A mindfulness practice. A yoga practice. We create practices to move beyond habits and routines. There is something more holistic about them, as they encompass something deeper in ourselves. A practice is an area we want to develop into a fully integrated life pursuit. While minimalism is viewed as an action taken once and (hopefully) maintained, minimalism can be a practice.
Bringing minimalism into your life involves many components: mental, physical, and emotional. That’s why I help clients not only downsize and organize but also create a minimalist mindset. Growing your minimalist mindset is the cornerstone of a minimalist practice. It takes diligence for it to become your natural way of thinking. The practice itself involves thinking with a different frame of mind.
A minimalist mindset includes everything, from your perspective about how much stuff you have in your home to the criteria you implement for all decision-making. It touches on many areas: your to-do list, how you spend your time, what you purchase, what you decide to keep, the systems you create, your relationships, and how you articulate and prioritize your goals. Mindset change doesn’t come overnight. Training your brain to think with a minimalist framework takes time and practice. It’s how you think, not only what you do.
Particularly at the start of creating a minimalism practice, take time to define what minimalism will look like for you. Meaningful Minimalism is minimalism built upon what matters most to you. Then, you can start “doing” minimalism and developing your practice. Continue to check in with yourself year-to-year to determine if this definition remains accurate, tweaking as needed.
The ongoing practice of minimalism has a physical and action-oriented component. Based on your version of minimalism, decide what you want to let go of today and routinely check in with yourself about whether the stuff you have aligns with your current version of yourself and your nearest next steps. Develop rules and heuristics for deciding what to keep and how to monitor yourself. “Monitor mode” is an active process that begins after you’ve sorted, downsized, and organized your stuff, and you are actively living in your current setup. Bring awareness to your interactions with your stuff. Be mindful about what’s working, what’s not, and what adjustments need to be made.
A minimalism practice also involves preventative actions. The more stuff you prevent from coming in, the less you have to sort through and decide about later when it’s typically more difficult and time-consuming. Heuristics and rules are also helpful here.
Prevention strategies include dealing with gifts, freebies, and invitations, but they apply to all types of stuff. For example, if you have several magazine subscriptions, buy them at grocery stores, and collect catalogs but have difficulty deciding what to do with them after reading (or you feel guilty about not reading them), using clear rules for yourself will help. In this case, you’d define where to cut back on your accumulation. Then, moving into maintenance, ensure that you have a simple system for organizing the magazines you decided are meaningful to you and how to let them go after reading. Prevention and maintenance go hand-in-hand.
A minimalism practice also involves decision-making strategies and how you navigate through the world- your attitude and ethos. Our decision-making strategies (or lack thereof) can lead to stress, confusion, overwhelm, and decision fatigue. Not all decisions are directly related to minimalism. But creating your minimalist mindset builds your decision-making muscle, offering you more clarity about how to “do life” in alignment with your values and goals while keeping things simple.
Creating a minimalism practice is a lifelong pursuit. It is part of personal growth and ensures your lifestyle aligns with your values while also being practical. Your definition of meaningful minimalism will evolve as your goals and priorities do. Ensuring that your stuff and lifestyle remain aligned with your changing identity is the part of the practice that’s often overlooked. And don’t forget about maintenance and prevention strategies to avoid the ups and downs of big pushes to downsize. Consider how a minimalist decision-making framework can assist you in all aspects of your life to integrate the practice fully.