We all have those moments when it feels like everything is going wrong, or even that everything is going sideways. It’s like you’re stuck in a perpetual cycle of challenges that never seem to end, and you have no idea what to do about them. It feels like this will be your reality forever, but that’s not actually the case.
What’s actually happening in these moments? On one hand, you’re experiencing stress. On the other, you’re facing a lack of clear understanding, vision, or sense of what lies ahead or even what’s happening now. This combination creates a mental fog that makes everything seem more difficult than it actually is.
Previously, I wrote the article ‘How to Kill Stress Before It Kills Your Dreams,’ which will be a great pair with this one.
The human brain is fascinating in its contradictions. It craves variety and has an inherent need for novelty, but simultaneously, it desperately desires predictability. Why? Because for your brain, predictability equals safety. When your brain understands that tomorrow will bring a new day, just as it does in nature where everything follows cycles, it knows there will be sunrise, daylight, and food. If suddenly the sunrise doesn’t come, or if daytime suddenly turns to night (like during a solar eclipse), or if your usual food source disappears from its normal place – these represent direct threats to your existence.
In response, your brain switches to survival mode. This is why in our modern world, this feeling becomes strange and unpleasant. We live in a world of abundance, where everything necessary is available and even more, yet events that don’t follow expected cycles create increasing stress for each of us.
The good news? There are effective ways to bring order to your life, clear the mental fog, and regain the ability to make optimal decisions. It’s not about having some magical personality trait – it’s about building a system that works with your brain rather than against it.
Why Your Mental System Is Breaking Down
The key element we need to address is clarity. Why do we experience this feeling of disorder or confusion? Because there’s no clarity. So we need to build it.
Know how you think
But before we go further, there’s a preventive step that, in my view, absolutely everyone should take. And the earlier, the better. You need to understand your thinking type and psychological profile.
There are various ways to do this. You could ask any AI model how to do it, or perhaps the AI could even help you based on the information you provide. But the key point is that you need to understand how your thinking model works and how you reactively respond to different situations.
For example, some people think rationally – like me. For me to convince my conscious and subconscious mind of the validity of a decision or to explain something to it, I need rational arguments. I need to present a series of arguments that follow systematic logic, and if everything fits together, if all the dots connect, if everything is absolutely sequentially connected, then that’s enough for my brain to calm down and accept the decision as correct, even if somehow it might be wrong. It’s a trick I play on my brain because I understand how it works, and I can manipulate it.
It’s completely different if you think emotionally. For your brain to make decisions, it needs an emotion, some strong surge of feelings that will make your brain look in one direction or another. In this case, it needs to be told a story, or presented with an event or situation that will speak to one outcome or another of your decision. And in this case, it’s much more effective to engage in precisely this – to visualize the outcome of one choice or another and base your conclusions on that.
But you need to understand which state your brain predominantly operates in – which model it more often thinks in. Because, understandably, at certain moments every person can switch from rational to emotional, but overall, one element usually prevails.
I understand that if I’m currently in an emotional state where emotions predominate, I need to fight with my mind. Typically, rational thinking always surfaces for me, and I tell myself that okay, I’m just emotional right now, I need to wait a bit until they subside, and make a decision after that. This is, again, purely rational behavior. It’s neither good nor bad – there’s no need to put labels on it. You just need to understand how it works and use it to your advantage.
Towards mental clarity
Here’s what most people miss: the quality of your decisions directly depends on your mental clarity. A striking study of Israeli parole judges found they were approximately twice as likely to grant a favorable ruling at the beginning of the day than just before a break. As their mental energy drained, the quality of their decisions deteriorated. This highlights why simplifying and systematizing your life is so crucial – it preserves your cognitive resources for when you really need them.
The state of mental clutter is particularly damaging because it hijacks your focus. Your consciousness becomes preoccupied with removing uncertainty or gaining clarity. That’s all your brain can focus on during these stressful moments. This essentially changes the focus and priority of your consciousness to dealing with this task. Your subconscious, which normally helps significantly, feels this burden too. And consequently, focusing on your current task, which you understand needs to be done, becomes more difficult – you have to force it out of yourself.
Most successful people aren’t just “naturally organized” – they’ve developed systems that work for their specific thinking style. Take the famous examples of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama, who all adopted routine wardrobes to eliminate trivial decisions. By systematizing low-priority choices, they preserved mental clarity for what truly mattered. As Zuckerberg explained, he wears the same style gray shirt each day to “make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.”
The Complete Mental System
Once you understand your thinking model, you can build the appropriate framework for decision-making and your further actions. Since our goal is to bring clarity to a certain period of time ahead, we need to build it systematically.
