Getting organized for the first time can be an extremely exciting (or frustrating) time because you’re faced with a gargantuan pile of tasks but you also foresee a most tantalizing reward: to finally be able to live and work in a space with little or no clutter.

Today, I am going to share with you some organizational tips straight from the experts, so you can begin hammering away on your own clutter issues at home or at work.

The Golden Rules of Getting Organized

1. Create a Detailed Clutter Map – This might sound depressing to some of you, but it’s the most important part of your blueprint for conquering clutter and finally ending the chronic stress caused by disorganization.

You have to create a detailed Clutter Map of the spaces that you want to organize and clean up so you will not become overwhelmed with all the things that you have to do.

Often, people just give up because they view all the clutter as this monolithic and immovable mass (like a mountain!)

While it is true that physical clutter can reach epic proportions, the only way that you can practicably tackle it is by performing a series of clean ups.

Getting organized is not an overnight endeavor. If you’ve seen TV shows that tackled extreme clutter, you may already have a clue as to how much work it actually takes to straighten out a cluttered space.

Even an army of a dozen men will require several days of continuous cleaning and clearing to straighten out two large rooms of an ordinary-sized house.

I am stating these facts not to discourage people from trying but to empower others to start as soon as possible if they want to see results quickly.

Now, it’s important that you set specific goals for yourself as you create a detailed Clutter Map. You need goals and milestones so have clear proof that you are progressing with your de-cluttering efforts.

2. Start Right Now – Starting right now sounds a bit crazy, but there is no better time to get organized than the present time.

As soon as you get up from your chair or bed, start clearing away at the clutter nearest you. If you don’t have a Clutter Map yet, that’s alright: you can make one after you spend a few minutes getting organized.

It doesn’t matter if you can only clear one table or cabinet at a time. The important thing is you’ve actually started something and you can immediately see the difference when you dip your toes into getting organized.

3. Get Serious About Clutter – In all my years of coaching people with stress-related problems, I’ve found that one of the most challenging hurdles is to start taking something new seriously.

I have met countless people who thought “stress management” was simply a fad or worse, a joke – as if millions of people weren’t suffering from toxic and chronic stress.

If you have a similar mindset about getting organized, let me be the first person to tell you that you’re going to have a hard time freeing yourself of clutter if you don’t take things seriously.

Surprisingly, the best attitude to motivate yourself to start de-cluttering your home or office is to get really angry at the disorganization of your living or working spaces.

If you start viewing clutter as the enemy or at the very least, an overstaying guest in your living space, you will begin to take clutter very seriously and you will no longer allow yourself to make more excuses not to clean up.

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Dive Into Deep Clutter – Clearing clutter can become a frustrating and anxiety-causing enterprise when you begin seeing the extent of the disorganization that you have to tackle. I call this “fighting from the trenches”.

The effort needed to clear clutter and stay organized is literally a battle against present and future clutter. Here are some tips to stay strong even if you feel like you’re already sinking while cleaning up your living spaces:

• If you can’t think of a good use for something, choose any of these three: throw it away, sell it or donate it.
• People often make 2 piles when de-cluttering their home or office: a “keep” pile and a “throw away” pile. Check your “keep” pile to see if you can discard more stuff. Thin it out a few times to make sure you’re not hanging on to useless stuff.
• When you decide to throw away something, forget about it and move forward. If you keep reviewing your “throw away” pile you will only become emotionally and physically drained.
• Create a small support network so you can call someone if things get too intense or difficult.
• If you can’t throw away something because you might use it someday, put it in a box and write the date that is exactly three months from the day you placed the item in the box.
• If you didn’t even touch the item after 3 months, discard it!

If you have been reading this blog from its very first post, you may have already learned about the modern stress model or the sequence of events that lead to the physiological stress response.

For those of you who are not familiar with it, here’s the summary:

• Person experiences or thinks of something that is stressful. His negative thoughts and emotions combine at this phase.
• Person triggers psychological stress. He may begin experiencing signs of mental stress.
• Psychological stress, if left unregulated, triggers the physiological stress response. Person may experience physical symptoms of stress such as clammy hands and an elevated heart rate, even if he is at rest.

Why should you practice control over your own thoughts?

If we would look carefully at the modern stress model, we would come to the conclusion that the actual, physiological stress response only comes to the surface during moments of mental stress.

Mental stress on the other hand, doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. A person only experiences mental stress if his thought patterns and emotions are working toward this particular outcome.

With these facts in mind, it becomes very clear that in order to stop physiological stress in its tracks, you need to address the causative agent, which is mental stress.

