Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Retrain Your Brain to be a Tidy and Organized Person | Clutterbug Podcast # 188

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

This podcast is going to blow your mind! You can actually train your brain to be a tidy and organized person, and you can do this instantly!  This incredibly simple concept will transform your home and your life using science! Learn about your reticular activating system (RAS), and how to train it to be a more positive and organized person in real time!  Listen to Mel Robbins talk about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7h38ApnAR8 Another great Mel Robbins explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV4h6R7XyAc   You can find more Clutterbug content here: Website: http://www.clutterbug.me YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clutterbug TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clutterbug_me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clutterbug_me/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clutterbug.Me/   #clutterbug #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever heard of the reticular activating system? I had never heard of it before until I listened to a recent Mel Robbins podcast and I'm telling you this is going to change your life. Hey Clutterbugs, welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. Today's podcast is going to be incredible. I am so excited about this podcast because this will 100% absolutely change your life for the better. I am so convinced of this because I have seen this change my own life and now I'm witnessing this change my two daughters lives too. We were recently driving to a cottage and it was really far away. It was like a seven hour car ride and so after listening to lots of music and singing and then in silence and then the radio, I put on a couple of podcasts and I love Mel Robbins but I haven't listened to her podcast in like a while and just turned one on and let me tell you it was the most incredible thing ever and I want to kind of summarize it for you and also show you how this concept that

she's talking about retraining your brain retraining your reticular activating system to be sort of a bouncer for your brain can actually make you a tidier and more organized person. Are you ready for this? This is pretty incredible. And I'm going to put a link down below to a couple of links to Mel Robbins talking about this. So if you want to hear more, definitely check those out. She is absolutely incredible. Okay, let's just jump right in. We've heard people talk a lot about, I mean, everybody, I've talked about it a million times, the power of positive thinking or the power of your thoughts and how the way you think kind of changes and affects your environment. I mean, we know this, right? We hear people talk about mindfulness all the time, but do we know what this

actually means and why? And I didn't. I definitely knew that your thoughts change your reality because I went from a person who was very messy and living in a chaotic space. And I started telling myself, I'm not messy. I just organized differently. I needed to find a different way. And when I did find this way, I told myself, this works for you. Like, you got this. This is amazing.

You're really good at this. And I don't know if it was true. But it became true because I truly believed it. where in the past, I really believed and told myself all the time that I was naturally messy. I'm just a hot mess sandwich. And no matter how hard I tried, I would never be an organized person because I was born disorganized. Okay. So I knew this, but I didn't know why. I didn't know why changing your thoughts worked or really even how to change your thoughts. I think if I'm being honest, I just got really lucky and stumbled upon this thing with organizing and got excited about it.

And it kind of fell into place without a lot of thought behind it as to like the process and how it was working. It was like one day I just woke up and was really into organization and and tidying and went from there. So while we hear all the experts talk about mindfulness and changing your thought pattern and being more positive, so more positive things happen to you. That all sounds great, but why does it work? And how does it work? And how do we actually do this? Okay, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the actual science behind training your brain. And this is so fascinating to me. I had never heard this before, but I kind of knew part of it. First of all, I know that you, because I've read this multiple places, that your eyes can actually see your nose all the time.

Like your nose is always there. But you don't see it because your brain filters it out. Your brain actually filters out a lot of stuff because otherwise you would be overstimulated. So it's meant to do this biologically. It's pretty amazing, this incredible machine that filters out all the things that aren't important to you. or that your brain feels aren't important to you, whether it don't matter or will distract you in some sort of negative way. So if you have like a radiator that's always making a noise or a fan or something, eventually your brain will actually tune that out. I feel like my husband has tuned out the sound of my voice because he no longer hears me. I could be talking to him and asking him a question, I swear to you, he has, he's tuning me out. He also tunes out the kids and the noise and the screaming

in the dog. Now this isn't probably part of your brainy thing, but I want to talk about this phenomenon called your reticular activating system. Mel Robin calls this like a bouncer for your brain. It kind of does two things. One is it keeps out all the things that your brain thinks are not important, but it also opens the door for all the things that your brain does think is important to you right now. And we know this because think about when, okay, so I wanted to get a new car and I was like, I want a Tesla. And I was looking at them online and my friend got a Tesla. And I swear to you, all of a sudden, every time I'm driving, everywhere I see, I'm just seeing Teslas. And yet I had never really seen this car or cared about this car the day before and now it's all I can see everywhere.

