Tools for the stressed, distracted, and overwhelmed (or, everyone)
The modern mind is a cluttered mind.
There's distraction – the addictive draw of texts, news, email, and social media that causes us to pull out our phone during every idle moment.
There's stress – the harried feeling of spending every waking moment in a state of constant busyness.
There's outrage – the seething anger we feel toward those who don't share our beliefs.
And then there are our thoughts – research shows we spend about 47% of each day in a state of mind wandering, time traveling through repetitive stories about an imagined past and future.
If our mind were a physical place out there in the world, it would look like the house of a hoarder. Random stuff strewn about. No open space. Pizza boxes and crumbs covering the floor.
But, of course, our mind doesn't exist out there. We only experience it up here, which makes it easier to ignore all this clutter, even when it causes us great suffering, even when it pulls our attention away from the activities, projects, and people that matter most.
This guide is designed to help you clear out the clutter and access more of what might be the most precious resource in modern life: mental space.
We moderns, with our smartphone-flooded overly-stimulated minds live on a steady diet of McDonald's-like mind snacks. The result? We're often oblivious to the present moment. Try these tools to create space in your mind from distraction.
Take a close look at your home and ask: "How can I redesign this space to make screen time more difficult and the activities that matter to me more friction-free?"
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Now ask: "How can I redesign my time to make distraction more difficult and the activities that matter friction-free?" Here are some ideas:
Now ask: "How can I redesign my phone to make distraction more difficult and the activities that matter friction-free?" Here are some ideas:
Why does the stressed mind feel so cramped, cluttered, and claustrophobic? Because in this state our nervous system spins up a storm of hormones, catastrophic thinking, and tension that makes it impossible to see life from a bigger perspective. Try these tools to create space by interrupting this biological momentum of stress.
Yoga is based on a simple but profound idea: the mind shapes the breath, the breath shapes the mind.
The big idea is that the breath and mind are inextricably linked. Stress in the mind changes the breath, creating a short, tight, and contracted pattern of breathing. But this relationship also works the other way. Lengthening and relaxing the breath changes the mind, creating less clutter, more space.
Yoga is a practice designed to reset these patterns. It changes the breath as a way to change the inner atmosphere of the mind.
What's the practice? If you're just getting started, find a teacher in your area who can help you develop good breathing habits and alignment. You can also find a vast array of classes and styles online.
Try this practice a few times a week. See if you notice your ordinary habits of breath changing. See if you notice less of the clutter of stress and more space emerging in your mind.
Yoga nidra means "yogic sleep." It's an ancient practice that researchers now call "non-sleep deep relaxation," a practice with all sorts of science-based benefits like reduced stress and anxiety, enhanced sleep and cognitive performance.
The idea behind the practice is to hover in that liminal space between being awake and asleep. It's a magical place, one that can take you into ultra-deep states of relaxation and open more space in the mind.
To try it, use a guided audio track. You can find these in the App Store or on YouTube.
Start the track and lie on your back with your palms facing the sky. You might also experiment with putting on an eye mask to experience total darkness. For extra comfort, put a bolster under your knees.
Now let go into this relaxed state and watch as the clutter falls away and the space in your mind naturally expands.
When we're stressed, our breath tends to be tense, tight, and originate from the top of the chest. If, however, we can shift the rhythm of breath and move its source from the chest to the belly, we can calm our nervous system, almost instantly. Here's how:
Notice how this simple shift in breathing creates more mental space.
Want to take belly breathing one step further? Try extending the length of the exhale.
An emerging body of scientific research shows that the simple extension of the exhale slows down heart rate and initiates the relaxation response. Here's how to do it:
Our neighbors who held different beliefs about politics or religion or guns used to "have a different perspective." Now they're "deluded," "insane," and sometimes even "the enemy." Political polarization has become a way of life and added all kinds of anger-based clutter to the mind. Try these tools to create space in your mind from all this controversy and outrage.
Take a closer look at all of the news apps on your phone and computer.
Now use the Marie Kondo method of tidying up a living space to tidy up your virtual news space.
Take a moment to look at each app, podcast, and news site. As you press your finger on the icon, notice what thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise.
Then ask: "Does this app bring me joy?" Or, if that's too much, ask: "Does this app allow me to stay informed without stoking my outrage at the other side?"
If your answer to either of these questions is "no", then delete it.
In the end, you may find that you delete most podcasts and apps.
The research on political polarization shows that the more like-minded people talk to each other, the more polarized they become.
What's the antidote to staying trapped inside these opinion echo-chambers?
Listen to the other side.
If you're politically conservative, check out the opinion page of the New York Times or listen to NPR.
If you're politically liberal, read the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal or the National Review.
In both cases, steer clear of the most inflammatory sources of partisan spin such as the purely opinion-based shows on MSNBC, Fox News, and talk radio.
Now for the advanced practice: talk to your friend or neighbor or coworker who votes for the other candidate. Instead of trying to prove them wrong, see if you can listen and understand their perspective.
The continuous bombardment of breaking news updates on cable news and online sites creates a false sense of vigilance and anxiety.
Unless you're a media professional or a political operative, you don't need to know about each developing shooting, bombing in a foreign country, or inflammatory tweet.
You can read about it later, once the dust has settled and reporters have a clearer picture of what actually happened.
