Declutter your mind with brain dumping

26 April 2022

Brain dumping helps you put all your thoughts down onto paper so that you can start to organise your thoughts. You can write down everything that enters your mind, or you can use a structure. We have suggested three structures to organise your brain dump below.

You might like to use one structure or no structure at all, but another person might prefer a different one. There is no right or wrong way to brain dump, it’s whatever works best for you. It’s a great way to help you organise your life, clear your head and prioritise tasks.

This will give you a clear focus for the day ahead.

So, what are the benefits of brain dumping?

When you write down information, you are more likely to remember and recall it. When you are trying to learn something, have you ever noticed that if you write it down you remember it better than if you don’t?

It can also help you to reduce your levels of stress and anxiety. We often become overwhelmed when we keep everything in our minds, so by writing it down we are ‘emptying our minds’. Once it’s all down on paper, it’s easier for us to gain perspective on the situation that is increasing our levels of stress and anxiety. This will also help us to create more solutions to any problems that are causing us stress, or how to cope better with our levels of anxiety.

If we are writing down everything in our minds, the tasks, projects and to-dos we need to get done will naturally make their way onto the paper. This is great because we are able to pick out the important tasks we need to tackle.

Why does this work?

There is evidence to show that writing down your emotions helps you to process them better. This can improve your well-being as you can then start to label your thoughts and feelings as emotions. From here, you can start to understand what you are feeling and why.

Not only this, but if you write something down, you are more likely to achieve it because you are more likely to take action. By putting all the information in front of you, you can organise it and then know what the best course of action is.

How to brain dump

There are so many different ways that you can organise a brain dump, and for a variety of different reasons, like processing emotions or improving your productivity. But, there doesn’t necessarily have to be a direction to it. You can just get a piece of paper or journal and write down absolutely everything. Here are three brain dump templates that you can use:

Emotional Brain Dumping

Sometimes our emotions can overwhelm us, so doing an emotional brain dump helps us to see what situations and environments stimulate positive or negative emotions.

It forces you to dig deep to understand yourself better. This way you can be more mindful of the environments and situations that you are putting yourself in.

Prioritisation Brain Dumping

This one is designed to help you improve your focus and productivity levels. It helps to provide perspective on what you need to get done and what you might be dedicating too much time to.

Start by writing all the tasks and projects that you are working on. Then put each of these into one of the following four categories:

Urgent and Important
Urgent and Not Important
Not Urgent and Important
Not Urgent and Not Important

This will help you work on what matters most and to not waste your energy on things that don’t matter. Be more mindful of how you are spending your time and choose where your time and energy goes.

Weekly Brain Dumping

Set aside time to sit down and write down everything that you have to do in that next week. At that point you can sort through them and see which would fit best on which day.

If you have a day where you have plenty of time, you can schedule in more time consuming projects and tasks, or if you have less time available, quick and easy tasks would be great for this day.