Why do we think the way we do?

I often encounter individuals who beat themselves up over the fact that they have a tendency to think and feel in certain ways especially when they have to contend with common stressors.

Your habitual responses to stressors are actually determined by 3 different yet interlocking factors:

1. DNA – Your parents’ genes are partly responsible for your tendencies and general temperament.

In addition to the way you were raised, there’s also the fact that you inherited your parents’ chromosomes, which also means that you’ve inherited at least part of their personalities.

So if one or both of your parents are aggressive or hotheaded, you may have the same inclinations because of your DNA.

2. Childhood – Sigmund Freud, the old father of psychoanalysis, often analyzed people’s childhoods to get to the bottom of strange neuroses.

It turns out that Freud was spot on when he determined that early childhood experiences have a lot to do with how we fully develop and mature as adults.

Our individual responses to stressful situations are partly determined by how we were conditioned to respond when we were still young. So keep this in mind when you are raising your own children; your children are not only absorbing the world at large, they are also absorbing your behavior and thought patterns!

3. Life Itself – Our DNA and early childhood experiences comprise only a small portion of the totality called the self. Your experiences as you grow older are also strong determinants of your behavior toward stressful situations.

We can’t do anything about past experiences, may they be good or bad, but we can do something about our beliefs and values in the present time. We must not allow past negative experiences to dictate how we live in the present time.

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Now that you are more familiar with how the mind works and why it operates in a particular manner with regards to stressful situation, it’s time that you learned how to control unstable and stressful thought patterns.

How can you control seemingly unstable thought patterns?

Thought patterns are powerful, but they are never more powerful than the person itself. A thought, no matter how destructive, does not have free will or a life of its own. All negative thoughts are vulnerable and extinguishable, remember that!

Easy Mind Control Exercise

•  Find a quiet place to perform the Easy Mind Control Exercise. Get a piece of paper and write down 5 of the most horrid thoughts you’ve been having for the past few months.
• Below the first 5 items, write down 5 beautiful thoughts, memories or ideas that are directly in contrast with the first 5 items you wrote down.
• Focus your mind’s power on each of the undesirable thoughts and as you do, give your mind a firm command to remove the thoughts.
• Visualize a blank space where each of the undesirable thoughts used to be. Begin placing pleasant thoughts on this blank space, to replace the bad ones that have just been driven out.
• Repeat the exercise until you are satisfied and try again tomorrow.

The first part of our current series on acing the art of stress management, we talked about three important guidelines:

First, you have to become familiar with the actual stressors that are causing you feel chronically stressed on a daily basis. This can be accomplished through regular journaling.

Second, you have to identify the negative beliefs and values that you may have. These beliefs and values may be stopping you from successfully managing your stress. This can be done through consistent self-analysis.

Third, you also have to accept the fact that not everything can be done in one day or one week. Stress management is actually a lifelong endeavor which will help create better beliefs, behaviors and thought patterns.

Today’s discussion will center on some additional guidelines which you can also use to improve your handling of stress management. You can find a few more essential guidelines below:

1.Try One or Try Them All – The fact of the matter is that there is no “perfect formula” for fight stress. I personally believe that stress dissipates more quickly through deep tissue massage because I really feel relaxed and happy after a good massage. But that’s just me; deep tissue massage may not be as effective for you.

This is why it’s so important for people to seek out different methods of stress management.

• Do not limit yourself to only 1 or 2 techniques.
• If something doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t mean that you do not have the capacity to manage your stress.
• It just means that you haven’t found the right combination of techniques to bring you to your desired level of relaxation and happiness.

2. Assemble Your Army, One by One – Managing stress is literally a battle against bad habits and a myriad of stressors. What do you need to succeed in any battle?

Your personal anti-stress army, of course!

• This personal army of yours will be composed of different relaxation techniques and behavioral modifications which you will learn as you progress with your stress management efforts.
• The techniques which you will be using must fit the genetics of your lifestyle and way of life. If a technique just doesn’t fit your lifestyle, it won’t work. Learn to adjust and discard techniques that do not conform to what you feel is the right way to remedy stress in your life.

3. Keep Practicing! – Like I’ve said before, stress management is essentially a collection of different skills that will enable you to effectively combat stress before it makes you permanently sick.

If you want full mastery of a specific skill, you must be willing to practice it until it becomes second nature.

This guideline may seem easy in comparison to my other reminders but in reality, it’s one of the most challenging to carry out.

