The rise in popularity of minimalism, minimalist principles, and simple living teaches us one thing. Excess consumption does not make us happier. More and more, people are feeling the effects of too much stuff.
However, minimalism involves more than just reducing the number of physical possession you own.
We are beginning to realize that minimalist principles are not so much about what we remove, as they are about clearing space for those things that matter most in our life.
We’re searching for ways to slow down and be more intentional. Most of our lives are lived at warped speed. Days, hours, and minutes go by without even realizing it.
We’re so surrounded by busyness that it has become the norm. But here’s the thing – we’re not made to be totally exhausted and stressed out all the time.
If you are at all relating to this, practicing these minimalist principles may be just what you need to simplify your life.
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1. Declutter
The first minimalist principle to start simplifying your life is to clear out the physical clutter. I’m not talking about getting rid of everything, but only eliminating unnecessary things that prevent you from living the life you were made for. You see when you clear the clutter you create time and space to live your best life right now!
Decluttering your possessions has so many benefits outside of your home. These include:
Improving Your Finances
First, when you have lots of stuff, you often don’t even realize what you have or where it is. If you can’t find something, you go out and purchase it again. Overdue fines and late fees happen because we misplace things. Forget to pay a bill buried amongst the clutter result in accruing late fees.
Improving Your Mental Well-Being
Clutter causes stress. Clutter is overloading your senses and making you feel stressed. The stress is exasperated because you cannot maintain your home. With excess clutter, you miss place items, waste time looking for things, and have general feelings of overwhelm.
Improving Your Physical Health
As I said above clutter causes stress and there’s no question that stress is incredibly harmful to our physical health. But in addition to the physical dangers of carrying around a lot of stress, excess clutter may even be making you fat. Yes, it’s true, research has shown that there is an association between the clutter people have, and their excess weight.
Another danger to your health from too much clutter is that clutter results in excessive dust and animal dander. When your home has a lot of dust and dander, allergies and asthma symptoms will increase.
Improving Your Ability to Accomplish Goals
Eliminating physical clutter will help you achieve your goals. You see, when you have an excess of stuff you spend extra time caring for your stuff, this limits the time you have to work on your goals.
Additionally, searching for lost keys and papers distracts you and steals your focus. When you are distracted and unfocused you are more likely to suffer missed opportunities.
Proper time management is a key component to achieving our goals. Excess clutter taxes your time and has a direct impact on your goals.
Improving Your Atmosphere at Home
Excess clutter robs your home of peace and prohibits hospitality. When your home is a mess from excess clutter, the last thing you want is to have people stop by. It can be embarrassing as you come up with excuses for why your home is messy. Or if you know guests are coming, rather than focus on your guests, you are running around trying to clean up before they get there.
Instead of your home being a haven for your family from the natural stresses of the outside world, your home becomes stressful itself because of the excess clutter everywhere.
If you clear away much of the clutter in your home you will likely discover that the benefits are much greater than you had anticipated. Clearing out the clutter frees up space for wonderful changes in your life.
2. Identify The Essential
The next minimalist principle to start simplifying your life is to start identifying what is essential or most important in your life.
If you don’t know what’s important to you there’s no way for you to properly prioritize your life. Greg Mckeown, in his book Essentialism, talks about being a story in someone else’s life when we don’t define what is essential and what is not. We end up doing what we’re told we should want.
But following minimalist principles is about clearing space to focus on what matters most. Therefore you must identify and learn what is important to you — not what you’re told to want.
By knowing YOUR priorities, it’s so much easier to make decisions for what fits into your life and what doesn’t.
The best place to start setting out your priorities is to take a good look at your calendar. Is there anything that could be removed to make life simpler?
Simplify your schedule by saying no to unnecessary requests. This doesn’t mean that you need to become completely antisocial. It does, however, mean saying “no” more often so that you can say “yes” to the things that really matter to you.
Practicing minimalist principles to simplify your life is about setting and honoring your boundaries.
3. Purge Your Closet
Even if you do not declutter your entire home, purging your closet will go a long way towards simplifying your life.
Decision fatigue is real. By reducing the number of clothing items you have, or by creating a capsule wardrobe, you reduce the number of decisions you have to make each morning. You’ll no longer stare into an overstuffed closet thinking I have nothing to wear.
If you change your mindset about your clothes, your life will reflect it.
Get rid of the clothes you don’t love and don’t wear. You deserve to feel fabulous in everything you wear. To start, take everything out of the closet first. Create three piles, one for donations, another for things to throw out, and one for items you’ll keep. Then put the items you want to keep back in the closet. Follow through and donate or toss the other items.
