It won’t take a lot of time for people to realize that your behavior is not in harmony with your surroundings and, in their head, they will secretly label you as a clumsy person. It is extremely important to stop being clumsy if you already are one. Whether you keep tripping over your own feet or knock things down quite frequently, there are always certain things you can do in order to battle your clumsiness.
People can make changes and prevent clumsiness from becoming a condition that needs treatment. One of the keys to stop being clumsy is to take a breather whenever your head is heavy with stress. Stress can affect your peripheral vision and even slow down the speed at which you process things.
Our bodies use more than one areas to facilitate our movements. You must have heard sports commentator’s using the phrase 'good hand-eye coordination' for athletes who were quick to react to a particular situation in the game. This is because their eyes quickly took the information and the brain and nervous system passed the messages throughout the body to get quick responses from muscles and bones. The word 'quick' has been used thrice to highlight the fact that for good coordination one needs to be very quick. In short, the reflexes of a person needs to be good. An easy way to test your coordination mechanisms is, throw a ball at a wall and catch it. This will help you to understand how fast is the coordination between your external environment and your body. You can also try and throw the ball in different directions or at various locations starting from a slow pace to fast to establish a better coordination.
#2. Get All The Knowledge You Can
People may try to make you feel that clumsiness is inborn and it cannot be repaired. Instead of believing what they say and then judging yourself for it, is always better to collect sufficient information about the problem through research. It could be that you suffered a head injury in your childhood or consumed specific medication that perpetuated vision loss and pain in the knees and hampered your ability to react properly in different situations. Learning more about the common causes of clumsiness and their treatment will help you in treating it objectively and save you from the mental torture that others give through their biased opinions.
#3. Declutter
Sometimes you just cannot stop tripping over something or the other and end up constantly nagging about your messed up life. One possible reason for this could be your un-organized house. You need to clean your home so that you don’t bump your knee on the side of your bed or fall over an empty plastic bottle lying around. You must have a strict policy of organizing things so that all the space in your room is clean and you don’t experience any clumsiness.
#4. Exercise
A lot of people don’t believe it, but that cannot change the fact that exercising does improve the core muscles which are responsible for stability and coordination. If you frequent the gym you will know that trainers usually ask people who join the gym to work on one body part a day. That is because they know that in order to tap all the potential one has, it is necessary to work hard. The same goes for improving coordination. Specific exercises pertaining to specific body parts must be done regularly.
#5. Avoid Loose Fitted Clothes
How often has it happened that your unbuttoned sweater got caught in the door handle or your jeans came under your foot while walking and you tripped right there and then? If it has happened several times to you, then it is high time you should start wearing clothes that fit you well to avoid any clumsiness. Also, it is always better to tie your shoelaces well to avoid any chances of further hassle.
#6. Choose Your Footwears Carefully
If you cannot maintain balance while walking, then you will have trouble wearing narrow high heels or shoes that give less space to the front portion of your foot. It is always better to go for heels that are wide and shoes which give your ankle and toes enough space to feel the ground. These will help you to maintain your balance and prevent clumsiness.
#7. Seek Help
When we experience a lapse in the attention, we can be so unaware of it that we may claim we don’t remember it ever happening. Our memory does not have any track of it, and therefore, we can never really recollect it happening ever. You can always seek help from a professional or even talk to a close friend about what you are going through. They will help you to see where the problem lies in your life more clearly. Other methods by which you can figure out the level of your clumsiness are standard tests and procedures which includes questions such as differentiating between left and right, a road trip with cardboards where you see if you notice signposts or not, etc. These methods will help you to identify if you get confused or not.
#8. Meditate
The more you fret about making an error, the more the error will magnify. In this case, meditation can come to your rescue and stop you from being too harsh on yourself. We all fail sometimes, but we must never convince ourselves that we cannot regain the grip of the situations for our benefit. Embarrassment is a by-product of comparison and expectations. One can always do away with it by stop expecting and comparing.
#9. Make Your Surroundings Accident Proof
After you have realized that you act clumsily from time to time, then it is your responsibility to make your surroundings safe or tell someone close to you who can make it safe for you. One can always fall because of the stuff lying on a floor. You can put everything in boxes or arrange them in an almirah. You can also install non-slippery mats so that you don’t fall on the floor and install handles for objects that you need to hold or grab regularly to avoid any impediment in performing that action.
#10. Speak Slowly
Speaking softly can help you a lot in removing restlessness from your head and overcome the feeling that you have never had enough time to accomplish what you wanted to. When you speak slowly, you prepare yourself and readjust your focus on the task. It makes it easier for you to focus on the present and eliminate the attitude of racing against time.
#11. Take Proper Rest
Fatigue is one of the leading causes of clumsiness and can lead to malfunctioning. When you are well-slept, there are fewer chances of making an error and you do not get irritated quickly. Sleeping is also important for reviving the lost energy. therefore, it is very important to make sure that you are getting a good sleep.
#12. Target Practice
You can shoot darts to check if you have vision issues or not. If you manage to achieve what you aim for it will give you a different level of confidence and ditch your clumsiness. Target practice will test your coordination skills and will create new channels to provide an impetus for your self-esteem.
#13. Improve Flexibility
One has to be flexible and agile so that they can never be victims of clumsiness. A sure way in which they can achieve this is by doing yoga and pilates. Apart from them, performing exercises that include forward and backward runs can make one more flexible. Short sprints and jumping over hurdles will keep the loss of concentration at bay.
#14. Have Proper Lighting In Your House
Clumsiness is not just being lazy or incapable of honing a skill to the point where you can benefit from it. It also stems from carelessness and a dormant attitude. One may get an increased sense of nausea if they enter dark areas without proper lighting and this can make their movements more awkward. One can always escape clumsiness through adequate lighting in all the areas of one's house.
Tell us how you avoid clumsiness. Drop comments in the comment section below.
10 Opinions
9 Opinions
reason I have always had to make lists. I would make a list of items I would buy before going out
of the house to the chores I have to do over the weekend to nearly everything else. Important
birthdays and events that have to celebrate so that I can affirm I am living a positive life become
all the more important as my need to have meaningful relationship grew with age. I attended
seminars where they told me Self-awareness is a requirement. You have to be aware of the
situations/stimuli that trigger the behavior/response and have a plan to respond more
appropriately, thereby programming neural connections in the brain to respond subconsciously
in a more appropriate manner. It was not like I was distracted or having trouble focusing on
things in general as I was able to perform all the tasks with accuracy and skill but every now and
then I would stumble at work or at home and feel miserable over the fact that I broke a cup or
two. Silliness is overlooked when kids act silly but adults have to be on the money with basic
behavior as people are quicker to censure when adults commit mistake. I starts seeing a
professional immediately when I grazed the side of my car against a truck and realized I had
done it only when the truck driver hollered at me. Something was wrong with my vision or
maybe my brain was malfunctioning. I took a ball and hit it against the wall to test my hand and
eye coordination which was perfect and then went down to the shooting alley where I fired
bullets one after the other to feel better about myself and check if I am really losing it right now
or not. The professional told me it was nothing more than a general disinterest and gave me
antidepressants but he was amazed to come meet me at my house and see that I had worn my
trousers inside out without bothering to check them and was going about work as if everything
was normal. My family planned an intervention for me where my more aggressive cousins
directly asked me what was going on my mind and my parents and wife asked me with
sympathy and politeness- I told them what had been bothering me which was the money I had
lost in the past month over gambling and that I won’t be able to pay the mortgage this month to
which they replied it’s okay you didn’t lose much and I did not tell them how much I had lost. This
alleviated a lot of stress I was feeling and helped me focus on simple tasks with ease again.