The Brain Dump

This past weekend was my closing weekend. It’s not uncommon on these weekends for me to arrive home around midnight and not get to bed until an hour later. Despite this, both my own mental and my fuzzy orange alarms had me up by 6 a.m. This is also not unusual. I don’t fight it. I get up, go through my usual morning routine, knowing around 10 a.m. I can usually lay back down for a couple of hours.

That wasn’t the case this time around. Every time I tried lying down, I felt restless. I had a lot of thoughts bouncing through my head, though none of them were stressful necessarily. But my mind was active. It’s at this point I grabbed my notebook and dumped everything in my head onto paper. All the random thoughts, stuff going on at work, things I needed to do, and so on. All of it went onto paper. Within 15 minutes after doing this, I was asleep again. My mind was clear.

I cannot understate the importance of putting pen to paper for me. It’s how I slow my mind down. It’s how I make sense of things. It’s how I’m able to reflect and how I’m able to follow through. It’s why I’m such an evangelist of the practice. I believe in it and I live by it.

Basically, you’re clearing the cache of your mind. In times where I find my mind is overloaded, writing it out tends to ease that load. This helps me organize the chaos in my mind, giving me a kind of a bird’s-eye view of everything going on. The result is an increased insight and self-awareness of everything, when if I hold it all in, it’s a jumbled mess of thoughts. I’ve talked about my use of notebooks and my love of bullet journaling before. But I can’t suggest writing things out enough.