Brain Dumping: My Essential Tool to Self-Comfort — Part I
Skip to the second paragraph in case you know what brain dumping is.
Brain dumping is ‘’The act or an instance of comprehensively and uncritically expressing and recording one’s thoughts and ideas’’ or ‘’Writing down or explaining all the information one has on a particular topic.”
I have documented my thoughts and ideas for over three years. It all started after I moved from sharing blogs with my online network, and then after, I became more comfortable being offline for a while. I, of course, prefer personal journaling for this particular exercise.
With this rich archive of sometimes unmatured ideas or sound lines, I built the best pattern of brain dumping that I found more compelling. I will share a few thoughts with you to get more comfortable with this skill, in case you use it, it might be time to use it differently. Let’s start!
1. Your brain will always push you to react to your thoughts. Trick your mind in case you don’t have an answer.
Not sure if this is clear, but whenever a thought crosses your mind, your brain, which is the most sophisticated problem-solving machine, will be pushing you to react to that thought to find an answer, a response. Your reaction could be a bit more thinking.. sometimes overthinking in case you’re an overthinker.
In other cases, you might need to take action or find a solution, but it’s not possible on many occasions. How about making up a response? Do you think you’re brain would accept it?
Do I have examples in mind before getting into the writing technique… think think think, hmmm, yes! You plan to request a significant raise from your boss, you are 100% ready to present your case, and you are confident that you deserve it, but you have no control over whether the request will be accepted or not, so you’ll be concerned, maybe anxious or worried. What can you do here? One option is to trick your brain by pushing it to stop thinking about it, and your response here is I will think about it later. Guess what? It might be the only reaction you’ll take.
I do this whenever I need it. It works most of the time. However, I’m not saying you should procrastinate your tasks or avoid dealing with your problems; this is the opposite of what I’m saying.
2. Writing the thoughts down could be more vital in case tricking your mind doesn’t work.
The better approach, for me, is to braindump this never-ending concern, write it down, and express your feelings, expectations, scenarios, and all the what-ifs. Will this get you a raise? I don’t know, but you might at least lower your stress level.
3. Brain dumping helps you get committed to what matters the most.
I have an exercise for you; Make a list of all the goals you want to achieve in your life, review and refine it again in 1–month, then take action.
Exercise: Write a list of all the goals you want to achieve in your life, review and refine it again in 1–month, then take action.
I tried this exercise for the first time in 2019; I built a list of all the targets I wanted to fulfill in the coming years, they were endless but felt pretty realistic to me, or so I thought. One month later, I re-visited my list and was amazed at the number of items that meant nothing to me, so I decided to keep the targets I worked on during the past month. Anything else made it out of the list. I did the same the next month and the month after until I came up with the final list of what I was keen to achieve.
I loved this exercise the most because I achieved most, if not all, of the targets listed in that journal. If we meet in person and I have access to that journal, I promise to show you what I have written in my journal and then show you proof of fulfilling all targets.
My exercise included the following high-level planners; 1-Month Planner, 3-Month Planner, 1-Year Planner, and 3-Year Planner. The monthly planner has a section of all achivments, both small and big, such as spending quality time with my family and friends, doing more sports, receiving a grant, etc.
I see brain dumping as an excellent exercise to guard our thoughts of all kinds and get the most out of the best problem-solving machine available to us.
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Part II is now available, see the link below.
