Making life easier: the benefits of emotional minimalism
Perhaps for a long time we have assumed as a life mantra that ‘no one said it was easy’, thinking that difficulty, constant challenge and overexertion were the key to success (and even to happiness). But things are changing and the minimalism looks like the new path to that well-being with which we obsess in theory –because of the ‘culture of well-being’–, but which does not always really arrive. It is no coincidence that in a society overloaded with information, hyperstimulated and cerebrally accelerated (we have about 60,000 thoughts a day and most of them repetitive and negative, experts suggest), theories – and interest – in minimalism in all its versions are growing. The rules are imposed (a few seconds, please) to lighten your daily life at home and keep order; books that advocate the importance of small changes –the title Atomic habits: small changes, extraordinary successes (Editorial Diana) by James Clear was a bestseller last summer–; and the series that theorize about the minimalism as a lifestyle (in the documentary The Minimalists: Less is Now, from Netflix, Joshua Fields and Ryan Nicodecums, authors of the blog of the same name, try to convince in 53 minutes that you can live with less). Everything happens for a reason. Precisely the coach Anna Fargas He talks at length about it in the book. emotional minimalism (Luciérnaga Editions), a kind of manual to lighten the mind. “It is about identifying and eliminating the unnecessary emotional burdens that we accumulate. These burdens, which I call ‘stones’ in my book, include limiting beliefs, negative thoughts, toxic habits, and distressing emotions. The goal is to simplify our emotional lives, allowing us to focus on what really matters. By reducing excess emotions, we promote greater inner peace and mental clarity, which leads us to deeper satisfaction in our daily lives,” explains Fargas.
The importance of letting go of ballast
The psychologist Brigida H. Madsen establishes a very visual analogy about the benefits of letting go of ballast. “It is something similar to entering a room overloaded with things and start removing from your sight everything that is uselesswhich saturates you or gives you work to achieve a clear environment and feel peace.” This needlessly complicating life responds, to a certain extent, “to a desire to want to have control and know in advance what can happen to us. We want to have an answer for everything and obtain immediate results to feel that we have certainty in our decisions,” he adds. The psychologist Barbara Tovar defines this current as “a vital attitude that one consciously adopts to simplify the internal noise generated by certain psychological processes. Demand, perfectionism, stress… all this threatens emotional minimalism which represents the opposite, that is, cultivating simplicity of thoughts, calm, learning to be present and adopting an attitude detox that allows us to unload our interior of external and internal noise and find a balance focused on the small things of the day to have a full life. There are processes such as anticipatory anxiety that drain our energy and undermine that minimalism that advocates going little by little and crossing each bridge at the right time, without trying to fill any free space that our mind has,” he points out. So much for the theory, because stopping the brain and the desire for control in the face of uncertainty does not seem easy (paradoxically, especially if we take into account the title of this article). For Tovar it is about “learning to protect spaces during the day to be calm, in the present moment, and not always in the position to solve either anticipate. In the end you consume energy from a space that should be used to charge batteries,” he points out. And it even refers to the need to “schedule spaces in the day to decide, that is, dedicate quality time to think about what worries you and prevent those thoughts from being a constant trickle.”
Social networks and the desire for unhealthy perfectionism
In an era in which social networks are an (important) part of our lives, that tendency towards perfectionism has multiplied exponentially due to the fact that want to make everything beautiful. And tell it (stories or photo via). “It is important to free ourselves from the ‘Instagram syndrome’ or, in other words, pretend that everything is perfect. For example, when it comes to inviting friends over, we overcomplicate ourselves and many times we stop doing it because we allow ourselves to be carried away by that level of demand that consumes a lot of our time and prevents us from enjoying what is truly important,” reflects H. Madsen. And all of this is related to the possibility of choosing not to be perfect. “It is very important to discard perfectionism as a way of life and have a healthier demand, learn to take care of ourselves, to rest, to set red lines, to give ourselves the time we need. We get into a complicated wheel thinking that this way we have a feeling of worth or existence. But we need to find that balance between motivating ourselves to achieve achievements and respecting rest and being more compassionate with ourselves,” adds Tovar.