And yeah, some of this is we're getting targeted ads on Facebook, but out and about, like when we're just out in real life, we will see this. And this is our brain. This is real time proof that your brain is trying to help you focus on the things that you want, things that are important to you so that you can achieve your goals. This is science called your reticular activating system. It's like a net over your brain that kind of catches the things it doesn't think is important and really emphasizes all the things that are important. And I knew this to a degree, but I didn't understand and I didn't know that this really was like a system of your brain, that there was so much science behind this to explain it. A few years.

years ago, I did hire a therapist and I was working with her and she was amazing. And I remember, I complained about my husband a lot in therapy. And I was always saying, he never helps me. He's never does the dishes. He never cleans. I do everything. He does nothing. And I really wanted support from her. Like, yeah, you're right. He sucks. What happened instead was that she said, here's a notebook. Every day, I want you to write down the opposite. I want you to write down things that he actually does that is helpful, even if it's something small. And so this wasn't like me making things up and not believing it. I had to find actual evidence. I had to be like, well, he cut the grass today. He actually put his dishes in the dishwasher without me saying anything. Or he put his dirty clothes in the hamper and not beside the

hamper. Every day I would write down things. And at first, I struggled to see these things, but I knew I had to see her the next week and I had to give her this whole thing, right? I had to do my homework every day. I promised that was part of the whole therapy. And after a few days of noticing and writing down, it became easier. And then I started noticing all the little things that he did. So this is what was happening. My reticular activating system before was only seeing the bad. It was only finding the evidence. It was only finding the evidence. It was only the bouncer was only letting in all the information that it thought was important, which was, my husband sucks, look at all the ways he does nothing for me.

And so I would notice little things like he left us with towel on the ground where he didn't load the dishwasher again or he didn't, I don't know, trim the grass when he cut it or he didn't take out the garbage like I asked him to. I was noticing all the negative things all the time. but doing this exercise and only doing it for a few weeks, honestly, it didn't take long. It was crazy. Okay, I'm telling you, it was crazy. I started noticing the pot, like all the pot everywhere.

I was like, wow, he actually does. Look at he's doing this and he's doing this and he's doing this. And I stopped seeing a lot of the negative. And I started seeing more of the positive. And I didn't know why people say, like, oh, you change your thought. you'll know, but I didn't, like, why? No, it is actually part of your brain called the reticular activating system. This is what it does. It is the wiring of your brain and it can be changed in days. You can change it in days. And so I am using the example that, you know, of my husband being

crappy and then instead noticing all the cool things that he did and all the ways that he was helping. but you basically can train this bouncer to do anything that you want to do. You can reprogram this in real time, not only to filter out distractions and focus on things that really matter, but also to retrain yourself. Because I started, when I did this practice way back then, two times I can think of examples. The first time was telling myself I'm actually organized, telling myself I like organizing, telling myself that I am a tidy person and that I am good at this and noticing all these things and actually taking action and doing these little projects and really becoming aware of them, it made me that.

Whereas in the past, all I was seeing was all the ways that I had sucked. And then when I did this exercise again later with my husband, it actually made me much happier in my marriage. It made me appreciate him. It made our relationships so much stronger. And the only thing was, is I retrain my brain to see the positive and to kind of filter out the negative. So I think, I feel like this filter works both ways. We can train ourselves to look for self-doubt, to have negative thoughts. We can train our brain to see all the bad things, or we can retrain it for it. the positive things. And it's pretty incredible how this like mindset filter, I guess, is that what we're going to call it? It does more than just filter in the information.

