There are times when I feel so sharp in thinking. I know exactly what to do, and I comprehend what I read much faster. Everything seems fluid.
I act with intention and confidence. I don’t feel burdened to do many things, but rather I’m sure of what to do at a particular time.
While these experiences are great and help me believe that I’m operating in full gear, it is fleeting.
I can’t sustain and replicate it every single time, or a majority of the time. In a nutshell, it doesn’t last.
Most of the time, I feel drained, sluggish, and foggy even before I do any meaningful work.
The major reason for sharing this article is that I recently found out why I feel this way most of the time, and I also discovered the 3 habits that can boost mental clarity, thereby increasing your productivity on a day-to-day basis.
So, if you do have a similar problem as I do, and you want to boost your mental clarity, which helps in maximizing your full potential, then I will say “stay tuned,” because we’re about to dive into something interesting.
— Social media overload/overstimulation: Social media is profitable for learning new things and also connecting with people, but there is a problem.
The problem is that we can be overstimulated by information from digital devices, and our senses can take in more information than our brains can process.
Have you ever noticed how you feel after scrolling through YouTube for 2hrs or more?
For me, after spending endless time scrolling through YouTube for hours upon hours, I feel drained.
The excessive consumption of social media overstimulates our brains, hence, we feel foggy even before we begin any meaningful work.
And the worst of it all is that we start our day with social media and we’re sucked into an endless scroll from feed to feed on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
— Pile up of activities on the mind: Every little thing that you are aware of or not is being processed by the subconscious mind. So if you have a catalog of things that you’re supposed to do, whether important or not, and you keep on procrastinating about it, you’re delegating it to your subconscious mind to worry about it and this makes us stressed and anxious leading to mental fatigue and fogginess.
— You’re caught up in the past and anxious about the future: We often spend the majority of our time worrying about the wrong decisions we made in the past and the fear of what will happen in the future that hasn’t happened yet.
We live in limbo. This paralyzes us. We become unmotivated. We lack the energy and enthusiasm to engage in the now.
There are other problems like unhealthy sleeping habits, unhealthy diets, and lack of exercise that also affect your mental efficiency, but the three mentioned above are major for me and probably you.
Now that we have known some of the causes of our mental fatigue and overload, let’s look at the 3 habits that can boost your mental clarity.
Graduated stimulation simply means doing tasks that are less entertaining first and gradually moving on to entertaining tasks later on in the day when you notice that your energy is growing weaker.
Instead of starting your day with excessive social media consumption, you start with your most important task.
You must complete your most vital task first because it is usually the one that is least enjoyable.
By getting it done, you become mentally light and free. You are no longer taunted by the thoughts of it.
So plan your day in such a way that the most important, difficult, and boring stuff is done first before graduating to entertaining stuff later in the day.
Brain dumping is essential if you want to reduce the tension that comes from having too many things on your mind at once.
Brain dumping simply means writing down in a journal every single thing that you have to do. Everything you are accountable for, everything you must remember.
It is way better to have a structured list of everything that bothers you written down in a journal than to store it in your head.
While writing, try to be as thorough and detailed as possible. By doing that, you’re emptying your mind on paper, which frees you mentally.
It is proper to take this further by organizing your task according to the Eisenhower Complex.
The Eisenhower Complex is a system for organizing the importance and urgency of your various tasks.
So here’s the structure:
a.) Urgent and Important: Things that are urgent and important should be done first.
b.) Urgent but not important: Tasks that are urgent but not important should be delegated or done later in the day.
c.) Not urgent but important: Tasks that are not urgent but are important should be scheduled and properly planned for.
d.) Not urgent or important: Tasks that are neither urgent nor important should not be done at all. Get rid of them.
You'll feel more mentally liberated if you organize your tasks according to the Eisenhower Complex.
If you are subconsciously oscillating between the dread of the past and the anxiety of the future, then it means you lack mindfulness.
Mindfulness is about being present. The power of here and now. It means you have self-awareness.
When you are mindful, you stop overthinking everything. Overthinking is a major driver of brain fog, and mindfulness eradicates it.
When we practice mindfulness, we’re practicing the art of creating space for ourselves-–space to think, space to breathe, space between ourselves and our reactions.
So, there we have it. We’ve talked about some of the causes of brain fog, which makes us feel tired and sluggish most of the time. We also talked about 3 ways to boost mental clarity.
I’ll draw the curtain here. I hope you find this article useful and that you’ve learned a thing or two.
Make sure to share your thoughts in the comment section. I would love to hear your view on mental clarity.
Thanks a million. Always remember that you have greatness within you.