Why? Because old habits die hard. For example, it can be very difficult for a person to listen more during an argument because the old habit was to outdo the other person in a screaming match.

Apart from learning new skills, effective stress management will also require you to change your attitudes and behaviors toward your stressors. In the previous blog post, I recommended that you start writing on a stress management journal.

Your stress management journal is more than just a laundry list of things to do.

• It’s actually a special picture of how you think and behave in response to different situations.
• You need a source of special insight if you want to discover your true self and reinvent it so you won’t be so stressed anymore.

4. Don’t Forget “Me” Time – In order to carry out your plans to conquer stress, you have to create space in your daily schedule for stress management. Now, I know that many stressed individuals feel that there isn’t enough time in a whole day for everything that needs to be done.

• However, I would like to point out that the statement “I wish there were 2 more hours in my day” is more of a state of mind than reality.
• The reality is that 12-18 hours of waking time is sufficient for most groups of tasks. There’s also enough time for relaxation within this time-frame.

If you cannot fit everything that you need to do within this amount of time that simply means that you have poor time management skills.

Evaluate how much time you spend on your different activities and try to create more balance within your day.

Stress management is an active and continuous process of controlling the way you react to common stressors present in everyday life.  

The main objective of stress management is to progressively revamp your thought patterns and lifestyle so you will no longer suffer from chronic, toxic stress on a daily basis.

Like other major endeavors, stress management is not without its own set of challenges. That’s why it’s important that you adequately prepare yourself for this important commitment because if you don’t, you’re going to end up being disappointed with the results.

How can you consistently succeed in stress management?

Here are some expert tips that will help demolish the obstacles to successful stress management:

1. Record Your Stressors – Each person has his own unique set of stressors. Stressors can be any of the following: situations, actions, events, general circumstances, objects, people, tasks, chores and work-related obligations.

To make things more organized, I would advise you to create a stress management journal.

What does a stress management journal look like?

One part of your journal should be separated and devoted specifically for recording stressors. Each page should have three columns with the following headings: time/date, stressor, stress level (1-10).

Evaluating your stress level is of paramount importance. When a stressor is rated a “1”, it means that you are only mildly annoyed for a brief period of time.

When you rate an item as a “10” that means that you experience not only mental signs of stress but also physical signs of stress such as a racing heart rate, cold hands and feet, etc.

Is it challenging to maintain a stress management journal?

Bear in mind that a stress management journal should not be difficult to maintain. If recording and journaling stresses you out, it’s possible that you are simply overdoing it.

You do not have to record every little stressor that comes your way – you only have to record the ones that you remember at the end of the day.

Some people can write on their journals every few hours; the majority of people cannot. Write only when it’s convenient for you but you have to write on your stress management journal every day.

2. Acknowledge Your Personal Beliefs & Values –

The battle against stress would be much easier if you came to terms with your personal beliefs and value system.

If you want to overcome negative beliefs and old values that don’t support your current goals, you have to identify them first. Below are some common beliefs and values that can directly impair your ability to manage stress:

1. “I have more important things to do than manage stress”
2. “Stress management won’t bring food to the table, my work does”

iii. “I have no time left for this sort of thing”

1. “I’d rather sleep than try to manage stress”
2. “I’m a hopeless case!”
3. “I’m not very good at learning new things”

vii. “How will I know if this will work?”

viii. “Stress management is just not ‘my thing’”

1. “I think it’s tedious and boring”
2. “I don’t have the energy to think about it”

3. Take the First Baby Steps –

Stress management isn’t just a vague concept – it’s a whole set of special skills that will allow you to evade or moderate the stress response so you will be healthier, happier and more productive.

How long will it take before you master stress management?

Stress management has spawned a whole industry of mentors and coaches because it’s not something that can be learned overnight.

With these facts in mind, it logically follows that if you want to learn how to manage stress, you have to muster the courage to take the first few baby steps to achieve your goals.

Managing chronic stress doesn’t require a lot of time.

• You can accomplish a lot of things within a 20-30 minute time-frame. If 20 minutes sounds overwhelming, try limiting your stress management sessions to 10-15 minutes.
• 10-15 minutes should give you enough time to think about the stressors you encountered for that day and how you reacted to the stressors. Self-analysis is your most important tool in managing stress.
• You have to be honest with yourself though. You must avoid justifying habitual, negative responses to stressors as this will impede personal breakthroughs.
• You must make it a point to identify harmful thoughts and behaviors so you can modify them. Behavioral modification, in order to be successful, must be gradual and you must be consistent in enforcing new behavior and rewarding yourself when you succeed in doing so.