Perfecting My Business

If you're overwhelmed with your lifestyle and home, it's time for a change. Having a stressful lifestyle and a cluttered environment has a unique, but bad effect on your quality of life. It's time to simplify--for the sake of your health. 

Get Rid Of What You Don't Need

Where there's mess, there's stress. You might think that, even though you have a lot of stuff, it's not really in the way. Here is where you'd be wrong. Clutter in your living space affects your:

• Productivity. Too much stuff just existing around you can overstimulate your brain, leading you to become distracted more easily from important tasks, and sapping your energy. Procrastination is made worse by clutter. 
• Mental Health. Because clutter stimulates the brain, it is harder to relax a tired mind in a cluttered environment. When you're surrounded by stuff, it's like forcing your brain to work double duty all the time.
• Emotional State. The extra stress caused by clutter can actually lead to or worsen feelings of depression. 

You can make your entire life easier by implementing some methods to clean out the clutter. You can try:

1. Renting a storage unit. If you're too attached to your things to let them go, simply sort through your belongings and put the ones you don't need or use in a rented space outside of your home like All American Self Storage. Out of sight, out of mind--literally. Ever few months, visit your storage unit and slowly clear out the things that you no longer want. Remember, if you're not using it every day, the chances are, you never needed it to begin with.
2. Holding a yard sale. You can make some money off the mess you've been doing battle with. After the yard sale is over, box up everything that is left and donate it to a thrift store or homeless shelter.
3. Testing yourself. Often, the reason things pile up is because you never get rid of old things when you get new ones. Challenge yourself to always throw/give something away when you get something new. This will have two positive effects: you will (of course) stop building up clutter, but you will also think twice before buying more. 

Learn To Say No, Even If You Don't Want To

Some clutter is not tangible. Schedules, appointments, meetings, and activities can be type of social clutter that affects you just as much as physical stuff. Often, the over-scheduled life occurs when:

• you have trouble saying no to others. The next time someone asks you if can make brownies for the bake sale, simply tell them no. One of the easiest ways to reduce stressors on your time is to say no to invitations and to delegate tasks to other people. 
• you have a mental need to stay busy. Productivity has an amazing positive effect on the brain, but busy-ness is not that same as productiveness. Sometimes, people will overcompensate for emotional needs or past trauma by staying busy in order to keep themselves from feeling or thinking about it. Often, lives that are too full of tasks that simultaneously lack meaning need professional intervention by a psychologist. 
• you have something in your life that demands too much time, leaving too little for other pursuits. For some it is work, for others it is school. The key is knowing when to quit. 

Run It Out

Exercise is a physically stressful activity, which means your body releases stress hormones, like cortisol, into the bloodstream. These give more power to your muscles and raise your heart rate. However, as you continue to work out, your body's threshold level for stress increases-- it takes more stress on the body to release these hormones.

Occasional exposure to stress hormones is good thing. When people are chronically overstimulated, however, the body goes into a permanent stressful state, and these hormones actually start negatively affecting health. Therefore, exercise helps prevent daily stress from hurting your body, as it continually raises your body's ability to deal with stress without triggering hormone release. 

You can enjoy your life more fully when you are clutter and stress free.