I grew up watching Mr. Rogers, with his red zip-up cardigan, shoe changes, and unshakable conviction that we’re all good and fine exactly as we are. So maybe it’s not that surprising a grown woman like me has ended up a fan of Ms. Rachel.
If you don’t know her yet, Ms. Rachel is a modern day Mr. Rogers, a teacher with a singsong-y voice who just oozes love and care. She teaches kids to talk, sing, and name their feelings. She just released her first album called I’m So Happy and am I the target audience? Absolutely not. But I listened to the title track because I follow her on Instagram, and I gotta say it really stuck with me.
A particular line in the song goes “my joy is in the way I choose to think”, which happens to be just a fabulous mantra if you’re into that sort of thing. And I am. I repeat this phrase to myself, sometimes all day, when I notice my thoughts have become cluttered, noisy, angry, or just too busy.
A Cluttered Mind Is Like A Cluttered House
Think about what happens in a home when nobody is paying attention. Mail piles up on the counter. A coat lands on a chair and takes up residence. A bag gets dropped by the door “just for now.” None of it is a problem really, except one day you walk in, can’t find your keys, trip over the bag, and suddenly you are furious at a house that did exactly what houses do when no one is maintaining them: get in your way.
Minds work the same way. Thoughts become things. A worry here, a resentment there, an old criticism you’ve been carrying around since the third grade. They can stack up until your whole head space feels crowded, and if we aren’t mindful of what’s going on in there, it can ruin our mood and our whole day.
And then, maybe somebody chews too loudly. Or they leave the closet door open, or the toilet seat up. Or they ask a perfectly reasonable question in a perfectly reasonable tone, and suddenly our patience is gone. The things they did or said may well have been annoying, but it wasn’t worth getting upset over. Thing is, the upset wasn’t about the door, or the seat, or the question. It’s often about everything piled up behind it.
Where The Clutter May Come From
For a lot of people, mental clutter has a long history. It can stretch all the way back to childhood.
Complex PTSD (CPTSD) is a condition that grows out of prolonged or repeated trauma that you couldn’t escape, often in childhood, like when you’re a kid and it’s happening in your home. Similar to PTSD symptoms, CPTSD brings trouble managing emotions, a deeply negative view of yourself, and difficulty in relationships. It’s so insidious because it occurs when we’re young, over an extended period of time, and instead of being one traumatic event it’s years worth of a variety of traumas. And they’re often “subtle”, like being told you’re not good enough, or smart enough, or pretty enough. Those are three separate slights, and with emotionally immature parents (a lot of us have them), those three separate slights don’t just happen once each, they occur throughout your growing up years. So you learn to compartmentalize. You “don’t care” that you aren’t pretty enough, so you act like you’re fine, but you’re far from fine. You’ve stuffed that criticism away and years later it’s mental clutter. Multiply that by a thousand.
How common is it? In a 2019 study of adults in the United States, 3.8% met the criteria for CPTSD and 3.4% for PTSD, about 7.2% in total. That’s roughly one in twenty-six adults, millions of people, wandering around the grocery store looking perfectly fine. (Honestly, I think it’s a whole lot more than that.) Estimates vary depending on the country and how it’s measured (a national study in Poland found probable CPTSD in about 11% of adults), but the takeaway is the same: you are not the only one. And I suspect plenty more of us carry some of these patterns without ever ticking every box, which is why I think it’s a whole lot more people.
When you’re a kid in a hard situation, you adapt. You learn to read the room. You tuck your feelings away. You smile when you’re not okay, or you become agreeable, or invisible, or very, very good (the easy one), whatever it takes to get through that situation, that day, that phase. This is a smart, resourceful child solving a problem with the tools they have available. The mask worked. It got a lot of us where we are today.
But as we grow up, the masks don’t ever get taken off. Many of us don’t even know we’re masking anything. Ways of behaving that once protected us start to hold us back. We swallow feelings until they leak out sideways. We people-please (fawning). We don’t ask for what we need (more fawning). A steady hum of self-criticism runs in the background like a refrigerator we’ve stopped noticing. And we live a little bit away from our true selves.
Then… Midlife
Enter perimenopause, midlife changes that have no respect for anyone’s mask.
