Uncluttering Your Life

As we continue through our month of cleansing, we want to take today to focus on little ways to “unclutter” your life. We have sat down and compiled a list of ten steps to take during your cleansing process.

• Evaluate yours and your family’s priorities. Sit down and involve the whole family, make a list, engage in whatever method fits your needs best to ensure you focus on these priorities. By honing in on your family’s priorities will help eliminate unnecessary stress.
• Discuss Goals [Daily, Weekly, Monthly]. This step branches from the step above but narrows them down even further. Make a list of things that you would like to accomplish for the day and follow through with them. In regards to the weekly and monthly goals, we would suggest keeping these goals more about state of mind/spirit. For example a weekly goal could be something like: “Remind myself of a happy memory” or “invest in re-reading my favorite novel this month”.
• Take one thing at a time. Following a cancer diagnosis can cause profound chaos within your life, it is important to accomplish your daily goals and stick to priorities BUT it is also important to not become overwhelmed when thinking ahead. Sometimes it just important to get through the next couple hours or to the end of the day.
• Don’t overcommit yourself and know that sometimes it is okay to say “No”. This is something that may be hard to do at times. This can be especially true if you are living cancer. It is natural to want to still do all of the things you did before, to take control and be a “go-getter”-but it is important to recognize that it is okay to say no without guilt. By not overcommitting your schedule will eliminate that unnecessary stress we have talked so much about.

Moving forward, into your home:

• Items within your home should either have value or have meaning. By striving to rid of the [for lack of a better word] clutter from your home, will give you sense of a physical cleanse. For those items that do not hold meaning or value in your life, donate!
• Designate 3 items to donate every time you “unclutter”. By having a numerical goal, will help you figure out what is really important.
• When cleaning your room, always make your bed first. We know that this may sound silly, but, by making the bed will allow of things that are out of place in your room, stand out! Also it is a great spot to conquer and divide those cluttered areas.
• Create a “family command center”. This space will allow for you to display family schedules, calendar, important notes and reminders. Put a white board in so you are able to leave important notes or reminders to one another. Involve the whole family to create a fun, innovative and appealing space! Check out some ideas on Pinterest.
• Invest in creating a filing system for all of your important documents. Re-organize your family’s important documents and ensure they are in a place you can find. Next Monday we will feature how to efficiently organize your medical records, which pediatric cancer patients can understand!
• Allow yourself a break. One of the most important thing in all of this is, to allow yourself time. Don’t waste precious time over the small stuff.