When we're having more negative thoughts, we're feeling this, we're behaving in a negative way. It's having a negative impact in our life. And when we're filtering and seeing more positive and optimistic and good things, we're behaving in a more positive, optimistic way. And we can change this. And I think people say this to me all the time and people say this all the time. But now that we know the what's actually happening scientifically, I feel like this is going to be, it makes more sense and I'm excited about it. And it seems easy. So let's give you, I'm just going to throw this out. We're going to talk about two things. We're going to talk about how to train your brain to be like this tidy person. But I also want to talk about how Mel Robbins has this really

simple thing that you can do to kind of get the ball rolling to prove to yourself that this is actually a thing and within days to see the results in a really simple exercise that you can do. and we're going to talk about that in just one minute. I have to take a second to thank today's podcast sponsor, KiwiCo. We're a big fan of KiwiCo in this house, especially my middle daughter, Abby, her favorite day of the month is the day that KiwiCo comes. What this is is basically a kit that teaches your kids something amazing,

things that they're not going to just learn in school. It's all about art, engineering, science, technology. and Abby found that her favorite things to do were really like these STEM-type projects. She built a Bluetooth speaker that she uses every day she's so proud of. She built her own ukulele. She's built rockets and robots. But last month, we did something a little bit different and we ordered like the creative one and she learned how to macromay right now.

You can get 50% off your first month at kiwiCo.com. promo code organize. That's K-I-W-I-C-O-com promo code organize. Okay, the simple exercise that Mel Robbins did to really prove to everyone, including you, that this works is really a cool thing. It's called the Look for Hearts game. And you may have already listened to this Mel Robbins podcast, so I'm just going to be short and sweeten to the point here and then we're going to jump into what we can do if we're not doing the hearts game to really do sort of the organization tidy part. But basically the look for hearts game is that you are really mindful when you're out and about that you are looking for hearts. Maybe it's a rock that's shaped like a heart or a tree or a cloud or maybe there's a heart on a bumper sticker or I don't

know, somebody's wearing a t-shirt with hearts on it. Everywhere you look, you kind of are just reminding yourself to look for hearts. And we heard this in the podcast while we were driving to the cottage. And we were like, let's do this over the week that we're at the cottage. So we were looking in the clouds. We were looking for rocks. We were looking at trees. And we were seeing them. We were seeing hearts. We were out. We were like, look, actually, I think I feel like, I see that bubbling brook there. It's in the shape of a heart. My kids were like, mom, that tree looks like a heart. And we were at the store and we were like noticing heart things like heart mugs. And it was really a very cool experience. But I'm going to be

honest with you. After a few days, I forgot to keep looking for hearts. It's like my brain, it wasn't important to me. And so my, the bouncer was like, listen, Cass, I'm forgetting to remember hearts aren't important to you anymore. And I stopped looking for hearts. And I feel like this is some, this is normal. I think it showed me, it proved to me in a very short amount of time where it was topical of my mind to keep looking for hearts. But then my brain kind of, my particular activating system, kind of filtered that out again. And it became like, I fell into old routines of not looking for hearts anymore,

which is totally fine with me because, listen, the looking for hearts thing was just the proof that this works, that for me wasn't doing anything except proving this theory. It's not like I looked at a heart and was like, oh, and was somehow more positive. But what Mel suggests is once you've done this, like, it's called cognitive bias modification. So you're training yourself to look for something. You can substitute the hearts for like positive. things your husband's doing or positive things that are happening in the world or I don't know let's get into the organizing and other parts parts of out your home you love can you look for things in your

house that make you feel proud and happy or can you look for spots or things in your life where you are actually organized or a system really works if you need a band-aid can you find it really quickly. That's a maze balls. Let's celebrate that. And so I think the hearts thing is a cool idea, but you also can just jump right to training yourself to really see the tidiness in yourself and in your home and the organization in yourself and in your home. Because when you start to see that, when you start to notice it, when you start realizing that you are not messy, you organize differently. You may have too much stuff, but underneath all of the chaos and the mess and the whatever is a very organized person. Just needed a little help to get out. And the help to get