There's something powerful about reading the news historically. Even if there's just a one-day lag between the moment the story happened and the moment you read about it, this gap turns down the volume of intensity and allows you to process the events with greater clarity.
So here's the practice: instead of listening or watching the news, see what happens when you read it. And if you want to get really crazy, try reading it only on paper (paper being that thin screen-free physical artifact that gets delivered to your door or mailbox).
Certainty is the rocket fuel of outrage. It's the force that propels conflict, hatred, and righteousness, destroying the far less sexy virtues of deep listening, critical thinking, and intellectual humility, virtues our world sorely needs.
The cure offered by philosophers from Socrates onwards is to cultivate a radically different quality of mind: not knowing. As the Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu instructs: "Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. First realize that you are sick; then you can move toward health."
How can you cultivate a don't-know mind? Turn righteousness into curiosity.
Notice when you feel sure that you're right and the other person or group is wrong. You'll often feel this as a contraction in your mind and body, a narrowing of perspective.
Then get curious. Ask: "Is it true?" "What might I be missing?" "What's the most compelling argument offered by the other side?"
Mind wandering might just be the ultimate form of mental clutter. It's that unrelenting voice in your head that loops through random repetitive thoughts about the past and future, all day, every day. Try these meditation practices to create more space around your thoughts.
This is the first in a four-stage meditation designed to create more space in your mind. When you meditate, you can either focus on just one stage (counting, focusing, expanding, or dropping) or move through all four in a single session.
Start by counting your breaths. Here's how:
Once you can count ten breaths, move to the second stage by bringing your attention to the breath itself. Here's how:
The invitation in this third stage is to allow your awareness to expand. Here's how:
Expanding the mind may shift how you see the world. But it still requires some effort. It's something you still have to try to do.
This final step is to drop this effort. To drop is to allow – to take in life from this wide-open view while simultaneously letting everything that arises in the mind simply be, as it is, with no effort to get rid of it or change it.
That's the paradoxical move of dropping. Let go of the technique. Drop any remaining effort to expand the field of your awareness. Let go of your desire to be a good meditator. The goal here – if there is one – is to simply sit and watch things as they are.
Think of this stage like a short mind vacation. There's nothing to do, nowhere to be, no one to text. There's just this. You're just breathing, just sitting, just resting in awareness, just allowing the whole show of life, both inside and outside, to come and go.
Sometimes our mind gets so cluttered that we need something more than new habits and daily routines. We need to shock the system – to reset the mind itself and, along with it, our entire structure of life habits. Try these tools for creating space by resetting the mind.
One powerful way to reset your system is to carve out extended periods of time away from the routines and distractions of everyday life.
You can do this in a variety of ways.
Going on a silent meditation retreat offers a powerful shock to the system.
Attending an organized retreat focused on self-growth and awareness offers a powerful shock to the system.
Spending an extended period of time in nature alone or with someone you love offers a powerful shock to the system.
If you're pressed for time and resources, even just getting out of your home for an entire day devoted to practice and reflection with only a paper notebook (no phone) offers a powerful shock to the system.
Nowadays, it's easy to think that we have to retreat from the world to create more space in the mind. But that's not true. We can also create more space by moving in the opposite direction, by diving head-first into the chaos of modern life.
It's a practice called "street meditation." There's just one difference between this practice and the way we usually meditate: the setting.
Instead of turning away from the craziness of the world, this practice is all about turning toward it. Street meditation is the practice of paying full attention to the cacophonous sounds and chaotic sights of modern life.
How do you do it? Try it out next time you find yourself waiting. Try it in the line at the grocery store. Try it when you're sitting on the plane waiting to take off. Try it when you're in the waiting room at the doctor's or dentist's office. Try it when you're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
See if bringing meditation into the midst of life creates more mental space.
There's one last way to blast open space in the mind. It's a riskier path. And yet it's a path that might help you break through the darkest, most traumatic, patterns of your mind. It's the path of psychedelic assisted therapy.
And yet this path isn't to be taken lightly. To do it right, you should enlist the help of a skilled professional so you can get a proper evaluation and the support you need.
Or, try this. It's a much less risky practice that I call Non-Drug Psychedelic Experience. The big idea is that, at base, psychedelics are "non-specific amplifiers." They turn up the volume on certain qualities of mind.
But this is where things get interesting because psychedelic drugs aren't the only non-specific amplifiers. Music, breathing, and other powerful stimuli can have a similar, albeit milder, amplifying influence on the mind.
Take a moment to reflect on this question: "Which of these tools do I want to take with me, outside of this guide, and into my life?" To help you organize the inquiry, you'll find a checklist on the next pages with all eighteen practices for decluttering and creating space in the mind. Put a checkmark next to the ones you want to turn into regular habits and then come up with a plan to weave them into your everyday life.
Hi, I'm Nate Klemp.
I'm the coauthor of the NYT Editors' Choice book The 80/80 Marriage and the NYT Bestseller Start Here: Master the Lifelong Habit of Wellbeing.
I'm also a founding partner at Mindful Magazine and a philosopher trained at Stanford (BA/MA) and Princeton (PhD).
Learn more at www.NateKlemp.com
Check out my book OPEN: Living With an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World. It explores all of these themes in much greater depth through age-old insights, new science and my own explorations into opening more to life.
Follow me on Instagram @Nate_Klemp where I offer regular tips, strategies, reminders, and insights for creating more space in the mind.