Have you ever had those days when your brain feels like it wants to explode from overuse?
You can’t focus to save your life as there are so many thoughts, worries, and extraneous bits of information swirling around in your noggin.
These are the times when you need to clear your mind and find a quiet corner of inner peace.
But how can you do that with the demands of modern life?
In addition to work and day-to-day responsibilities, we’re bombarded with distractions from our ever-present digital devices that keep us in a state of constant hypervigilance.
Add any extra life pressures (a move, the holidays, a career change), and our brains go into overdrive with all of the planning, worrying, and sorting through emotions — sapping our energy and peace of mind.
These stressful periods of mental overload require a bit of extra self-care in the form of mind-clearing.
Even a few minutes a day is enough to reboot your energy and recharge your brain.
When you stop ruminating, worrying, and planning, and simply empty your mind, it’s like stepping into a peaceful oasis where the stresses of life can’t reach you.
Here’s how to clear your mind to reduce stress:
1. Clear Your Mind With A Morning Routine
In the morning when you awaken or before you begin your daily activities, take five minutes to do some intentional breathing.
When we first wake up, we’re often flooded with thoughts about our tasks and obligations for the day.
Instead of giving in to all of those thoughts immediately, mentally set them aside and give yourself five minutes of freedom to clear thoughts and empty your head.
Find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted, and practice diaphragmatic or abdominal breathing.
Rather than breathing from your chest, when you breathe in, concentrate on pushing your abdomen out.
The abdominal muscles help move your diaphragm, giving you more power to empty your lungs.
Abdominal breathing decreases the work of breathing by slowing your breathing rate.
Take a few deep, cleansing breaths, then slowly breath in and out through your nose, taking natural, easy breaths.
You don’t need to force it — just relax into the breaths as you clear your head of unwanted thoughts.
As you breathe, focus your thoughts on counting to ten, mentally saying the number to yourself on the out-breath.
When you reach ten, start over again. If your thoughts wander or you feel anxious, gently guide your thoughts back to your breathing and counting.
Within a few minutes, you’ll notice your mind and body calming down.
This breathing recharge can be done at any time of day when you’re feeling overwhelmed, tired, or just in need of a mental break.
2. Clear Your Mind With Resistance Training Exercise
A great way to give you an immediate energy burst while clearing your mind is through a resistance training exercise.
It’s very difficult to have racing stressful thoughts or worry when your mind and body are occupied with intense muscle work that requires concentration, focused breathing, and counting reps.
Your brain becomes empty of all thought except forcing your muscles to do their work.
Resistance exercise has so many health benefits aside from having a clear mind and improved muscle strength and tone.
It helps you maintain flexibility and balance, manage your weight, have greater stamina, increase bone density, prevent and control many chronic health conditions, and decrease your risk of injury.
You can perform strength training with free weights or medicine balls, weight machines, resistance bands, or with your own body weight (with push-ups, sit-ups, dips, squats, lunges, and chin-ups).
When you perform strength training, you begin with eight to ten exercises that work the major muscle groups of the body, performing them two to three times every week and focusing on different muscle groups during each session.
If you’re a beginner, start with one set of each exercise, with eight repetitions, no more than twice a week.
Then gradually increase to two to three sets for each exercise with eight to twelve reps, every second or third day.
Once you can easily do twelve reps of an exercise, you can increase the weight or resistance. Sessions should last about 20-30 minutes each.
This type of exercise is a great activity at the end of the day when you feel low on energy and carrying stress.
It doesn’t require as much intensity as cardio exercise, but it stills gets your blood pumping and focuses your mind, allowing you to de-stress from the day and clear your mind of negative thoughts.
3. Ways To Clear Your Mind with Meditation
Meditation is a practice that has been proven through research to help you clear your mind, reduce rumination, sleep better, and reduce anxiety and stress.
Set aside ten to fifteen minutes a day to practice a short mind-clearing exercise with meditation.
The steps are simple, but you will need to practice consistently to “train your brain” to calm down so you can enjoy the inner peace meditation affords.
Here are the steps for a basic meditation practice:
Step 1: Set a timer for ten or fifteen minutes. Sit in a chair or on a cushion on the floor with your hands resting gently in your lap. Close your eyes and take a deep, cleansing breath.
