Moving house and moving on

26/09/2008 by Tina.

We’re moving - again! This will be the 13th time in 22 years, so you’d think I’d be quite good at it.

Well I am actually - everything has a label and I’ve planned where all the furniture will go. But undoubtedly the best bit, and the most therapeutic, is the throwing away of redundant and no longer wanted things. In fact this time I think more will be recycled or taken to the tip than will go to the new house!

There is no doubt that decluttering your surroundings helps clear you mind, and it’s clearly big business if the many decluttering systems to be found by google is anything to go by. Mind you, no one seems to have twigged that if you buy a book on decluttering it’s just another bit of clutter for you to deal with

Anyway, having these “things” around you all the time acts as constant reminders, whether you’re consciously aware of them or not. And when it comes to the wiring of the brain, the more times the neurons fire (each time it catches your eye, you touch it or you think about it), the more “hardwired” they become, forming what Leonard A Wisneski (The Scientific Basis of Integrative Medicine) calls engrams, or engrained thought patterns. He says:

“The amygdala receives the incoming sensory information and checks in with the hippocampus to see if there is an engram associated with a memory to which the hippocampus can respond. The amygdala is scouting around to see if there is a match. It is somewhat like doing the FBI computer search for a fingerprint. If the sensory data is close, you get a hit.”

And from there the body responds with a cascade of hormones that affect your feelings. Now of course some things will have a pleasant engram/association and will spark off the feel good hormones, but others may not and you’ll find yourself feeling bad even though nothing has happened in the present. Basically your body goes, “Well the last time I saw/held/heard that I felt angry, so if I’m seeing/holding/hearing this again I should be angry now”. And it produces the chemicals to make that happen. Clearly bad news if you’re surrounded by things that evoke negative memories!

The good news is that when the neurons stop firing, the engrams can break down, so no future matches.

So order up that skip, toss out that rubbish, declutter your life and move on to better things. Less work for your poor old amygdala and more room for feeling good

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