It’s Time to Spring-Clean Your Brain

Spring is here and it’s the season of letting go of the old and tired and bringing in the new and fresh. It’s a good time to consider some of your counter-productive attitudes, beliefs, expectations and fears, and decide whether you ought to let them go.

We learn our attitudes, beliefs, expectations and fears in childhood. If we’re lucky, the people we grew up with were able to instill in us a positive attitude, healthy expectations, reasonable and flexible beliefs and appropriate fears.

Sadly, a fairly large portion of the population grows up with parents or guardians who aren’t able to do this, which leaves us with a cluttered mind, filled with counterproductive patterns of thinking, feeling and reacting.

The good news is that you’re not stuck with these unhelpful patterns. You can let go of the mental clutter of attitudes, beliefs, expectations and fears that aren’t working for you and adopt a new, functional mindset and productive strategies for coping with life’s challenges.

Spring isn’t just a time for cleaning out the house. It’s a great time to spring-clean your brain.

First, you can examine your attitudes. Are you overly negative, cynical or pessimistic? Are you irritable, resentful, paranoid or excessively envious? If you’ve been walking around with some bad attitude(s), spring is a great time to examine them and to let go of those that haven’t been serving you.

Next, you can look at your expectations. Do you expect good things of yourself or not so good? Do you expect good things of others, or do you anticipate that they’ll hurt you, betray you, exploit or abandon you?

What are your expectations of the world? Do you see it as a benign or nurturing place or as a dangerous one? You can use this time to explore the expectations that aren’t working for you and you can start to let them go.

Next, you can look at your beliefs. We all walk around with a lot of beliefs but these aren’t necessarily the truth. Spring is a great time to look at your beliefs and see if any of them are holding you back from happiness and success.

If you believe that you aren’t lovable, intelligent, attractive or deserving of good things, or if you believe that you should settle for mediocrity in love and in work because you’re convinced that you can’t do any better, spring is a good time to throw out these beliefs with the trash.

Finally, you can take the opportunity to look at your fears. Perhaps you’re afraid of getting hurt so you’ve been avoiding entering into a new relationship. Perhaps you’re afraid of failure so you’re not pursuing your dream job. Perhaps you’re afraid of how your friend or partner will react to you expressing your feelings and needs so you’ve kept silent and as a result, you haven’t been getting your needs met.

Spring is the season to re-examine your fears and see that they’ve been holding you back from getting what you really want in life.

Of course, if you find it excessively challenging to spring clean your brain on your own, there are counselors, therapists and coaches available to help you, just like there are experts to help you clean and de-clutter your home.

Spring is here! What’s stopping you from spring-cleaning your brain?

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