Mental clarity is more important physical strength. Without a clear mind, we don’t have the capacity in order to keep going. Physical strength is a luxury, mental strength is a necessity. That’s where all of our choices start from. That’s why it’s more important than ever to know how to achieve it.
When I’m stressed out, I make suboptimal decisions. What really happens is that I start to *care less*. I care less until I have zero care leftover in my body. When that happens, that’s when I overlook mistakes and turn in a suboptimal work product in. Whether I get punished for it, I really don’t care.
Even though I had all the physical capacity in the world, it didn’t matter because I had no desire or willpower in order to keep going. Your mind, mentality, and mindset is where everything starts from. A psychologist and therapist said it perfectly. When you’re physically hurt, you can recover from it by eating well and hydrating yourself.
A mental breakdown can be permanent with zero chances of recovery or getting back to your baseline level of normal. With the pandemic raging on in the world, people are not functioning at a healthy pace at all whatsoever. People are working overtime without getting compensated. 10,000 John Deere workers are going on strike.
Employees are finally fed up and taking steps to better their mental health by looking for ways to get mental clarity. It’s more important than ever to take the sick day to take care of your mental health. You don’t want to get permanently hurt by trying to make someone else rich at your expense.
Your life is worth far more than that. Don’t ignore or discount it.
What is Mental Clarity?
Mental clarity is having a clear, direct, and understandable state of mind. There are no high strung emotions that muddies it up to make a suboptimal decision that you regret down the road. Indecisiveness is not in your vocabulary when you achieve mind clarity. There’s no lingering self doubt either.
You can charge ahead with confidence, no burnout, no heartburns, or any other thing that’s holding you back. It’s one of the most powerful weapons you can have to tackle your day and the world. There’s no thinking about “what I have to do next” because that burden isn’t on you anymore. You have achieved peace.
There are many things in the world that are preventing you from doing that. For one thing, money stress is absolutely one of those things. People have an extremely difficult time dealing with money stress because they have so much other things that have to worry about just to live to fight another day.
I’m not going to lie and say that the pandemic didn’t affect my stress levels. I’m more stressed out than ever and I yearn of the day when I finally get to walk away and can say “I quit”. I don’t even feel like I’m living my life for me, I feel like I’m living my life entirely for someone else while they get rich at my expense.
I’m looking forward to the day that I finally get to permanently walk away. These days, companies want to earn at least $100 for every dollar that they pay employees. They want a 100x return. It’s just not something that I want to subject myself to over the long term.
I can’t wait for one day to have complete and absolute mental clarity.
How to Achieve Mental Clarity
Below are the tricks and steps that I’ve used in order to achieve mental clarity and weather the storm that is called a job. One way that I haven’t mentioned to achieve mind clarity is to SLAP that social share button and post to your favorite social media! Mental health is much more important than ever these days.
Your friends could be struggling in the pandemic or in general state of mind. This article could absolutely help them thrive and jump forward! If anything, if you could share the article for me, I would really appreciate it.
So with that said, let’s get into the ways that you can reach mind clarity!
1) Take Care of Your Physiological Needs, VERY IMPORTANT
This is the number one thing. Your physiological needs are the most basic needs in order for you to function. For me personally, I have digestive problems. I have a very hard time digesting food and drink, particularly liquids. Yes, even water. Water pains me and gives me grief during my digestion journey.
When I drink water, I get obscenely angry at no particular thing. Beverages, water, and drinks make me feel tied and weighed down. There’s a burning feeling in my stomach after I drink liquids and beverages, particularly if my stomach is already full of food. Water does not help me digest better, it makes it worse.
Therefore, if my physiological needs of not drinking water plus taking probiotics before eating aren’t met, then I can never achieve mental clarity. Your physiological needs are more important than anything else. Did you get enough sleep? Are you hungry? Are you physically hurt anywhere that’s making it hard for you to focus?