Step 2: Start to notice each breath, both the inhalation and exhalation. Follow the breath as it enters your body and leaves your body. Try to focus your full attention on your breathing.
Step 3: When your mind wanders (and it will a lot in the beginning), gently redirect your attention to your breathing. Do this as many times as necessary during your meditation time.
Step 4: When your mind wanders, don’t judge yourself or the intrusive thoughts. Simply notice them, and then return to your breathing.
Step 5: When the timer goes off, take one final deep breath and return to your day.
The more you practice meditation, the easier it becomes to find that clear space in your mind that is calm and peaceful. And the effects of your efforts will last even after you’ve completed meditating.
Instead of seated meditation, you might try a walking meditation instead, especially if you are particularly agitated and find sitting in meditation difficult.
Walking meditation requires being mindful of yourself, your body, and your surroundings as you take your walk.
Begin by simply standing and becoming aware of the weight of your body moving through the soles of your feet and into the ground.
Become aware of all parts of your body, how they feel, and the subtle shifts required to keep you balanced.
As you start walking, notice the feeling of your feet lifting from the ground and striking it again with each step.
Become aware of the movement of your joints and the swing of your legs as you walk.
Notice the temperature outside and how it feels on your skin.
Then pay attention to the smells outside, the sounds of nature, and the various things you observe as you walk.
As you notice these sites, name them in your head descriptively — bright red bird, tall oak tree, babbling stream.
This may seem silly, but it keeps you grounded in the moment and your mind engaged in exactly what you’re experiencing.
If you notice your mind wandering or you have feelings of stress or agitation, name those feelings as well — but without judgment or anxiety.
Then simply shift your thoughts back to your observations through your senses.
More Related Articles:
The Benefits Of Practicing Self-Reflection
13 Mindful Communication Techniques
27 Must-Read Books On Meditation To Expand Your Practice
4. Clear Your Mind With Daily Journaling
If your mind is really preoccupied with a problem or worry, and it’s extremely difficult to disengage from it, then empty your mind by putting all of your thoughts on paper.
Perform a brain dump in your journal by writing in longhand everything that’s on your mind.
Write down what you’re thinking, how you’re feeling, and what you are worried might happen.
Once you get all of the negativity out of your head and onto the page, then create some positive affirmations that are the opposite of the feelings and thoughts you just released.
For example, if you’re worried you won’t get everything done in time, and you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed, then write, “I have plenty of time to do everything that needs to get done, and I complete my tasks peacefully and calmly.”
If there are real solutions you can enact to reduce your stress or negative feelings — like delegating or cutting back on going to events — then write down your thoughts on these as well.
There’s something about getting thoughts onto paper that helps us process and organize them.
They are no longer swirling around in our minds, but rather captured in black and white, relieving us of the stress of worrying about them.
Putting them on paper also releases energy to put toward creative solutions and a change in mood.
5. Clear Your Mind With Gratitude Moments
It’s calming to step back and look at all of the existing gifts in our lives that we sometimes take for granted.
We have so much to be grateful for.
And a gratitude practice has been shown to make us happier and healthier in addition to giving us a clear mind.
During the hustle and bustle of your day, take two minutes to close your eyes and think about everything you are profoundly grateful for in your life right now.
Think about what life would be like without the people you love, the health you enjoy, the home that shelters you, and the food that is abundant on your table.
Flood your mind with feelings of gratitude so there’s little room for any worry thoughts.
Calmly sit with those feelings for a few minutes, allowing yourself a respite from the incessant chatter in your brain.
Taking the time to clear your mind a few times a day will renew your energy and help you create a new perspective on what’s truly important to you this season.
How do you clear your mind during times of stress or excessive worry?
Can you begin emptying your mind today?
Are you ready to have a clear mind?
If so, choose one of these strategies and focus on it for the next few days or weeks.
Consistency is key to building a habit you can turn to again and again when your mind gets cluttered and you feel agitated and out-of-sorts.
If you practice one or more of these ideas regularly, you’ll find that you’ve created a protective barrier against the life events that can make you crazy.
Yes, they will still impact you — but now you have a strategy for releasing the steam and finding your calm center.
Would you like to help others?
There is so much stress and anxiety in the world today.
People all around you are silently (or not-so-silently) suffering in their daily lives.
Please spread the love by sharing this post with others on your preferred social media platform.
Your simple act of kindness can make a world of difference for thousands.
