Few people ever bring up the necessity of occasionally detoxing your life in addition to cleansing your body of toxins and other dangerous substances. Negative energy, stress, and tension build up in your body along with pollutants, and these factors impact your overall health, emotions, and capacity for clear thought.
Discover here the key indicators that you need to cleanse your life and how to do it in order to regain your inner tranquility and contentment.
6 signs it’s time to detox your life
You should detox your life periodically as a way of maintaining your well-being. If you don’t do it at all or often enough, your body will start giving you hints that you need to. Or maybe you will find yourself facing the same problem and worries over and over again.
Your body is trying to tell you something
You feel constantly tired, without any energy and you have a hard time focus. You might have trouble falling asleep, insomnia or dream so much that you wake up feeling tired already.
Your skin can also break out often and you feel your muscles stiff and sore. Getting sick once or twice a month, even with just the flu, can also be an indicator that something is amiss.
You can’t find the time to be alone
You need to be alone with yourself to allow your body to rest and calm down the flow of emotions. Solitude also gives you the opportunity for contemplation and for your brain to declutter.
When you don’t have enough time by yourself, you start craving it. All you want to do is to close yourself at home and enjoy a moment of silence, a moment of doing nothing.
You’re constantly reaching for your phone
When you start feeling the jitters every time you’re away from your phone or the internet in general, something is wrong.
The social or work pressure to be constantly connected is taking a toll on your brain. Even when it should be resting and recovering, it is stressing about what is going on. Maybe you’re waiting for a message or a call or maybe you are missing something important happening in the world or at work if you don’t look it up.
Too much stuff
Your desk is cluttered, your home is cluttered, your car is cluttered, and every time you need something you have to navigate through all the stuff you have.
This “stuff” takes physical space but also brain space. It competes for your attention, it stressed you when you need to go through a pile of papers, shoes or cute toys to finally find what you were looking for.
Not only it increases stress, it also prevents you from relaxing.
You’re dealing with toxic people
Even if you don’t recognize them as such, you might have a friend or a coworker that simply leaves you exhausted after spending time with them.
These people tend to always have something negative to say about you, about other people, or about things in general. They keep complaining, they make themselves the victims and they normally expect you to fix the situation for them or at least cheer them up, regardless of your own problems and feelings.
You’re spending too much money
The world right now is one of consumerism. When you’re not emotionally balanced or are overstressed you tend to buy more things in hopes that they will fill the void and make you happy.
And you find logical reasons for your purchases too. Maybe you would be able to relax better if your TV was bigger and you didn’t need to strain your eyes so much. A new computer would be faster so it would stress you less.
In the end, you are likely to end up in debt, which will stress you even more; or you at least you will find yourself with more clutter to go through.
How to detox your life now
If you saw yourself reflected in any of the signs that you need to detox your life, it’s time to pull your sleeves up and get to work. The sooner you start introducing some changes, the faster you will be able to break the negative circle you’re into right now and begin to fight stress and all the negative energies surrounding you.
Declutter
Have you heard about Marie Kondo and her method to declutter? Even if you don’t follow her technique by the book, her premise is still very good and easy to follow.
Just check your house and your desk and pick objects one by one. While holding one of these, try to remember, did you use it in the past two years? Does it have a practical function? Does it have a good memory attached to it? Does it make you smile or feel good when you look at it? If the answer is negative to all of these, then throw it away or give it to charity.
Clearly, it isn’t’ bringing you any benefits, practical or emotional, and it is only a source of clutter and stress.
Listen to your spiritual needs
You don’t necessarily need to pray or follow a ritual. Listening to your spiritual needs is not about religion, it’s about paying attention to your soul.
Sometimes people feel more relaxed and in peace with themselves after reading a script. Others feel the need to meditate, or go to a park and hear the rustling sound of the trees, or to simply sit in silence for a moment, without interruptions and distractions.
Declutter your social media and contacts
If you eliminate all the “noise” from your social media and from your phone or email, you will considerably eliminate the amount of unimportant notifications you receive and that keep you reaching for your phone.
After the cleansing, it will be more likely that any notification or message will be one that truly interests you and that doesn’t just take up your time.
Go through all your accounts on social media and eliminate or unfollow anyone who:
- You never met personally or keep an online conversation with.
- You don’t even remember meeting.
- You don’t know who they are at all.
- Constantly posts about a topic that doesn’t interest you or annoys you.
- Keeps posting negative comments or complaining about something.
- Is on an online quest to convert his or her followers to whatever topic they are into while using aggressive messages and images.
Remove or avoid toxic people
Removing toxic people from your life is like decluttering your social media, but harder because you deal with the people in the flesh and there more emotions at play.
Even if you can’t cut them off completely, you should at least try to avoid them as much as possible. It might be painful in the beginning to part ways with someone you like, but eventually, you will feel much better and at peace would yourself.
To recognize these people you can pose yourself some questions.
- Do you feel happy or stressed when you think about meeting them?
- Do they listen to your problems or do they just keep talking about themselves?
- Do they support you in your goals?
- Do you do activities you enjoy or do you always have to compromise?
- Does that person cheer you up or just keeps stressing the negatives for each situation?
Sleep more
You should try to always sleep the numbers of hours required for your body to recover from the stress and fuss of the day. This is even more important for women as sleep deprivation has more negative consequences for their health.
You can make use of some strategies to help you fall asleep easier or you can even add some plants to your bedroom to help you achieve a greater state of relaxation. Some essential oils like lavender can also be good allies to relieve tension.
Detox your body
You don’t necessarily need to enroll in a detox diet. Sometimes, simply making the switch to a healthier diet can help your body recover its energy and strength.
If you’re under great stress there are even foods you should be avoiding, as they worsen the symptoms, while increasing the intake of others can help you fight the tension you are feeling.
Exercising is also excellent to keep your body healthy, release the tension from your muscles and sweat the toxins out of your system.
Last but not least: detox your mind
You are the holder of your body. You’re the one who has to allow negativity to come in or prevent it from affecting you. The problem is, sometimes, you might be that negativity and it’s hard to detox your life from yourself.
You might be the one putting yourself down, thriving for perfectionism when you’re nothing but a human that also makes mistakes. You may question your decisions, your looks, everything you say and you make up situations in your head imagining what others think or see when they look at you.
The point is, there is no harder judge in this world than your own mind. And until you realize this, no decluttering or tricks to detox your life will work for the problem doesn’t come and go, it is with you at all times.
Check out the testimony of Petra Kolber below, whose quest for perfection went so far that interfered with her normal life, it disrupted her health and prevented her from enjoying some of the best years of her life.