The number one priority is to take care of your physiological needs first before you get mind clarity.
2) Unapologetically Disconnect From Work
When you’re in paid time off or sick day, or holidays, that’s your time. Unapologetically disconnect from work. Stop working and stop thinking about work. They don’t pay you to work 24/7/365. One of my earlier bosses told me to work from home once I told him that I’m taking a sick day. I silently laughed and looked for ways to sue the company.
I didn’t have much money at the time so I didn’t retain a lawyer but if a company told me to do that these days, I will sue them. There was a Kevin O’Leary video who said “I expect you to work during vacations because you and I both agreed that you would do the work”.
While conveniently leaving out the PTO time that Kevin and the employee agreed would be granted to the employees. One of my former bosses said it perfectly. “PTOs are a part of your pay package, we expect you to fully take advantage of it”. They agreed to pay you that amount and now they’re pulling the rug out underneath you.
That doesn’t make sense. You need PTO days to recharge and regain mental clarity.
3) Say No to More Things
There are many people who ask you to do things that THEY want you to do. Anytime that a friend asks you to go to lunch, it’s at their convenient time that they ask you. On the day that they want to. Therefore, it’s not rude to say no and/or to renegotiate and ask for a different time or place than they’re asking for.
You earned your time. You only have a limited amount of time left on this Earth. Why would you spend it doing things that you don’t want to do? At the very least, why wouldn’t you spend it resting up to regain back the mental clarity you lost during the week by working so hard for someone else?
Live your life for yourself, don’t live your life for others. If you want to have mind clarity, then you need to seek out activities that give pleasure to you. Not to someone else. Doing nothing is better than doing a bad thing. There are people who take it personally that you said no. Those aren’t the kind of people you want in your life.
4) Set Boundaries
You may rub some people the wrong way, and that’s OK. Having no relationship is better than having a bad relationship. Set boundaries with people. Whenever there’s people involved, they WILL do things that are in their best interest. Their best interest does not include your interests.
And yes, if they do wrongdoing, and you didn’t say anything, you WILL be blamed for not saying anything. And if you do say something, you WILL be blamed for not going along with the program. You can’t win. Therefore, if you’re going to lose anyway, why not lose while doing something that’s in your best interest?
It logically makes sense to do so. To have mental clarity, you need to set boundaries with other people. Other people will absolutely take from you, if they knew or think they could get away with it. Anytime I tell people that I don’t talk about my personal life, they all yelled at me and called me “paranoid” for not wanting to talk about my personal life.
They were just hurt that I wouldn’t trust them right off the bat.
5) Make Less Decisions By Planning Ahead
Decisions are costly to your mental clarity. It takes immense brainpower to make a single decision. Even simple things like deciding to get up from bed is a decision that takes brainpower in order to do so. You don’t realize how taxing the decisions are to your mental clarity and fitness.
Therefore, if you can lower the quantity of decisions per day, you can increase the quality of the smaller number of decisions you make. One way to do so is to plan ahead with a “to-do” list. It’s one of the good habits to have. It takes brainpower to decide on what next things there are to tackle.
Therefore, if you can eliminate that unnecessary brainpower to exert, then you already won before the day even starts. Every day, I write a “to-do” list of things to do and I check things off one by one as I finish more down the road. It takes the hassle out of remembering to do chores and the like during the day.
6) Eat Well
The biggest caveat to eating well to better your health and increase mental clarity is to make sure that you don’t eat well based on what you think others mean. It’s to eat well by actually figuring out what eating well means for you. For example, gluten. Some people are flat out allergic to gluten because they have celiac disease.
Even though bread might be eating well for one, it’s not eating well for another. It’s up to you to figure out what eating well actually means. Don’t take the generic advice and start eating a bunch of salads because that’s what others think eating well means. Salads can be good for some but bad for others.