The research here surprised me. In the Harvard Study of Moods and Cycles, women in perimenopause with no history of depression were twice as likely to develop significant depressive symptoms as their pre-perimenopausal counterparts, and a diagnosis of a depressive disorder was two and a half times more likely during the transition. In the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, a smaller Pittsburgh sample of 221 women found they were two to four times more likely to have a major depressive episode when perimenopausal or early postmenopausal.
Researchers at Penn Medicine followed 243 women for 16 years. Women who had two or more adverse experiences in their teens, things like abuse, neglect, or family dysfunction, were 2.3 times more likely to have their first-ever major depressive episode during perimenopause. The study can’t prove cause and effect, but research certainly suggests the hormonal changes of menopause can expose a risk of depression that wasn’t there before.
It’s possible that the same shifts that make everything feel harder in midlife also loosen our grip on those coping strategies we’ve leaned on since childhood. Depression can be a real bugger.
For me, 3+ years ago, grief was the thing that cracked it open, but perimenopause, depression, and a lot of unexamined history were all right there with it. Certain masks I had worn my whole life simply stopped fitting. (I wrote about the physical side of that in my last post, and about the hormonal side a while back.)
So if you are in your forties or fifties and suddenly can’t hold it together the way you always have, and you’re wondering what’s wrong with you… maybe nothing is wrong with you. Maybe this is a mental health thing, a biological and historical thing, not a character flaw. And the good news is that you have more power to work with it than you think. There are hormone replacement options, counseling and other mental health options. And there’s exercise, for body and mind too.
Enter The Mantra
So, a line from a kids’ song has certainly not cured my trauma. But a mantra is one of the simplest, cheapest, most portable tools I’ve found for clearing out mental clutter in the moment.
What does the research say? A small imaging study (Berkovich-Ohana and colleagues, published in Brain and Behavior in 2015) found that silently repeating a single word quieted activity across much of the brain, especially in the default mode network, the system tied to mind-wandering, self-reflection, and self-judgment. In other words, repetition appears to turn down the chatter.
Another interesting idea, researchers working from acceptance and commitment therapy found that rapidly repeating a negative thought as a single word reduced both its discomfort and how believable it felt. The discomfort dropped within about 3 to 10 seconds, and the believability within roughly 20 to 30. That study repeated the negative thought itself until it lost its power, so it’s a slightly different trick, but the idea is the same: repetition loosens a thought’s grip on us.
These are small studies, a mantra is not a substitute for targeted treatment, and no phrase will simply erase a hard history. But as a way to interrupt a spiral before it ruins your afternoon? Absolutely worth having. It’s like a different way to meditate, to keep your brain in the present.
I think mantras work because the scripts running in our heads got there through repetition. Years of hearing, absorbing, and rehearsing the same messages. If the old script runs on repetition, a new one can too. Exactly like training your brain with meditation.
How To Try It
Nothing fancy here.
Catch the clutter. Notice the signs: a clenched jaw, hunched shoulders, a short fuse, a mind that won’t stop talking. Just name it: ah, clutter.
Pick a phrase that’s kind and true. Lately mine is that line from Ms. Rachel’s song, “my joy is in the way I choose to think”. Yours might be this is a feeling, not a fact, or I am safe right now, or one thing at a time, or I don’t have to take this on. It doesn’t have to be profound. It has to be yours.
Repeat it slowly. Out loud or silently, with your breath, for at least half a minute. Longer is fine. Let the words be a little boring. That’s the point.
Then ask what you actually need. Often the answer is practical: water, food, a walk, a nap, a conversation for later when you’re not barking. (If you’re not already talking to yourself on paper, this is a great place to start.)
Do it again tomorrow. Repetition is the whole game.
A Mantra Is A Tool, Not A Therapist
If something in this post clicked for you and thought oh, that’s worth paying attention to… a trauma-informed therapist can do things for you that a mantra can’t. I wrote about finding the right kind of therapy a while back if you’re not sure where to start. And if your thoughts ever turn dark, please reach out to someone you trust or a crisis line in your country.
You’re Not Alone
I wish I had known earlier that many of my own struggles in life weren’t personal failings. They were patterns, with histories and causes and, thankfully, ways of working with them. When the mask starts slipping, it isn’t the end of the world. It might be the beginning of actually meeting yourself. Which is so freeing.
Joy, it turns out, is at least partly something we practice. One clutter-clearing thought at a time. And sometimes the thing that helps comes in the form of a very catchy song from a very kind woman with a very big smile.
Peace and love to you, wherever this message finds you.
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