Celebrate by Decluttering

Lunar New Year celebrations begin today and continue for the next couple of weeks. Also known as Chinese New Year or the Spring Festival, Lunar New Year is a largely secular holiday celebrated by 1.5 billion people worldwide. Celebrations include cultural rituals that derive from Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, as well as from ancient myths and folk traditions.

I’m three-quarters Thai and a quarter Chinese. My family and I celebrate all sorts of new beginnings each year—Lunar New Year in January/February, Songkran (the Thai New Year’s Day in April), and the traditional Gregorian calendar New Year’s Day.

In the days leading up to Lunar New Year, cleaning is a big part of preparing for the celebrations. A thorough cleaning before Lunar New Year’s Eve ensures that you are free of bad luck from the previous year and ready for the good fortune to come. Cleaning may not seem like the best way to celebrate, but it sets the tone for the new year to start fresh.

As you start to hunker down during the final couple weeks of bar preparation, this might be a good time to re-evaluate your study space.

Studies have shown that is it harder to concentrate and focus in a disorderly environment. There are two reasons why it is more difficult to study in a messy space. First, it creates distraction, filling the mind with other things to focus on rather than the work you hope to accomplish. And, second, clutter has been proven to subconsciously stress us out.

To learn more about how clutter can impact your studying and mental health, and what you can do to reign in the clutter, check out “The Case for Finally Cleaning Your Desk,” from the Harvard Business Review.