetting things—probably because I forgot things on a regular basis.
But now my packing list captures the things I used to forget—my toothbrush, mascara, Altoids, literary stickers for book events. I simply tick off the boxes as I load my suitcase and don’t worry about omitting essentials, because my list has proven to be dependable.
Take Care of Your Body
When it comes to overthinking, our physical bodies matter. Overthinking is not all in—or about—our headspace. Any plan to prevent excessive overthinking has to consider what’s happening in our bodies, because when we take care of our bodies, we take care of our brains as well.
When facing a subject as complex as overthinking, it may seem silly to focus on these physical fundamentals, what Dutch psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk calls the “basic housekeeping functions of the body.” But that is a trap. Van der Kolk is the author of the fascinating book The Body Keeps the Score, about how traumatic experiences manifest themselves in our brains, minds, and bodies, and in his work he’s seen time and again that tending to our bodies’ foundational needs is essential. He writes, “Breathing, eating, sleeping, pooping, and peeing are so fundamental that their significance is easily neglected when we’re considering the complexities of mind and behavior.” But we do so at our peril, because the workings of the physical body are intimately tied to the workings of the brain.
Following my own 9/11 experience, one of the first things I did was quit caffeine, because my anxious mind and overtaxed body didn’t need additional stimulation. Anyone who’s ever lost their temper when hungry or lain awake overthinking in the middle of the night has experienced the tie between the brain and the body. One reason I lost my mind over the immunization certificates was that I was tired. The middle of the night is prime