Episode Overview

This episode comes out the day after Christmas, and if you are anything like me, your home probably feels fuller than it did yesterday. More bags, more boxes, more things that were given with love, and now need a place to live.

In many parts of the world, the day after Christmas is known as Boxing Day. A day traditionally associated with clearing things out, donating what is no longer needed, and creating space for what comes next.

In today’s episode, we go deeper than closets and countertops.

We talk about how clutter is not just something that surrounds us physically, but something that can live inside us too. We explore how mental clutter, rumination, busy schedules, and emotional attachment to both things and thoughts can quietly impact stress, nervous system regulation, and healing after breast cancer.

Using research from the American Psychiatric Association, this episode breaks down what rumination really is, why it keeps us stuck, and how repetitive negative thinking can affect not just mental well-being but physical health as well.

We also talk about why starting with something simple, like clearing physical space or creating breathing room in your calendar, can open the door to deeper emotional and mindset work.

Inside this episode, you will hear about:

• Why clutter and busyness are both forms of overwhelm

• How rumination impacts mood, stress hormones, sleep, and healing

• Why emotions are often tied to the things we hold onto

• How clearing your environment can help calm emotional overload

• A simple framework for letting go of repetitive thoughts

• Why time is one of your most precious assets after breast cancer

As we head into January, I also share more about the upcoming first quarter theme inside the Better Than Before Breast Cancer and Metabolic Health and Mindset Membership, The Zone of Courage, and why learning to release what no longer serves you is one of the bravest acts of self care.

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.

0:33
Hey, friends, welcome to episode 443

0:36
of better than before breast cancer. This episode comes out the day after Christmas here in the US. And you know what that usually means, you probably have more stuff than you did yesterday, more things in addition to the things you already had, more bags, more boxes, more gifts. And although everything was given with love and the experience was probably amazing, now, everything needs a place to live. When I think about the aftermath of Christmas, I often feel like a cooking story, and what I mean by that is I love to cook. I love to cook and I love to cook for people. I love to see people enjoy the food I cook. But the worst part about cooking is the cleanup, and so I've learned to clean as I go, but sometimes I don't, and when I don't I'm left with this because I am a bit of a messy Cook. I'm left with this disaster that I'm too tired to clean up, and I have to do it, but I don't enjoy it after Christmas. I feel like that's the hardest part. It isn't the celebration or putting up the beautiful lights and the decorations that are so enjoyable is standing there looking around afterwards and thinking,