Here’s the step-by-step system that will transform your mental clarity:
Step 1: Identify Your Dominant Thinking Style
As I mentioned earlier, some people think rationally while others think emotionally. Identifying which category you predominantly fall into is crucial because it determines how you should approach organizing your mind.
For rational thinkers, logical arguments and systematic approaches work best. You need to create structured lists, prioritization frameworks, and clear action steps. When making decisions, you’ll want to analyze pros and cons methodically.
For emotional thinkers, visualization and storytelling are more effective. Create vision boards that represent your goals, use journaling to explore how different outcomes would feel, and make decisions based on emotional resonance after visualizing potential scenarios.
You can determine your style by reflecting on past decisions. Did you make them primarily through logical analysis or emotional resonance? Neither is better or worse – they’re simply different ways your brain processes information. The key is to work with your natural tendencies rather than against them.
By the way, notice how I describe all these moments from a rational point of view. I present information in such a way as to explain and argue each postulate of my article. I’m again thinking from a rational point of view. If you lack the emotional delivery here, it just speaks to the fact that we have different ways of thinking.
Step 2: Create Environmental Order
This is about physically organizing your surroundings. If you’re currently in a room or building, look around. If you’re in nature, you probably don’t have this feeling because in nature, everything is already in order. You observe and don’t feel that something is wrong or needs to be fixed. The way trees grow, the way plants grow, the way mountains look, how the sea behaves – everything seems natural and authentic. Because it is.
If you leave nature as it is, it will flourish and prosper. And this is perceived absolutely naturally by humans because we are part of nature. We understand our unity with it, and nothing here causes any dissonance.
Approximately the same thing should happen in the environment we create for ourselves. This is an artificial environment created by humans, for humans. That is, it’s the space where you are. Your house or your apartment, your room, your office, your bedroom. In general, all of this.
If there’s disorder here, you know how you’ll feel. There are people, I know, who don’t understand this at all. For them, this feeling of being lost is absolutely normal. That is, something is always wrong, something is always not quite right, it’s not entirely clear what’s happening at all. And one can guess that in their room, most likely, there’s disorder.
Tidy it up, overcome yourself, and sort through all the items, throw away what you haven’t used for a long time. For example, I can’t understand this story when people buy a huge number of things just to not use them. Just things, things, things. It’s a consumer approach. Absolutely incomprehensible. I, on the contrary, strive to get rid of things, to make them as few as possible.
According to UCLA researchers, their 2009 study found that people who described their homes as “cluttered” had chronically high cortisol levels throughout the day compared to those who felt their homes were “restful” or orderly. These elevated stress hormones are associated with chronic fatigue and even physical health issues, providing biochemical evidence that disorder can literally “get under your skin.”
I adhere more to a minimalist lifestyle and don’t quite understand why you need to buy something new unless it’s an absolutely necessary item or something I use every day for one task or another that somehow helps me in life. If that’s not the case, it’s not entirely clear why to buy it.
Get rid of these things, sell them at a flea market, give them to someone who needs them, donate to charity. For example, clothes that you no longer wear can be donated to charitable causes. Of course, in your wardrobe, you’ll find more than one such item that you haven’t worn for a year, or maybe even several years.
According to a controlled neuroscience study from Princeton University, people in organized settings outperformed those in messy environments on tasks requiring concentration. The researchers found that visual clutter overloads the brain, forcing it to filter out irrelevant objects and thereby reducing focus and performance. When surrounded by clutter, your brain has to work overtime just to filter out distractions, leaving fewer resources for the task at hand.
Step 3: Brain Dumping
Another method is bringing clarity through writing, or through some other mechanism that allows you to lay out all your thoughts. This is very similar to tidying up, but not in physical space, but in the mental one.
How does this work? When you transfer your thoughts to paper – this is the most well-known method because it involves many sensory tools from your body. There’s vision and the visual part, there’s the tactile sensation of paper and pen, there’s also sound perception when you hear how the pen writes on paper or the rustle of the sheet. There’s also muscular interaction, that is, you have fine motor skills involved, and you feel this in your body. All possible sensory aspects of the body are involved here, which is why it’s the most effective way to do this.
So, you simply lay out your thoughts, you give a simple flow of what’s happening in your head, and it doesn’t matter how well it forms into understandable logical structures, sentences, or even makes sense. These can just be some scattered thoughts, but that’s not essential. The principle here is exactly the same as when cleaning. That is, these thoughts no longer occupy space in your head; they now lie here on paper.
A 2018 Baylor University study provided scientific evidence for this practice. Researchers found that people who took five minutes at bedtime to write down their to-do list for the next day fell asleep significantly faster than those who journaled about completed tasks (so both are valid). Writing down the list effectively offloaded their unfinished tasks from mind to paper, reducing bedtime worry and stress.
