Free your mind, free your brain. I bet almost everyone knows that feeling when you start cleaning up and organizing your space – your apartment, your room, or just your desk. After you’re done, there’s this incredible sensation of calm and satisfaction that you haven’t been able to achieve for a long time. It feels like you’ve created order not just around you, but inside your head too. Despite the physical effort and tiredness, your mind feels refreshed – like a clean slate, as if you’re starting everything from scratch.
This doesn’t happen by accident. It’s one of the most powerful ways to relax your mind and open it up for new achievements. Sometimes in life, we find ourselves feeling backed into a corner. So many things pile up, so much happens at once, and there’s literally no space in your head to think about things like your side project, your business, or how to improve your life. You barely have enough energy to collapse on the couch, watch some Netflix, and pass out.
Back in college, we had more energy, more physical strength and possibilities. You could go out with friends, drink something, stay up all night partying, end up at some club, and then somehow show up in the morning and ace an exam. That trick doesn’t work anymore, even though nothing seems to have changed. But something has changed. That mental space is now occupied by an enormous number of different things – physical objects, moral choices, and the responsibilities that appear after you enter adult life.
For example, you need to pay bills, pay for housing, pay off loans. I’m specifically using money examples because they actually take up a huge amount of time and mental space. We worry about money because it’s a necessary resource for survival – there’s a direct correlation. You constantly think about how to earn more, where to find money to pay off a loan, how to make sure everything’s covered next month while still saving for a vacation. How to find money to fix the washing machine that hasn’t worked for weeks… all these separate little pieces that occupy mental bandwidth.
A 2020 study in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that people in cluttered homes had significantly elevated cortisol levels throughout the day – concrete evidence that disorder literally stresses us out on a biochemical level. This isn’t just about being neat – it’s about how your environment directly impacts your brain’s ability to function.
Your Environment Is Programming Your Brain (Whether You Know It Or Not)
Let’s talk about how our consciousness and subconscious actually work. The brain is a relatively powerful processor. If you don’t know what a processor in a computer does, it essentially processes information. It has certain input data that gets transformed somehow.
For instance, if you need to perform a calculation, two numbers and an operator between them are input – like two multiplied by two. The processor performs calculations and converts this information into output data, the result. In this case, it’s four. Right? So there’s input information, some transformation process, and output information.
This is obviously a simplified mechanism, because software is also involved in these processes, which transforms all this data differently but still uses processor power to deal with everything. The point is to draw an analogy with our brain, which processes information coming from our body in exactly the same way – from various receptors. These are tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory, visceral receptors, and there should be some others too – the exact details aren’t important.
All this data is processed by the brain, and the output is a signal telling the body what to do. For example, if a person sees some danger, the brain signals an adrenaline rush into the blood and alerts you that something’s wrong. You start feeling your body. Fear arises with the physical surge, and then you get a reflex to either run or assume a defensive position, and so on.
All these things seem instinctive to us, but actually the decision is made before we even realize it all at the subconscious level, and all commands are issued to our body without our participation. We may have the illusion that we control our body, but it’s not really conscious. We don’t control it; our subconscious does it for us, regulating things like blood flow, because you don’t think about making your heart beat at a certain rhythm, right? The brain regulates all this. And it all happens in the background, without our participation. This is a very important point for understanding how our body works and how we can deal with it.
Your Brain Is The Information Accumulator
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” — David Allen, productivity expert
So we understand that the brain processes information. But what is this information? It’s actually everything that comes to us from around us, and everything we perceive throughout life. This is an important point because the brain is designed to store information. Apparently, this is necessary again for its survival, for development, so that it’s possible to remember, from a natural point of view, certain moments that either represent danger or, conversely, are useful for moving through life.
In a landmark study published in Science, researchers found that the mental load of concerns – even small ones – can significantly impair cognitive performance. In one experiment, participants showed a drop in cognitive test scores equivalent to a 13-point reduction in IQ when preoccupied with worries. This is what’s happening in your head every day with each unresolved task or cluttered space.
For example, we remember that this food is good, leads to development, to the growth of the organism. And this creature is dangerous, it should be avoided. Accordingly, all this is remembered and stored in the brain even without our conscious participation. If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. So there’s a huge amount of information stored there that you don’t even suspect exists.