1:41
now what I got to clean all this up, where's everything going to go? Suddenly, the whole space just is tighter and heavier, and that's why the timing of this podcast is important. Today, the day after Christmas in many parts of the world is known as Boxing Day, and that's traditionally associated with clearing things out, donating things you no longer need, and just creating more space to bring in the new but not to stuff more in, right to kind of change things out. And I think that that idea goes so much deeper than stuff, than closets and countertops and junk drawers. And I want to talk about that today, because I think especially as we prepare to go into a new season of life, a new year, this is a really important topic to consider, because clutter is not only something that can be in our environment, surrounding us, but clutter can live inside of us too. Our brains can become cluttered with thoughts the same way our home becomes cluttered with objects, so unfinished, conversations, old fears, replaying memories, unfortunately, most of the time when we do that, they're not great memories, worries about the future and things that feel just urgent or unresolved can just clutter our Brain, just like physical clutter, that energy is very overwhelming, and you don't always notice it right away. You may not have a real clear awareness of it, that your nervous system does your environment, everything around you is constantly communicating with your brain. How could it not you have to navigate your environment. So when your space feels crowded or chaotic, your brain has to work harder just to filter information, and that extra effort increases stress, mental fatigue, emotional reactivity, and so even if you can't quite name why you feel kind of on edge, this is where connection between the environment and mind becomes impossible to ignore, right? We have to develop an awareness of that, what is causing that edginess. And so for me, I want to bring to the forefront of our awareness this word that we often are in but often don't realize or name, and that's rumination. So the American Psychiatric Association defines rumination as repetitive thinking, or dwelling on negative feelings and distress and on their causes and consequences. The key word here is repetitive, right? Rumination feels like thinking things through, like maybe we're trying to understand or prevent something. But what the research shows is that when someone is already stressed or feeling low, rumination changes how the brain works, and people who ruminate are more likely to remember more negative experiences from the past, to interpret current situations more negatively, to feel more hopeless about the future, and the longer that loop continues, the harder it becomes to move into actual problem solving. So even people without anxiety or depression can get pulled into this cycle, and once it starts that often just feeds itself, like feeding the beast. The more you ruminate, the worse you feel, the worse you feel. The more your mind ruminates. And this isn't weakness or some broken feature in your brain, it's just how the human brain responds to unresolved stress. And I think you know, the more I've done this work on coaching and helping people with their mindset, the more impact I realized we had that has when we can change that lens of looking at the human brain for the way that it works, how that organ is structured and works, rather than self worth being attached to everything that we do. Right? So for those of us who care very deeply about our health and we're doing all the things we can to support it, these mental patterns don't just stay confined to the mind. Persistent rumination keeps the body in a state of stress, and that means stress hormones stay elevated longer than they should. The nervous system struggles to return to a place of calm, sleep, quality can suffer. Immune signaling and inflammatory responses can be affected. So when we talk about mental patterns influencing health, it's not just symbolically. We're completely connected mind, body, spirit, we cannot separate them. The body responds to repeated negative thinking as if the stressor itself is still happening, even when it's only happening internally. And I've talked about this before on the show, like I could talk about giving birth, and how many times have women sat around talking about their birth stories, their labor stories, and trying to convey the amount of physical pain they experienced? But we don't relive that physical pain when we share that story. But if I were to share a story with you, for instance, of something extremely painful, like the loss of my brother in my life. I recreate that stress. I feel that emotion. I can easily find myself in tears if I bring that back up, right? So internally, when we're thinking it's impacting us physically, there's no escaping that, and this is why working with the mind is not and cannot be separated from healing. It must be foundational. You know, I have clients come to me often, and they'll say, you know, I want to work on my food. I want to understand what I can eat. I want to do my labs and my nutrition genome, and I just want to understand what I should eat. But I already have a therapist, so I don't want to talk don't want to talk about anything else, like I don't want to talk about my thoughts. I'm not a therapist, and I don't administer therapy, but you