PSYCHOLOGICAL SPRING CLEANING: CLEARING THE MIND FOR RENEWAL
By Lillian Snellenburg
There is the common misconception that spring is this beautiful time where our emotions reflect the environment. Spring is a paradox: the decay of winter ends to make way for new. Branches once stripped naked begin to dress themselves again in hues of green. It is the end of cold, but the beginning of warmth. Everything is stirring. The days extend with light, blossoms open, and the mewls of new life are in the air. Some are motivated enough to clear cupboards and pull weeds. But this is not everyone’s reality.
I do not trust the neatness of the cultural story we tell about spring. Many of my clients are not walking around with a sudden rush of motivation simply because the sun lingers longer in the sky. They carry grief, anxiety, heartbreak and exhaustion and feelings like that do not obey the weather. Everything is not all of a sudden rosy posy because it went up a few degrees. Life rarely follows the tidy order of our calendars. The only certainty is that seasons turn: winter into spring, spring into summer, whether we are ready for it or not.
This turning reminds us of our limits. We move through life with the illusion of control, convinced that if we plan enough, work enough, or hope fiercely enough, things will unfold exactly as we want them to. We continue to set about our days with robust little plans with a monumental level of certainty that everything we do/feel/see/experience is going to play out exactly as we hoped. But very little outside of our personal conduct is truly ours to control. Humbling, isn’t it?
The cycles of nature are the only rhythm we can count on. Winter has turned to spring, and spring will turn to summer. But will we all feel good? Probably not. So I’ve started asking myself, and those who sit across from me: what is it that we can choose? What can we clear, soften, release, so that renewal has space to find us?
Some of the heaviest clutter lives inside us as stories. The stories handed down by family, culture, or old versions of ourselves: I am too much. I am too sensitive. I will always be anxious. We are not good with money. I will never be chosen.
Our belief system is the scaffold of identity. Often inherited, not chosen. They structure how we see the world and ourselves. Once, these mantras may have protected us, helping us make sense of experience or offering belonging. But do they still serve the life you inhabit now?
Many of the beliefs we carry are not our own, but arrive disguised as truth, whispered from family histories, cultural scripts, or childhood selves: I must keep proving myself to be worthy. I am anxious by nature. I am not good with money, not good with love, not good enough.
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott suggested that true growth requires the ability to shed what no longer serves, like a snake slipping out of its old skin. Neuroscience echoes this: thought patterns repeated long enough carve grooves in the brain until they feel inevitable. But grooves are not destiny.
Hannah Arendt wrote of “natality,” our infinite capacity to begin again. To practice psychological spring cleaning is to remember this: we can set down beliefs that belong to other seasons. Renewal begins when we ask: Whose story is this? Does it still serve me? Or has its season ended?
Habits, too, can hold duality. They stabilise and soothe, but they can also bind. Consider the habit of overwork, born of a time you needed to prove yourself but now only depleting you. Or distraction, the endless scrolling that numbs but never nourishes. These are the psychological equivalent of clutter: you can still move around them, but not freely.
In behavioural psychology, this is called “contextual rigidity”—patterns that remain even when the context that demanded them has dissolved. What once saved us becomes the very thing that stifles us. To recognise this is not to condemn the habit, but to thank it and release it. Spring cleaning the psyche means pruning behaviours that belong to another season, so that energy can flow into growth.
The most intimate clutter is the inner voice; the self-talk that becomes the wardrobe of our psyche. The tone, the voice, the phrases we slip into each morning like clothes. We live inside the garments of the mind and they shape our posture, our confidence and our way of being. But like clothes, they can be set aside if they no longer fit.
Wittgenstein once wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. When we shift our inner language, our world expands. Replacing “I can’t” with “I am learning”. Swapping “I should” for “I choose”. Speaking to ourselves with the tenderness we long for from others. This is not cosmetic, but rather, transformative. To clean the language we wear is to reclaim possibility.
Rituals of Release
Spring cleaning of the psyche becomes powerful when grounded in ritual. The body remembers what the mind forgets, so symbolic acts help anchor change:
The Thought Audit: Write down the phrases that echo in your mind. Circle those that feel expansive; cross out those that constrict.
The Release: Write a belief you no longer need on paper and burn it, or bury it in soil. Let matter mirror your mind.
Planting Seeds: Replace each released story with a phrase of possibility. Speak it daily until it roots itself in your being.
Curating Inputs: Just as you would open windows to let in fresh air, choose carefully what voices you allow in, what books you read, what spaces you inhabit.
These rituals remind us that letting go is not erasure. It is compost. What is shed becomes nourishment for what will grow.
Letting go is not rejection, but a form of love. The habits, beliefs and voices that no longer serve once protected us. To release them is to acknowledge their service, then step forward unburdened.
Psychological spring cleaning is an act of faith: faith that renewal follows release, that emptiness can be fertile, that the self we are becoming deserves a lighter, kinder environment to grow.
As the earth leans into spring, so can we. Not by adding more, but by carrying less. Not by clinging to what was, but by trusting in what might bloom.
In this practice, we return to Arendt’s natality, the ever-present possibility of beginning again. What is pruned makes room for blossom. What is released becomes soil. Renewal is not a luxury, but rather, our unavoidable birthright.
THE WOMAN BEHIND THE WORDS
Lillian Snellenburg is a registered psychologist, writer, and director of a private psychology practice on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. Her work is grounded in the treatment of anxiety, depression, trauma and major life transitions, with a special focus on the reclamation of feminine identity and power. After the stillbirth of her son, Sunny, she began writing from the raw edge of loss, drawing upon myth, nature, and the underworld as her compass. Connect with her @the.millennialpsych.
MUSE PAPER
ISSUE 08