Enclosed

The space around you is more than just your surroundings, it is a construct of the mind.

The area around you can determine comfort, worry, aggression, and even safety.

It can either help your mental health or hurt it.

Your mind reads the space around you, and based off of personal experiences and other variables, determines how you feel about it.

It’s amazing how many subtle and minute cues in the world around us affect our mental health. Wray Herbert writes for the Scientific American, describing in detail the evidence behind physical space affecting the mind.

In short, the world at your fingertips arranges the emotions in your mind, but it all depends on what you have been through, and how you look at the world.

What I have found is that when my environment becomes cluttered or messy, I become more anxious and worried.

When things are clean or the room feels more open, I can relax.

I know now that the enclosure I kept myself in reflected the enclosure I kept my mind in.

But it hadn’t always been so obvious to me.

During the darker years of my depression, my room was a disaster zone, matching the chaos of my brother’s rooms. My bed stayed a rat’s nest, and my clothes found their home on the floor, or chair. At the time, it didn’t matter to me. That is, until I came across the most useful advice.

Even if you can’t bring yourself to do anything else, make your bed.

At the time, it was a simple thing, I had to get out of bed for school anyways, and Lord knows I couldn’t stay in bed and be a disappointment to my parents.

So, every day, when I pulled myself out of the black tendrils that weighed me to my mattress, I pulled my sheets up over my pillow.

At first, it was a messy-made bed. Just some disheveled sheets pulled over the spanse of the twin frame.  TH]hen when it came to the weekends, it became an accomplishment.

If I did nothing all day, at least I made my bed.

And while some times it took extra effort just to remember, that little trick of doing just one thing boosted my self esteem higher than any letter grade.

Slowly, I began to make progress. On easier days, I even dared to stack the papers on my desk in a neat pile, or put away a basket of laundry.

With each square space of picked up room, I found myself thinking a little clearer, and breathing a little easier.

The space around me matched my mind, cluttering my thoughts into patches of anger and hate and fear.

It wasn’t until I coulds keep up a clean room that I realized that I put my thoughts into the space around me. I tend to allow myself to think as far as I can put my thoughts in the space around me.

In time, my room became more and more of a space where my thoughts didn’t clutter, but could flow freely. I had the space to sort through them, recognizing the lies I believed, and the fears I sheltered.

The world around us affects us more deeply than we realize, and even if you can’t bring yourself to make your bed, or fold your clothes, then find a space that is clear. In the bathroom, all alone, or in the front yard in your week old sweatpants, wherever it can be, go.

What you allow into your surroundings is what you allow into your mind, your health.

Be aware of what hurts, what collects the dust of your fears, and what scratches at your worst insecurities. Some of these things you can see, and some of these things, you can change.

One day at a time. It can change.