4. Stop Buying Things You Don’t Need
Not gonna lie, retail therapy can actually be effective. But only for a very short moment. It usually leads to more stress and guilt in our lives.
Analyzing your motivations behind spending money is a minimalist principle that will serve you well. It will not only help you spend less, but it will ensure that when you do spend money it’s on things you truly love or need.
After all, you’ve worked hard to clear space in your home, the last thing you want to do is clutter it up again with useless stuff you don’t need.
Instead, take the time to think through your purchases before you make them. Before you buy anything ask whether you’ll actually make use of the item or will it eventually wind up somewhere collecting dust.
Another minimalist principle to practice in this area is to consider spending a little extra on higher-quality products. This will help avoid the need to replace items as often.
I know there are times we all crave things we don’t need. And I’m not saying you should never purchase something just because you want to. However, I am saying to consider your purchases carefully and make sure your purchases are not complicating your life rather than simplifying it.
5. Practice Mono-tasking
It’s pretty common for us to be doing 100 things at once. Our culture has this mistaken idea that multi-tasking is somehow a virtue. But the truth is multi-tasking violates nearly all, if not all, minimalist principles.
To simplify your life and stop multitasking, it is important to be purposeful with the things you’re doing and with the things that you are eliminating. Research confirms that monotasking–and not multitasking–is the secret to getting things done.
The reason is that our brain is not designed to focus on multiple tasks at the same time. What we really do is switch between tasks at lightning speed. So, instead of multitasking, you should focus on monotasking.
Minimizing the number of tasks you’re focusing on and you’ll accomplish so much more in much less time. For more ways to simplify your life with you stop multi-tasking read this.
6. Create Rhythms and Routines
I’m a big proponent of creating rhythms and routines in your life because they allow you to put things on autopilot.
A solid evening routine will allow you to start the following day on a positive foot. It ends the morning rush madness because you’re prepared for all that needs to be done ahead of time.
You can continue your routine into the morning by having a set series of things to be done that enable you to start your day feeling much more relaxed.
I’ve also found that a simple cleaning routine makes it easy to keep up with all the household chores.
Rhythms and routines naturally eliminate the unnecessary, while automating the must do’s. You could create a morning routine, evening, or pretty much anything!
Establishing clear rhythms and routines simplify life because they create the step-by-step process to get things done so you can give more focus to what matters most.
7. Plan Your Week
When you want to simplify but don’t know where to begin regular planning sessions are the perfect place to start.
This is an area I am ritualistic about and I assure you planning ahead makes life so much simpler.
A good place to start is to write down your top three priorities for the week. This will help you know exactly what needs to be accomplished. Next, look over events for the week and make sure time has been set aside for the important things. In addition, make a general meal plan based on your schedule for the week.
Even though your days may not go exactly as planned, having that starting point simplifies any unexpected things that may come up.
8. Eat Well
I can’t think of a better place to exercise the minimalist principles of eliminating the excess than when it comes to eating well. The majority of packaged food on grocery store shelves is filled with processed garbage. None of which is necessary and most of which are harmful to your health.
No, I am not saying you can never have treats or junk food. In all honesty, I have a major sweet tooth and rarely pass up anything chocolate. However, eat it in moderation. Remind yourself that your primary diet should consist mainly of fresh whole foods.
Look, the simple truth is there is little that complicates life more quickly than not feeling well. Eat what makes you happy in moderation, but focus on eating what keeps you healthy. Get some form of regular exercise and see how much simpler life feels by minimizing the unnecessary from your diet.
9. Make Everything Count
Whatever you do, make it worthwhile. A key reason it’s my favorite day was started was through a realization that far too often we go through the motions of doing what’s expected of us rather than enjoying the moment we are in. As a result, we miss those precious moments we never get a second chance at.
If we’re not intentional in simplifying life, complicated wins every time. Practicing minimalist principles is about being purposeful in all that we do.
Be purposeful in connecting with the people in your life. Spend time with friends for the pure sake of socializing. Get together for coffee instead of sending a text or at minimum pick up the phone and call. Have meaningful conversations with your people.
Try new things and discover new places. While you’re at it, take lots of pictures.
At the end of the day, reflect on what you accomplished and consider what you could improve.
This is your one and only chance at life, make it count!
Minimalism at any level is designed to enrich your life. Incorporating these minimalist principles is a great place to start the simplifying process.
What are some minimalist principles that have made an impact in simplifying your life? Leave a comment.
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