When I’m feeling stressed and headachy, my body and mind still want to declutter; however, it has to be something that doesn’t require decision making. What I’m finding is that there are different levels of decluttering and the ones that involve decisions can quite easily stress me out even more.

When there is mess everywhere (which feels like all the time and everywhere in my house) doing something little and often works for me as long as I can see the progress. By doing what I feel like doing every day, I am making the whole process more pleasurable which is an important part of my wellbeing. When there are decisions to be made, I find it very stressful.

I’ve also realised that it’s important to rest and my body knows exactly when to do that; it awards me with a 48 hour stress/tension headache. It’s usually before I have time off and guess what… I have Monday off. As you know yesterday I had (and still have) one of those headaches which I believe is linked to a few things:

• Not resting when I should i.e. pushing myself to do something when all I want to do is curl up and watch a feel good movie.
• The clutter all around me still hanging around in areas of the house that we use every day (which is getting better downstairs but just not upstairs).
• Not asking for help, which I’m getting better at. Everything I’ve asked for help with today my lovely family have done for me.

Last night I went to bed a lot earlier than usual and drifted off to sleep during my meditation track. Then I woke up at 3am and couldn’t go back to sleep. The pain at the back of my head was lingering in an annoying way, so I got up and had some porridge and camomile tea and sat quietly in my tidy kitchen 😀. I then tried lying down on the sofa and I actually ended up drifting off at 6am for a few hours.

I had things I wanted to get on with today so I really didn’t want to spend the whole day lying around so I went upstairs to assess what needed doing in the spare room (the one I mentioned the other day that my eldest daughter would like to have as her bedroom). As there’s going to be a lot of decision making in that room it wasn’t the best thing for me to be decluttering today with how I was feeling. So, I just moved things forward by ordering some large Really Useful Boxes which will be arriving tomorrow. The girls are going to help me pack the stuff up that I want to keep and put the rest in relevant bags.

I then turned my attention to something easier to take my mind off my headache and it worked.

My progress today

I walked into to our bedroom and saw the mess that had been piling up for a couple of months. I suddenly had a vision of how I could make a couple of changes and stop the clutter build up and I felt instantly motivated. I just needed to move the baskets of clothes, washing and other stuff that didn’t really have a home. It was getting difficult to get into bed at night and walk around the room. I saw it as a decluttering task that could be broken down into 2 steps – first step was easy, (perfect for today) and second step was difficult (for another day).

First step (today) was to shift the bed to the left, move the dressing table to the right side of the room, dump all baskets of stuff in the far corner on the right for sorting another day. Then clean, dust ceilings and walls, change sheets and vacuum the surrounding area. I was determined to limit myself to around an hour and it took me 57 mins.

Second step (for another day) will be to sort out each basket in the corner of the room. As they’ve been moved away from the entrance of the room they won’t get in the way anymore so there’s no rush to do that.

Great progress for day 200!! And I managed to cook a roast beef dinner as well.

Until tomorrow…

Sandra