cannot not talk about your thoughts, because they impact everything. They change the way we nourish our body, they change the way we take in food. They change our ability to be consistent in any health habit. And so you've got to take both into consideration. Mental health affects physical health. Physical health affects mental health, and the environment that we're in impacts the environment that's inside of us. There's no separating at you guys. So when things feel overwhelming, the brain starts to look for things it can control. And for many of us, busyness becomes that form of clutter, and the thing the brain is fooling you into thinking you're controlling. So a packed schedule, constant motion, back to back, commitments, we can convince ourselves that this is productivity, sounds like something responsible, right? I'm so busy, I'm taking care of everything, and it gives us a very reasonable excuse not to slow down enough to notice what's happening inside of us, because when you're busy, there's no space to feel overwhelmed, right? You just keep moving. And that kind of clutter comes with a cost. That's why starting with uncluttering your physical surroundings can be so powerful. Clearing a surface, donating a bag of items, creating a little more breathing room in your space, it sends a signal to your nervous system that it's possible to have order, and that slowing down is safe. Having space is safe. It doesn't solve everything, but it starts to open a door, right? So your brain experiences relief, even if it's just temporary, right? So if I got three new outfits for Christmas, can I go into my closet and look at three outfits that I really haven't worn in a year? You know my sister, who does a lot of closet organizing, and I know she's not the one that came up with this thought, but there's this method out there where at the beginning of every year, if you turn your hangers backwards, then at the end of the year, you can see what you haven't worn in a year. So do we really need what we haven't worn in a year. And I want to address the thought I often hear for people, they feel wasteful, they feel ungrateful if they haven't used something or they're not using something. And I always offer this reframe of what a beautiful, connected cycle we are in this world and in life, and that if something isn't serving me, it's just hanging there using. Of energy and space. Maybe it could really serve someone else. Maybe someone else really needs that beautiful pink sweater, but I don't feel like wearing pink this season, right? So we can really be giving and connecting and supporting and choose those thoughts instead of choosing thoughts of self judgment, right? So when your brain experiences that relief of space, of clearing clutter, then that relief makes it easier to notice what's happening internally, and that's why people often feel lighter after cleaning, even if they're tired, right? I can remember as a kid, my dad, on the weekends, he would mow the lawns and water the grass, and then I remember watching him, and he would sit back in his chair, he would get his cup of black coffee and his palmel non filtered cigarette, and he kicked back, and he put his feet up, and he would just look, and he would just appreciate all the yard work he had done. Right that soothed his nervous system. So when we're cleaning things out, when we're organizing, it's not just moving objects. It's actually reducing sensory input, decision fatigue and background stress and decision fatigue is the big ones. What does that mean, deciding what to do with things. So if you are in a house with lots of things stacked or things stuffed, it's not that you're lazy, necessarily. It's your brain is overwhelmed, right? It's just like, What do I do with all this stuff? How do I make 100 decisions? You know, it sounds overwhelming, exhausting, so we avoid it, and that's where the emotional work is always tied in, because when we clear our environment, we must deal with emotions again. I will emphasize our emotions on our body are not separated, and we develop attachment to things. So when we consider clearing things, emotions will surface. Maybe grief, maybe guilt, maybe nostalgia, maybe fear. Why would it be grief? Well, maybe someone you cared about gave something to you. It's sentimental, but it's just collecting dust. And so there's grief there, the grief of that person, and the thought that if I get rid of this, I'm getting rid of the memory of this person. That can surface guilt can surface that can be connected to what I just shared, but it can also be connected to someone who's so nice to give this to me, and I don't really like it, but I don't want to say I don't like it, and I'd be afraid if they came over and didn't see it hanging on the wall. You know, my former mother in law, she would hang these things on the wall, and she would talk about how much she hated them, and I would say, Why do you hang it up there if you don't even like it? And she said, because if they come over and it's not hanging on the wall, they're gonna feel bad, interesting, right? Nostalgia, memories again, and like my mom had boxes and boxes of things from their six kids in the family, boxes and boxes from when we were little kids. So the nostalgia was so important to her. But then when she would give us the boxes, maybe we keep one or two things, but we threw it out to us. It was like whatever, right?