We don’t know this for sure yet, because we haven’t yet invented a way to read information from the brain, i.e., what’s stored there. Well, we can read some of it. These are, as a rule, such reflex things, for example, which are the responsibility of certain parts of the brain. We’ve learned to catch the electrical signals it generates and can interpret them, for example, mouse movement, or typing certain words on a virtual keyboard.
This is working now, it’s no longer theory, these are real working mechanisms that allow, for example, paralyzed people to interact with a computer and even communicate with people, which was previously completely impossible. But there’s a theory that seems very applicable in life: that the brain or subconscious stores absolutely all information and remembers everything that comes into it over time.
That’s exactly why when you go to a psychologist, for example, in your 30s, you suddenly discover with them that a huge number of decisions you’ve made in life were made because of a childhood trauma that happened to you, occurred at age 3. It seems like it was decades ago, why do all this, but the fact is that each event forms, especially during brain development, certain neural connections.
And this, by the way, is already a proven fact. And the way it works is this: Neural connections are responsible precisely for this logical understanding of things. When you make a conclusion about something, for example, based on other information. And that’s exactly why, by the way, artificial intelligence works based on neural networks. We’re trying to model the work of the brain that way.
And as we can see today from the result, it gives very good results, and it really does seem that our brain works about the same way. Because you can just chat with ChatGPT and understand that there are some moments you won’t be able to distinguish from a living person.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo da Vinci
So what’s all this about? It turns out that as we go through life, we accumulate all this information. And certain information, usually what’s relevant to us now, that is, for our survival, as the brain thinks, the information that needs to be processed now, we’re already working with it in consciousness. That is, there’s this prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for conscious thinking, that is, the feeling that you’re now thinking about yourself as a person at the present moment, and you’re feeling yourself. This is the so-called consciousness.
That is, what’s on your mind right now, and what’s embedded deep in the subconscious, that is, it’s already in the back of the cerebral cortex, it’s not directly accessible, but the subconscious gives it out in a certain case. Again, that is, when you see fire, for example, the subconscious can give you information that this thing is dangerous and hot, and you need to avoid contact with the flame. If there’s no flame in direct view, direct line of sight, then there’s no point in giving you this information either.
Clutter For Your Room – Clutter For Your Mind
“When our space is a mess, so are we.” — Dr. Libby Sander, organizational behavior expert
A neuroscience study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that when your visual field is cluttered, your brain has to work significantly harder. Using fMRI scans, researchers discovered that visual clutter forces the brain to allocate additional resources just to filter out distractions – reducing your ability to focus on what matters. This is exactly what happens when your workspace is messy or your digital files are disorganized.
So, when we go through life, we accumulate a huge amount of this material, and whether to work with it or not, unfortunately, doesn’t depend on us, as we already know, this is controlled by the subconscious without our control, it can give out information, it can hide it from us. How this mechanism works is not really important, the main thing is that we don’t control it.
Often we simply don’t control the information that comes to us in consciousness from the depths of the subconscious. And here are all the most important moments when, for example, we have an emotional breakdown, or we react emotionally to something, that is, we don’t do it consciously, we don’t sit and think “now I need to experience this or that emotion”, no, it happens automatically, that is, there’s regulation of certain hormones in the body, and then we already consciously draw conclusions about what caused, for example, this emotional outburst, this event, we make logical connections, and so on.
So, when all this happens, and we start working with this information, we make a certain decision about what to do now, precisely at the level of our body or at the level, again, of consciousness, that is, we can think about it, decide something, for example, with this task, or, conversely, not decide.
And we finally come to the most important thing, to order in the head. The fact is that all these things that are around you, in the space that surrounds you, they’re not just physically around, they’re in your subconscious, even if you don’t think about them, because they’re perceived by your senses.
That is, you see them one way or another, even with peripheral vision, for example, you see that this box, which remained after unpacking the gadget, lying on the table, and it seems like you don’t pay attention to it, but it’s in your field of vision, and the brain reads this, it lies in the subconscious, and there’s this certain information, mental space, occupied precisely by this box.
Yes, it doesn’t pose any danger, but this is information, once again, that will live there until you need to make some kind of decision. For example, if the box suddenly comes alive one moment, turns into a monster, then you’ll need to react to it somehow, it means a danger signal will come, so you need to be on the alert and you need to monitor it, everything that’s here and now, you must definitely subject to this kind of analysis, and that’s exactly what your brain does.
That’s it for now, I think it’s a good starting point for the topic. And in the next article I will cover proven technics to reclaim your mental bandwidth. So, stay tuned and keep your mind as clear as possible.