Some people need more calories in order to function very well. Whatever eating well means for you to get mental clarity, that’s how you should be eating. It takes time to figure out what it means to eat well. Once you actually figure it out, then it’s going to become magic and you will face less indecision and insecurity in your life.
7) Routines are Good For Mental Clarity
Most people hate being “predictable”. That’s true. However, routines help clear the fog of your mind and give you mental clarity. There’s a reason why Mark Zuckerberg wears the same thing almost every single day. During work from home times, I don’t vary my clothes that much.
I have a set amount of clothing that I want to wear for the week then I repeat for the next week, then I do laundry. It takes one less stress out of my life if I know that that’s what I’m going to be wearing. It’s giving me muscle memory. Muscle memory means that I do it automatically. There’s no mental capacity you need to waste towards it.
Routines are not good if you want to add excitement, suspense, and surprises to your life. Routines are great if you want to simplify and add mind clarity to your life by not having to think about things to do. It’s almost done like clockwork without missing a beat.
8) Spend Time Alone
Even extroverts need to be alone at times. Whether we like it or not, when another human being is in our presence, then we think and act differently than when we are alone. We don’t have to accommodate or think about how others will think or feel. All we have to worry about is ourselves.
When you spend time alone, then you get mental clarity. Every night, I go out and walk around the neighborhood for a solid hour, hour and a half. It gives me time to recoup and really let go of the things that’s been building up in my head. Or I sit on the couch my friend gave me earlier this year and just think about my life.
It’s what gives me the power to think about things that are important to me instead of things that are important for someone else. We get our best ideas when we’re alone. When we’re doing chores or when we’re doing mind numbing and menial chores. That’s what gets you mental clarity and gives you your best ideas.
9) Doing Nothing is Great to Achieve Mental Clarity
And finally, the last thing that can give you the best mental clarity of all time. Doing nothing. When we put in a lot of mental strength on an activity, we tend to get tunnel vision. There’s very little chance that we’ll spend time thinking of things outside the box because we already invested so much time onto one particular solution.
Therefore, we need to take a step back before we even think about moving two steps forward. That’s where doing nothing kicks in. It’s that pause and mental break that you need in order to achieve progress. How many times were you stuck on a problem for hours on end only to go to the gym and work out.
Then when you came back, you wonder how the problem even gave you any headaches in the first place? That happens more times than you would think. It happens more times to me than I would like to admit, too. Sometimes the best way to move forward is to give rest to your brain.
Then the eureka moment can finally sink in.
Mental Clarity Will Literally Open Doors For You
The ones with great mental clarity is scarier than the ones with great physical strength. In the past, physical strength was valued much more highly than mental strength. We needed to fight wars and hand to hand combat in order to gain power over someone else. However, these days, it’s brain over brawn.
No one cares if you can bench press 250 pounds. People care what you’ve done for them lately and recently. If the answer is not much then people just forget about you and let you go in a second. Smarts are valued more heavily than physicality. That’s how I like it because otherwise then, I would be in trouble.
So if it’s valued so highly then, why not take care of your mentality and mental strength? When it’s the key that will open the door for you, it’s a good idea to polish it and keep it clean. It’s what your company pays you for and it’s what your company values you for. Your ability to think through problems and actually solve them correctly.
Even if it’s not to be better at what you do, you should try to gain mental clarity for your overall well sense of being. The mind is where our mood starts. Once we don’t muddy it up with stress and the outside noises of the world, then we get into a better mood throughout the day and the week.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped taking care of our bodies and ourselves and gave our life to other companies more. We need to stop that and start taking care of ourselves much more than others. It all first starts with gaining mental clarity and then the whole world will open to you.
How to Achieve Mental Clarity Summary:
- Take care of your physiological needs, VERY IMPORTANT
- Unapologetically disconnect from work
- Say no to more things
- Set boundaries
- Make less decisions by planning ahead
- Eat well
- Routines are good for mental clarity
- Spend time alone
- Doing nothing is great to achieve mental clarity