13:03
It was just crap. Here, scarcity is very attached to stuff. What if I need this? Right? And we have to work through those feelings of scarcity and learn to trust ourselves and trust the universe, to say, whenever I need something, it will be there for me, right? Attachment, all of that attachment brings up emotion, and those emotions surface when we try to decide what we're going to do with all of our things. So many things we hold on to aren't just things, right? They're meaning, they're memory, maybe their identity, right? Maybe we have something when we like to think, oh, everyone knows I have this wonderful Anna Lee dog collection, right? We have to think about what they mean to us. So letting go of objects means we've got to touch those feelings inside of us that we've kept ourselves too busy to think about. And that is why busyness can feel safer than stillness, because when we're busy, the uncomfortable emotions aren't here. We're not experiencing them. But when we're still, when we're creating space, we can experience that. But the beautiful thing about that is, when we are creating space slowly and intentionally, we're also giving ourselves permission to feel, and feeling is how we begin to release what has been weighing us down, environmentally, mentally and emotionally, so the space you create around you makes room for the space you need within you. You know when I talk to people about letting go, about releasing, especially when it comes to ruminating thoughts, which can really create a tremendous amount of emotional suffering. The first question, and the most common question I get is, How do I actually do that? People tell me all the time, change your thoughts, stop thinking about it. But how? How do I do that? Because letting go is not about forcing thoughts away. You cannot force a thought away. It is literally about retraining. Your brain how to respond to the thoughts. So at a very high level, that's what this is, what that process would look like. First awareness, you have to notice you're in the loop without judging it, right, just noticing it, realizing, oh my god, I keep thinking about this, and I don't want it anymore, right? And it doesn't mean I'm a bad person, or something's wrong with me, and which we tend to do blame ourselves. Why can't I stop thinking about this? I'm so crazy. I hear that all the time, we must leave the judgment out of the facts, and we just notice, wow, I am thinking about this situation so much of the time. It's consuming all this space in my life and in my mind. And then the second thing is, we make a choice, we begin to recognize that a thought is not necessarily a fact, and that you are allowed to choose a different thought, but, and here's the third, third one, replacing choosing a different thought must be a different, truthful thought, something else that is true for you. Let me give you an example. Oh, my goodness, I want to get rid of this purple glitter statue that my great grandma gave. My grandma gave my mom, and my mom gave it to me, and I hate the color purple, and I hate glitter. I don't want this thing in my house, but, oh my gosh, I feel so bad because, you know, it's been in the family for so long, and my mom gave it to me, right? We can go that route, or we can look at something else. Is true. I have a friend, or I know someone, and she would love, love, love, love this statue if I passed it on to her. I'm not only saying here, take care of this thing that has sentimental value. Was special to my family, but you are also special to me, and I know you will get joy out of this, right? So we're choosing a different thought that's actually true, that's an important thing. We don't want to be in denial. We don't want to have toxic positivity, but we want to choose a grounded and supportive thought that your nervous system believes and can accept, okay, then the fourth step is to practice, and that's really where change happens, big change. Repeating the process again and again trains your brain to move out of old pathways and into new ones. And this is no different, and I've talked about before, training your muscles, strengthening a muscle, right? When you first start to do it is going to feel awkward, it's going to feel hard, it's going to feel uncomfortable, but over time, it starts to become natural. And this matters, because the thoughts you release are often the ones that are keeping you stuck in old roles, in old patterns, in old emotions, in old expectations, right? So as we wrap up the year, as we wrap up this episode of the podcast, I want to invite you to look at one more thing, not just your closet, not just your countertops, not just your junk drawers, not just your thoughts, but your calendar. So we often get to that point in our homes, in our environment, where we are willing to admit something's got to change, right? There's too much stuff here. We can see it, we can feel it. We know something has to shift, but we don't always look at our schedules the same way. And one of the most common things I hear when women tell me they want to be a part of better than before, breast cancer, metabolic health and mindset membership is I just don't have time, and I understand that life can be full. But what if, in this next season of your life, in this new year, life is about asking a different question, what if the work isn't finding more time, but just clearing space because there is no more time. There's 168 hours in a week period. How are you going to clear it? How are you going to invest it? How are you going to use it? Just like your closet, your calendar holds things at one time may have served you, things that you enjoyed saying yes to for a good reason, and things that may no longer fit who you are now. Time is the most precious asset that you have, because you can't make more of it, and maybe this year is about choosing to intentionally reserve some of that time, not for more productivity, not for more obligations, but for you, for support, for reflection, for self care, because when you take care of your environment and your body and your mind and your thoughts, you're taking care of you and you are worth having space in your own life. So as we move into January, inside the better than before, breast cancer and metabolic health and mindset membership our first quarter, the theme is going to be the zone of courage. And courage very often looks like letting go, releasing what no longer supports you, and how brave you have to be to do that, how much. Have to be willing to feel and to face. Releasing patterns that kept you overwhelmed takes a lot of courage. Releasing the belief that caring for yourself is the last thing on the to do list. Takes a lot of courage to shift that. And over the next three months in our membership, we'll be creating space in your mind, in your routine, in your life, so you can move forward feeling steadier and clearer and more supported. So I invite you to consider whether this is the season to clear that space in your calendar and dedicate some time to yourself, to your health and to the life that you want to create for yourself. Right? You can find all the details in the links here in the show notes. You can find all the details on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com and if you want to test the waters, come to my website and join my free group, the living well after breast cancer community and ask me your questions. I love to hear from you. Love to hear from you. Love to hear what you need. Love to hear what you don't need. I love it all. This is a community that means everything to me, and I'm devoted to serving you all right, friends, have a wonderful week, and I will talk to you again next Friday. Be good to yourself.

21:15
You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. You. Rest. Your mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door.

21:33
Give it all you got

21:36
no hesitating. You've been waiting all your life. All your life, this is your

21:45
moment. This is your moment.