KonMari Your Mental Space
Like everyone else, I have a lot on my mind these days. News streaming from the firehose of politics and world events, my kids, and whether we have anything in the house for dinner. Added to that, the past year that I have spent playing around and doing experiments in my art studio has filled my brain with competing half-baked ideas for where to go next with my artwork. My brain has become so overloaded that my daytime thoughts are running rampant in my dreams and are paradoxically slowing me down during the day.
I’m especially struggling with my creative work. I am spending way more time in the studio staring into space than putting paint to canvas. And while contemplation is an important part of my creative process, this feels more like paralysis.
It is time to spring clean my mental space.
The KonMari Method
The last time we did a major spring cleaning we were living in a big house in Dublin. As often happens in our age of consumerism and with growing kids, our possessions had gotten a little bit out of control. To address the problem, we turned to what so many people at the time were reading – Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Following Kondo’s KonMari method involved three key steps:
Gather. We got everything out in the open, category by category, so that we could see what we had.
Decide and let go. We held up each item and asked, “Does this spark joy?” We kept the things that did – or that we just really needed – and got rid of the things that did not.
Organize and store. We organized and stored the things we wanted to keep.
This process worked so well that I have recently been applying it to my mental space.
My goal for mental spring cleaning is not necessarily a tidier mind. In fact, creative minds are often messy. But there is messy good and messy bad. A brain full of interesting tidbits, memories, and imagery can provide fertile ground for creative mind-wandering and exploration. A brain full of distracting information, unfinished projects, and general worries, on the other hand, can lead to mental fatigue and inaction.
It’s the difference between Francis Bacon’s infamously messy painting studio – a seemingly unorganized space full of materials that he relied on to spark inspiration – and the basement shop where I grew up – an almost impossible to work in underground space choc-a-block full of expired materials where if anything was going to be sparked it would be a fire.
Mental clutter can trip you up
What does clutter look like in our brains? Unfinished tasks, unresolved problems, and nagging worries reside in our brains in the form of persistent cognitive activity – sometimes called cognitive loops. These cognitive loops take up space in the precious cognitive real estate of working memory. Unlike the seemingly unlimited space of long-term storage, our working memory can only hold so much activity at a time. When some of this space is taken up by open cognitive loops, there is less for doing other things that require attention and conscious thought.
Distracting cognitive loops can be ignored with effort, but they are sticky – they continually try to catch and hold our attention. And so, we must continually spend mental energy pulling our attention back to the task at hand. As time goes on, our mental reserves are depleted, it becomes harder and harder to suppress these mental distractions and get things done, and we are left feeling anxious and mentally fatigued. My husband calls these sticky loops “mind-fields” – they are always there ready to blow up your train of thought.
Mind-fields aren’t just a problem when you are trying to work. They can also hijack mind-wandering by grabbing the attentional spotlight and stopping the loose associative type of thinking that is an essential part of the creative process. Instead of letting the ideas flow we end up getting caught in the quicksand of our problems and worries. Creative paralysis often ensues.
What can we do about these distracting open cognitive loops?
Inside the creative messiness of Francis Bacon’s studio
The life-changing magic of tidying up cognitive loops
In the language of the KonMari method, we can think about mental tidying in terms of gathering, letting go, and organizing.
Gather. The problem with open cognitive loops is that they often hide just below our conscious thought where they can run around unsupervised. We need to gather these thoughts in order to deal with them. For me, writing is the best way to do this. When I am feeling stuck or overwhelmed, I free-write on all the things I have to do, the things that are worrying me, the things that I would like to be doing, the things I want to try out in my studio, and my artwork ideas. The simple act of externalizing all the things that are on my mind can provide some immediate cognitive relief.
Decide and let go. Once you’ve identified what’s on your mind, you might realize that there are some things you can simply get rid of. Years ago, friends of ours were considering remodeling their bungalow kitchen. Their current kitchen was fine but all their friends were doing remodels and they had the nagging sense that their kitchen could be better. At some point, they realized that the open cognitive kitchen loop was siphoning off their mental energy. They brought the idea out in the open, talked about it, and made the conscious decision that they were not going to do a remodel. This decision effectively closed the loop, saving them both mental space and quite a lot of money.
When I take the time to write down all the things I feel that I could or should do, there are almost always some that I can let go of. There are worries about which I can do nothing and sometimes simply writing about them releases them. There are upcoming deadlines for exhibition calls that I can decide I am not going to meet. There are artwork ideas churning around in the back of my mind that I realize no longer interest me.
And then there are the things you decide are important. Some of these you might be able to close out with little effort. I am always amazed how little time it actually takes to respond to emails, make calls, and complete little errands that have been stressing me out. It is usually far less than the time I’ve already spent worrying about them.
Finishing a task or making a conscious decision to let it go are both excellent ways to close cognitive loops. For those things that can’t be quickly closed out, it’s time to organize and store.
Organize and store. One way to reduce your cognitive load is to lean more heavily on your environment by storing your ideas and to-dos some place other than your brain. Transferring tasks to a to-do list provides immediate relief for an overwhelmed mind. Storing ideas in my “art techniques to try” or “future blog post” files takes the pressure off my brain to remember those things and helps me focus on one thing at a time.
Larger ventures can be organized by breaking the project down into concrete steps and then creating a plan and timeline for completing those steps. This both brings peace to a chaotic mind and ensures that the project gets done.
Why wait until Spring?
Just like in your home, you can’t solely rely on sporadic big cleanups. Regular maintenance and cleaning are also important.
For our minds, regular maintenance means doing our best to reduce the distractions that eat up mental energy, taking breaks to let our attention rest, and topping up our mental resources through restorative activities like meditation or spending time in nature.
Regular mental tidying is something both productivity gurus and researchers recommend. For some people, this might take the form of daily morning pages or weekly reviews to reveal and help close cognitive loops. I find monthly reviews and resets helpful.
But there are times, like the present for me, where incremental maintenance and tidying are not enough. When my art studio starts veering too much towards chaos, it is time to do a physical deep clean and reset. And when my mental space gets too full of things that detract from my clarity of mind, it is time to do a mental deep clean and reset.
Whether in your physical or mental home, the ultimate goal of tidying up is not just a tidier space, but a greater sense of peace and a clearer sense of what truly matters to you.
Do you need a mental tidy up?
Anne Kearney is the 2025 reDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.