Step 4: Short-term vs. Long-term Clarity
While our aim is to introduce clarity to a certain time period ahead, it’s important to connect your short-term actions with your long-term vision. This doesn’t necessarily mean setting those clichéd goals for the year ahead – the brain finds it quite difficult to think in such large scales.
It’s much easier for it to think short-term – about tomorrow, for instance. You can visualize what will happen tomorrow, paint that picture for yourself. In most cases, this will be enough to understand that a new day will come. By doing this simple mental exercise, you’re essentially performing a mental trick to convince yourself that everything is under control.
Psychological studies on goal pursuit show significantly higher success rates with planning. Research on “implementation intentions” – specific action plans for goals – demonstrates that having concrete plans increases goal achievement by 60-70% compared to having no specific plans. While planning doesn’t guarantee success (plans can be derailed by unforeseen changes), it dramatically improves the odds.
Management consultant Peter Drucker warned that
“there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
In other words, being busy and organized with the wrong tasks is wasted effort – you must prioritize what truly matters. The implication is that clarity comes from knowing which short-term actions serve long-term values.
US President Dwight Eisenhower famously said:
“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”
He developed the Eisenhower Matrix (urgent vs. important grid) as a systematic way to triage tasks. By planning and scheduling important-but-not-urgent activities, you prevent them from being drowned out by endless “urgent” minutiae.
Step 5: Systems Thinking Application
The final step is systematizing your vision. As a rational person, this is the most obvious tool that I want to apply first. This means creating a system – a system of vision, a system of the future, a system of what I will do. And for this, I lay out various tools that I possess, that I know how to use, that can help with this.
Therefore, study models of thinking and system analysis, ways of modeling systems, select the one that suits you in this specific situation, because different ways of thinking and modeling will act and help absolutely differently in different situations.
If you want to dig deeper into my tools for developing systems thinking, check out my previous articles:
- ‘The Power of Systems Thinking: How to See the Whole When Others See Parts’,
- ‘The Mental Model That Will Transform Your Life: How To See What Others Miss’,
- ‘Design Your Life Machine: Systems Thinking for Location-Independent Success’,
- ‘The Black Box Method: How Systems Thinking Can Free Your Brain (And Your Time)’
It’s much better to have a set of these tools in your arsenal to choose the most appropriate one for each situation.
Dr. Atul Gawande demonstrated the remarkable power of systems thinking when he led the implementation of a 19-item Surgical Safety Checklist by the World Health Organization in hospitals worldwide. After adopting this simple, systemic tool, major complications in surgeries fell from 11% to 7%, and inpatient deaths fell by over 40%. This case shows systems thinking in action: the checklist provided clarity (everyone knows the critical steps and their timing) and reduced stress under pressure.
By viewing your mind and environment as interconnected systems with feedback loops, you can identify leverage points: a small change (like adopting a checklist or clearing a desk) cascades into larger benefits via positive feedback – clarity, calm, and efficiency breeding more of the same.
Psychologists have noted that when your environment is full of visual distractions, each irrelevant object or piece of information acts as a “distractor” that your brain must process or suppress. That consumes mental energy and can create a sense of mental chaos. On the feedback side, feeling mentally chaotic or anxious often manifests outwardly as disorganization – you might neglect cleaning up or fall behind in filing, creating a vicious cycle.
However, positive feedback loops can be created by intentional order. For example, establishing a daily routine (a morning ritual, a set time for planning, etc.) conditions the mind towards clarity. It’s a reinforcing loop: a small initial change – say, clearing your desk at day’s end – gives a satisfying sense of closure that lowers stress, which then helps you start the next day with a clearer head, enabling further orderly behavior.
The Freedom of a Systematic Mind
We’ve explored the various ways to bring order to your life and create mental clarity. From understanding your thinking style to organizing your physical space, from brain dumping to systems thinking – each approach offers a path to greater clarity and reduced stress.
As the philosopher Blaise Pascal observed,
“Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.”
When your mind is clear, your actions become more purposeful, your decisions more sound, and your life more fulfilling.
The paradox is that structure creates freedom. By establishing systems and routines, you free up mental space for creativity, innovation, and joy. As Steve Jobs said,
“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Start with just one aspect of this system today. Perhaps begin by identifying your thinking style, or spend 15 minutes decluttering your workspace, or try a brain dump before bed tonight. These small changes can create powerful ripple effects throughout your mental landscape.
Remember, clarity isn’t a lucky gift of temperament but a strategy – a way of operating. As Lao Tzu wisely stated,
“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”
By viewing personal organization as a system to manage (and not a one-time project), you continually adapt and find what works for your unique situation.
I wish you clarity and less time spent in a state of uncertainty. This will help tremendously in life and in business.