Empty your spam folder!

This afternoon, I was sitting with my 11-year-old, filling out his health paperwork for middle school. One section included questions meant to screen for anxiety and depression, which sparked a really meaningful conversation between us about the importance of keeping our minds clear of unnecessary noise.

I used an example of our email inbox. Every day, it gets flooded with messages from people, companies, and random bots. Most of them aren’t worth our attention, and some may even be harmful. Thankfully, email servers are designed with filters that catch a lot of this junk and send it straight to the spam folder. After a certain amount of time, those messages are automatically deleted. And of course, we can proactively go in and empty the folder ourselves whenever we need to free up space for what really matters.

Our minds work in a similar way. We’re constantly taking in information from media, family, friends, coworkers, and classmates. And not all of it is kind or useful. Some words or actions are meant to embarrass, frustrate, or belittle us—yet they still take up space in our mental inbox.

That’s why it’s so important to build a filter of our own. We need to decide what truly deserves our attention and what’s better left ignored and “deleted.” Of course, this isn’t easy. Unlike an email account, there’s no simple button we can click to clear out the spam in our heads.

One thing that that I encouraged my son to do is to identify a safe person to talk to. Everyone needs someone who will really listen without judgment. It might be a family member, a trusted friend, a counselor, or a therapist. Whoever it is, giving yourself the space to vent is powerful. Speaking your feelings aloud (or even writing them down) can completely shift how you process them. Recognize that some of those negative thoughts don’t deserve the space they’ve been taking up. Identifying the thoughts that belong in your mental spam folder makes it much easier to let them go.