The Unnecessary Complexity of Simplicity

“Minimalism is a tool that can assist you in finding freedom. Freedom from fear. Freedom from worry. Freedom from overwhelm. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from depression. Freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture we’ve built our lives around. Real freedom."

We are constantly being bombarded by social media, advertising, and many other things that distract us from becoming the person that we want to be and should be. Which is why we need to understand ourselves, and the difference between our wants and our needs, in order to get back to who we really are.

Due to being bombarded by so many things, it’s really easy to forget and get confused about what we truly need to focus on to have a more fulfilling and balanced life.

• Do you wish you had less stress, or didn’t have to deal with unnecessary stress?
• Do you find unnecessary relationships a burden?
• When you think about decluttering your life, do you feel overwhelmed and avoid it and keep going down the same path? Or do you make the necessary changes?
• Do you proactively make time for yourself or make excuses why you do not instead?
• Do you spend more time on social media, than with actual people?
• Do you have health issues, and constantly either avoid them and make excuses or treat them?
• Do you consider self care as a priority in your life?

These questions may seem, irrelevant, and pointless to take the time to answer but they honestly aren’t. When it comes to your well-being, you need to make time for it.

Think about some of the aspects that you want to change in your life, have you used either these excuses or a variation of these excuses. So that you moralize, not being proactive in making those changes in your life.

• Simplifying is not about taking away every luxury that we have
• It’s not about living in the woods, like a hermit
• It’s not about spending hours upon hours, doing life-changing things while turning our back on everything
• It’s not about having a stress free lifestyle, which is pretty much impossible.

A few ways that we complicate our lives and how what we can do about it.

Not enough time: Let’s face it, most people today are constantly on the go and rarely take time to breathe, and relax. Whether it’s taking a day off for yourself, or its five minutes. Regardless of the amount of time, one of the keys to declutter your life is to look after you! Coming from having a background in psychology, self care is an aspect that we often overlook in our lives. Why do we do that?

People have good reasons for doing this and bad reasons, sometimes people just selflessly and give their lives to everyone around them. Such as my late Taekwondo instructor and friend, who ended up taking her own life. On the opposite end, there’s people who think looking after themselves as being irrelevant, instead they just base their well-being on what they own, and other materialistic things. When we don’t look after ourselves, we’re taking away from a very vital need.

Whether it’s our mental health or physical health (technically it should be both), we need to make ourselves a priority in our lives. Taking the time for yourself helps you not only with dealing with your own life. It additionally helps you to see the world around you with more clarity, and understand what is and isn’t relevant to you.

The toxic approach to relationships is just that toxic: I’m going to be blunt, there’s a lot of idiots out there! Why do we keep these people in our lives? We suck at changing; yes we live in an amazing age with technology and our quality of living has never been better. For some reason though we all suck at relationships, still though. We have an innate fear of being alone or define ourselves with irrelevant relationships, or the size of our Facebook friends list. When it comes to relationships, it’s not about how many people are in your life. It’s about the quality of those relationships, decluttering the toxic people around you. Whether they are friends, family or a romantic relationship. If the relationship is more harmful and they take a lot more than they give, the only place in that relationship is, is in your past, pure and simple.

The more possessions I have, the more important I feel mentality: Whether it’s your obnoxious friend, who feels the need to compare who has the most credit cards. Really, anyone who defines themselves based on what they own instead of how they treat others and themselves. I know people who are rich and poor, neither of them defines a person. It’s the person’s actions and taking ownership of the things that they do, and also the things that they directly and indirectly cause to others. People like this are usually compensating, regarding having a lack of something in their lives. Such as they subconsciously feel irrelevant and invisible due to whatever reason, and then owning stuff and bragging fills that gap that they have in their life. When in actuality, it just makes it worse, due to having a poor self awareness of what they really need.

In conclusion, decluttering your life isn’t just about eliminating the unimportant irrelevant things that we waste our money on. It’s about how we treat ourselves and the quality of our relationships and our well-being. From a certain perspective, having and keeping essentially anything that’s unhealthy and harmful to our well-being is adding negativity and unnecessary stress.

That doesn’t mean to only focus on the positive or on yourself by any means. It means that people who are abusive and as you and others, regardless of how many times you tell them not to, aren’t worth the effort.

When it comes to you health, we tend to be a very fad diet type society. In addition, we base ridiculous health and nutritional information that’s endorsed by celebrities, instead of looking at what we really need to do for ourselves.

When we see something that we want, our first thought should be, "What attracts me to this lifestyle or product, and how can I benefit from it?" If you can’t, don’t worry about it. If it can help make you a better more well rounded person, then by all means use it, not to say that there’s anything wrong with treating yourself. It’s like everything else there has to be a balance. So stop, take a moment, and think about how I can help myself with the things that I should eliminate from my life.

The reason it's so unnecessarily complex, is that we don't like to change. It's easier to say things like I'm stuck in my ways, and any other excuses that stop us from making a difference. In the world around us, and within ourselves.