How To Get Rid Of Mental Baggage
Psychologists discovered people better remember what they haven’t finished than what they’ve done. This, in turn, creates what I call mental baggage.
Baggage is an unresolved issue, sometimes we are consciously aware of it and sometimes we are not. Because of our need for cognitive closure, or, the state of mind where we feel comfortable with our ability to predict the world, it is necessary to clear out mental baggage; or else you will start to experience emotional problems.
So, the problem is mental baggage, how do you know what kinds of baggage you are carrying, and how should you go about clearing it away?
The first kind of baggage is minor. It’s like clearing the cache for your browser. These are all the little to-do tidbits we keep in the back of our mind. Maybe you browse the internet too much in your free time. If so, you probably have a few tabs open of things you are meaning to read or you’ve bookmarked. This is because you initially found the thing interesting enough to make an impulsive decision about it. You know you want to investigate the thing, let’s say it’s a 5 minute read on building an email list, but you don’t have the time right this minute.
This “right this minute” or “right this second” mentality can create a lot of subconscious baggage. If you are making decisions like this when you browse the internet, you are showing signs of having attention deficit disorder for when you browse (not saying you have ADD always). In turn, you hoard information because you don’t give yourself the time to finish the various tasks you started. Before you know it, you may have given yourself enough tasks to take hours to complete. Based on the way you use the internet, you will never have the time or energy to complete those tasks. And so, right now, look at your bookmarks, your saved comments, and your watch later video queue. How long would it take for you to comb through all that?
For me, a quick look through and I can see that I have around 40 comments saved on reddit, most of which are under the mental category of “I’ll need this later” and on the topic of computer science. The rest are reference materials, things I think I’d need to look up and don’t want to have to do a search for again, or I’ll need the reminder, and also things I don’t want to forget. In total those comments would probably eat up 100s or 1000s or hours for me to act on all of them. I have 104 videos queued up on my Youtube watch later playlist. Looking through it that’s at least another 100 hours of material. If I only had time for half an hour of videos a day, it would take me over half a year to catch up. Meanwhile, I am watching videos of new things all the time and never going back to my watch later playlist to find something to watch. See the problem?
I can’t be the only person who does this, so I’ll assume you reference hoard as well. There is probably only one way to resolve this problem, and that is to check the link, watch the video, read the article, or carry out the action IMMEDIATELY or NEVER. Don’t even bother to schedule it, because if you are the type of person who follows their schedule, you would already be doing that and not have any issues.
Instead, before you save a comment, bookmark a page, or click the watch later button, ask yourself: “do I really need to do this thing, like, ever?” What you are doing is overriding your impulse feeling. By taking a breath and stepping back, even asking if you are information hoarding, can potentially save you from the new baggage.
If you decide the thing is worth saving, now ask yourself: “can I do this thing right now?” If you can, then you must. If you can’t, do you have time to think about what it is long enough to decide if it’s worth saving for later? In the time it took for you to decide that, did you have time to take care of it? Let’s now look at this at a bigger stage.
The next stage, which is slightly less minor, is like clearing your browser history. Again, doing something immediately (which can also mean the same day) is paramount. Let me give an example. One day I came across a tweet that linked to a blog. Something about the blog post intrigued me, so I acted on an impulse and opened the blog in a new tab on my phone browser. Normally I would fall for the hoarder trap and leave the tab open for days, maybe even months, all with the promise that I would read the little two minute post sometime. Well, I reminded myself to just do it and I read the post. The post was okay, nothing special, nothing I remember clearly (I only have a vague recollection it was about a man, possibly an early wrestler and how he stood up for his beliefs, or something). At the bottom of the blog post the author asked his reader, if they did anything at all today, to watch “In and Of Itself” on Hulu.
I thought, sure, why not, I have the time tonight, I will actually follow his instruction and watch this thing. That night I fought the urge to waste time on some mind candy flick and carried out my promise (to myself) to watch the recommended film. I was extremely glad I did, because the film was amazing and I also highly recommend you watch it if you haven’t already.
The lesson I learned was nothing other than the simple pleasure of doing what you feel like doing. You see, often we feel like we are doing things we want to do, but it’s a lie. You may be doing nothing more than queuing up future mental baggage. The danger in this is creating the self-narrative that you can’t keep promises to yourself. If I develop a habit of fantasizing about trying this or that new thing, or watching this or that movie, or trying to cook this or that meal, read this or that . . . you get the point; if you develop that habit of breaking promises to yourself, you won’t be able to keep the critical promises to yourself (and others), stuff like keeping an appointment, finishing a work project, sticking to a workout program, following through on a training seminar, and all the rest.
Mental baggage adds up. First, you innocently curate a bookmark or watch list, and next thing you know you’re staring at a book you bought years ago that you still haven’t read. We are too quick to fill our time plates with more than we have time for. Last year I dedicated almost all of my free time to catching up on the books I bought through the years. I still haven’t finished. I keep bumping new things up the queue, primarily because the things that were originally on the queue were impulsively added. Now when I pick up a book to potentially buy, I ask myself with a serious mind, “am I ever really going to read this?” If there is even an inkling of a no, I put the book down. I have enough in the queue already. You do too, your queues are full. Start emptying them out by either discarding things you know you will never do (and you won’t even remember them well enough to know they are gone the next time you look at your queues) or bump them to the beginning of the queue.
Maybe you have other things than information that is your baggage. A disorganized closet. A disordered kitchen. A garbage infested car. Clothes piled on your bed. You have no choice but to begin from the ground up to clear those things. But once you are done, don’t continue the habit of promising yourself you will handle it later. Handle it now (or throw the thing out!). Because every time you look at any of those things that are unfinished or need doing, you are activating all your mental baggage, reminding yourself you don’t keep promises, and you don’t get things done. When you look around your house, you should see a clean and tidy place that demonstrates your ability to keep it together. When you look at your bookshelf, you should be reminiscing, not mourning. You should have a clear watchlist in your Netflix account. You shouldn’t need to catch up on anything in your social media feeds.
By eliminating as much mental baggage as you can, you are clearing the space to focus your emotions on the to-do tasks that matter. Handle things immediately, or not at all, and stop freely giving your time to everything that seems even mildly interesting.