out is you noticing the good and the positive and the ways that you actually are amazing. Because then you're going to start to feel excited. And I am doing this. I'm already, I mean, I feel like the organization thing. I'm already geeked about organization. Here's what I'm going to be working on right now is my home, my new home. You guys know, I just bought a brand new home. We've lived here for just over a week and it has been nothing but nightmares. Nothing but nightmares. We moved in, the backyard flooded, then it rained, it flooded again two days later and then it flooded so badly that it was coming right up to the house. I kid you not. We were up until six in the morning just with buckets and pumps and generators just trying to get the water to stay out of the basement. And then a hurricane

came the next night. A hurricane. It wasn't a hurricane. No. And then the next night, a tornado came. A tornado. I can't even make this up. It literally ripped all the shingles and the tar paper off. multiple sections of our roof, ripped down trees, and rained again. Now, didn't get any rain in the basement, which was amazing. But we noticed the next day, like, a lot of the breakers were blown, so the outdoor kitchen that we have wasn't working, and then the pump, the pond filter broke.

We've just had, oh, we've spent so much money in the first week, just fixing problems. There was a leaky pipe in the ceiling that was leaking into a bowl, was dry-wold over. We've just had endless issues. And I really became very negative at this house. And I started walking around in every room and just feeling like a seething hate. And all I noticed was the scuffs on the walls and that the paint chipped and that this is dirty and there's cobwebs in the corner. And everywhere I was looking, I was looking for problems and things to be upset about. I'd wake up in the morning and I'd walk in my bathroom. That's gorgeous and beautiful. And I'd say,

This tile shows every footprint. I hate this tile. It's never getting clean. It never gets polished. I'd walk into my beautiful walk-in closet. And I would be like, ugh, I hate that there's not a door on the laundry chute. And I can see right into my kid's bathroom. And there's zero privacy. And I hate this house. And I'd walk back out into my beautiful bedroom. And I'm just like negative. The first thing I do is look at the window to look at the flooding in the backyard. And not say, wow, look at all the trees. Look at all the trees. beautifulness. Instead, everywhere I looked, I was looking for negativity. And it was making me, first of all, miserable, angry and sad and crying and miserable all day long. And the second thing, it was making me not want to take care of my house at all. I was like, why am I bothering cleaning

it? It's a, I hate this house. Why am I bothering doing the laundry? I don't even want to unpack. I don't want to put anything away. I hate this house. And that was making the house worse. And it was getting worse. And I'd walk into the kitchen. I'm like, this kitchen's so dirty. Oh, I hate this house. And I'd walk right back out instead of doing the dishes and doing the things I needed to do. Guys, do you know what's happening? The bouncer in my brain, I have trained it now to just see the negative things about this house and that mindset is creating negativity in this house. Yeah, a bunch of bad stuff happened. Don't get me wrong. Absolutely. Crap went, crap went sideways. It was not a great move in, but I'm making it 10 times worse because I'm focusing on the negative. And in focusing on the

negative, I'm creating more negative results. And this is what I used to do, when I was like, I am messy, I am X, Y, Z, then my house became that. Because our thoughts affect our reality. It shapes it because we don't take action when we tell ourselves that we're bad at it anyways. There's no point in tidying and cleaning your house. You're not going to want to. You won't take care of it. If you're telling yourself you hate your house, you need new furniture.

you want to update, you hate the paint. If you're walking around your home right now and you notice all the things that have to be done that aren't to the way you want, things you want to change, if you're constantly focusing on the bad things, you will hate your home and your home will never get better. You will be stuck on this cycle of never getting ahead because your brain is not allowing you to get ahead because it is filtering out all the good and only showing you all the bad and when you see the bad you're incapable of taking action and changing it and that's just science friends and so it's not just about your house we can apply this same principle this same phenomenon to any aspect of your life your love life you tell yourself all the men out there suck

You tell yourself you never find anybody. You only date bad guys. You're going to be alone forever. People are always going to dump you. That will become a reality because that's all you're going to see. Right? So how can you change? How can you change your home right now? Well, this is what I'm doing in my new home that I'm hating right now when I should be loving it. For the past two days, past two days because I was remembering this podcast from Mel Robbins and I'm like, this is ridiculous. Cass, stop it. You got some bad mojo up in here. And that's really what the mojo is. You know, people say about talk about energy and they talk about all that stuff. It's just your brain. It's just your thoughts. Your thoughts affect your reality. And so I was

making this house so much worse because my bad freaking attitude towards this house. It was manifesting, which is really just us doing things subconsciously. That's what manifesting really is. It was manifesting into a messy, untidy, kind of like dirty house. So for the past two days, I've been purposely faking it till I make it, but honestly looking for real proof of things that I love about this house. I love all the big open windows. I love the huge garage. We have an outdoor kitchen. We, I was feeling like I walked out there and I was like, oh, the TV's not up. And I'm like, you know what? No, this sitting area, who cares that there's not an outdoor TV? What kind of bougie people have that? That's nuts. Yes, it was there when we bought the house, but they took the TV

with them. We had a spare TV. We haven't had time to put it up. But it didn't matter because the seating area out here was so lovely. I was sitting out there with my husband. And I was like, isn't this nice? isn't this wonderful? And he's like, let's put up the TV. And we did. We took action to make it even better because we were focusing on the good that was there. And I cleaned the kitchen because I was like, I love the color of these cabinets and it's not white, but it's this beautiful. I just love this kitchen. And then I started getting really excited and motivated to clean it. It's not a fake it thing. And we talked about this with my daughter on the car ride up. She's like, if you, don't believe it, if you just say things like, I am beautiful when you don't believe it, this isn't

going to work. It's not going to work for you to say, my house is very organized if you don't believe that it is. This isn't just a blanket thing that you're just going to say a bunch of stuff and hope it comes true. That is where you're going to fail. That's the lie here. What you have to do is find real evidence to support this positive thought. What are some things you actually love about your house? What is one space that actually is organized? Like, I know you've found you love your neighborhood. Do you love your neighbors? Do you love your backyard? Do you love the way the light comes in in the morning? Do you love that you can always find your cleaning supplies because they're in a really convenient Do you love that, I don't know, do you love that your linen closet and that your sheets have a really nice place to go that maybe your old house didn't have?

Do you love that you have a double sink in your bathroom? I don't care how small and dated and I don't care messy your house is. There are things about your home that you love real things. And those are the things we have to focus on. and you need to bring those to the surface and be very mindful every day that you're looking for those things. And we can do the things that my therapist did. We're just like, she gave me a notebook. And it was like homework. You know what I mean? Real homework. Because it does. It takes work to train your brain. I'm not going to say like you do this once and let's train forever.

But I will tell you you do this once and you will instantly feel better and then do it again tomorrow. and then do it again the next day. Set reminders in your phone if you have to. I promise you, I promise you, you will get excited about your space and about your ability to maintain it and about the fact that you are a tidy person and that you actually enjoy cleaning your house and making it beautiful. And guess what? It's fall. It's fall, y'all. Get some pumpkins for your front porch. Maybe a new wreath. You deserve it. Your home deserves it. because you love your home, because you have a home and so many people do not. You have a place that's yours to come home to, a respite, and it doesn't matter right now what state it's in.

It is yours and you love it. And it's that attitude. It's retraining your brain. It's telling the bouncer that those are the thoughts that are allowed to come in and the bad thoughts of your home, they are not allowed in. We are training your brain and yourself to be a tidy and organized person. I'm excited about this one, you guys. And I'm so grateful to Mel Robbins for explaining the science behind it, because when you understand the science behind this, it makes it easier to do it.

It makes it make sense. It isn't just some fluffy, you know, hoity-toity. Woo-woo universe crap. This is real brain stuff, real stuff that we can do to change every aspect of our home and our lives and ourselves. And now we know the why. I'm going to put links to Mel Robbins, her podcast and her live talking more about this amazing concept down in the description. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I hope, I hope you're feeling really excited about the possibilities here because this is such an incredible thing that you need to do right now. Thank you guys so much and I'll see you next time.