Feeling Stressed? Try This To Calm Your Mind!-Brain Dump

Do you find yourself feeling worried and overwhelmed occasionally or maybe more often? As we drive forward in the contemporary world of Post-Pandemic, where there is zero social interaction, half a day is spent sitting in front of a screen, a complete disaster in financial management, it’s easy to feel like it’s way too much. Even now, things are still subject to change and are uncertain at any moment of our life. Thus, as a result, our overthinking, clashing beliefs, and opinions about our current situation cause many different emotions and ultimately make us feel stressed and overwhelmed.

As said by Emma Bombeck:

Worrying is like sitting in a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.

Being calm can be a very difficult task when you have a lot of thoughts spiraling around in your brain. It’s stressful to manage stuff when you have so many details going in your mind, these disorganized and inconsequential thoughts are always winning and capturing you and it feels like there’s no escape. Apart from all these stressful thoughts, there’s one simple trick that can help you calm down in almost every stressful situation. It’s called a brain dump, and it truly is as easy as it sounds. Using this strategy relieves the pressure of an overburdened mind.

Technique-Brain Dump

By now you must have come across many coping skills which help you to manage anxiety and stress, but Brain Dumping is a step above coping skills, it is a technique. Brain Dumping generally involves removing the cluttered and overthinking thoughts from your mind and placing them somewhere else, making you live more freely throughout each day as it comes as the most troubling thoughts are being resolved. Therefore, in simpler terms, it’s simply taking what’s in your mind and moving it to another place, this place can be anything from a piece of paper or your laptop’s Microsoft Word.

Brain Dumping is an exercise in differentiation, very much similar to cleaning and organizing our closets. This technique will surely help, as it will help you organize your unresolved clutter into a workable place in your mind. Dumping the rambling and cluttered thoughts from your mind to a different thing frees up valuable space up in your brain, unloads your heavy burden, and ultimately makes you feel less overwhelmed. You will feel a lot more organized and free mind space once you experience brain dump.

When do you need a Brain Dump?

There are no such defined situations only where you can practice brain dump technique to release stress and anxiety, you can do it in any situation or even make it a habit in day-to-day life.

But you can consider doing a brain dump at ant of these times:

• When you can’t keep up with your to-do lists because they’re too long.
• When your ideas get lost in the plethora of other thoughts.
• If you find yourself becoming angry or cranky for no apparent cause.
• When your life has been chaotic or disorderly for a long time.
• When you feel like you’ve lost control of your life and don’t know how to reclaim it.
• When you’re feeling lost, bewildered, or as though your life isn’t going anywhere.
• When you’re stressed out or your anxiety is becoming worse.

Advantages and Benefits of a Brain Dump

There can be numerous amount of advantages and benefits one can get from practicing a brain dump technique, as it depends on the individual from individual and it works in almost every situation.

Though, some major advantages and benefits of practicing a brain dump include:

• Assisting you in organizing the information you’ve gathered. You can now process information, organize it into a logical format, and make plans. It’s a lot easy to keep track of everything.
• Providing you with the ability to see other possibilities. You have a lot of alternatives once you’ve pulled all those thoughts out of your head and put them somewhere you can see them. When information is right in front of you, it’s considerably easier to sort than when it’s swirling around in your head.
• It’s time to clear your mind. Simply looking at the data in front of you gives you a sensation of control. Your mind is defragmented, similar to a computer cache. There is more space in it, allowing it to perform better.

Different Brain Dump Techniques. How to choose which one is appropriate for you?

There are numerous techniques for brain dumping, and I recommend that you choose the one that works best for you. The choices for brain dumping listed here are only a few; I urge that you create your version of the procedure that best suits your needs.

1. The Basic Brain Dump

This procedure is bringing out your journal or notebook in the morning and writing down anything that occurs to mind. This is a type of free-floating, free association process for writing down whatever that comes to mind.

The goal of this practice is to just take the clutter out of your head and put it somewhere else. In other words, your brain is satisfied that the issues have been identified, classified, and addressed.

Consider this progress even if you don’t do anything else with the material other than writing it down. By removing your thoughts from your mind and writing them down, you are assisting yourself in a very practical way in managing your thoughts. This allows your brain to unwind because it no longer needs to remind you to concentrate on the problem. After all, you’ve identified it.

2. The End of Week Brain Dump

• Get a piece of paper and a pen ready.
• Make a list of everything that’s on your mind. Consider any unfinished projects, as well as any other duties or issues that are bothering you.
• Keep the list on your desk and add to it when new problems or ideas arise. Your to-do list will quickly grow.
• It’s time to process your brain dump list after you’ve created it. First, make a list of the problems you’re working on and the actions you’ll need to answer them. Prioritize your list of problems to be solved by assigning them a difficulty level.
• Now choose a day to go over your list and complete each task to the best of your ability. This may be done the next day to avoid you from procrastinating and not resolving your difficulties, which will lead to you rebuilding the clutter in your mind and you’ll be back to square one.

Take the brain dump list you made at the end of the week, say on Friday, then on Monday, pick one item from your list and start working on it. Then, on Tuesday, tackle another thing from your to-do list, and so on. You can even “attack” the To-Do list component of your brain dump on another day of the week.

Repeat at the end of the week.

3. The Spiritual Brain Dump

Bringing all of your worries to God (your higher power) in your journal is part of this process. Begin by laying down all of your concerns in a written petition to God. As a separate section or bulleted item, write about each aspect of your life that is on your mind. Write down all you can think of concerning the topic that is bothering you.

After you’ve written everything down, pray about each item and give it to God. This will assist you in finding peace and resolving the difficulties that are bothering you.

This is a very simple strategy since all you have to do is discipline yourself enough to write and then let go of your issues. This is tremendously liberating and rewarding because you are not pressuring yourself to do more with the things that are upsetting you; instead, you are releasing these difficulties to God, the Universe, or whatever higher power works best for you.

4. The Four Square Brain Dump

This strategy is what I follow on day to day basis to keep my brain organized and calm. By drawing horizontal and vertical lines over a piece of paper, you can divide your page into four halves. The following titles should be used to label each section: Thoughts, To-Do, Gratitude, and Top 3 Priorities.

Here’s how to fill up each box:

• Thoughts: Simply jot down all of your random thoughts without delving too deeply into them.
• To-Do: Make a list of all your thoughts about the tasks you need to complete.
• Gratitude: Make a list of the things for which you are grateful.
• Top 3 Priorities: Return to your To-Do list and write down the top three items that are most important to you on that list.

You can also use this method to start completing the tasks on your To-Do list. You may resolve to start working on items on this list every day until they are completed, and then move on to the next list. Procrastination, which is a contributing factor to anxiety and sadness, can be reduced by taking action on the items on your To-Do list.

Finally, keep in mind that you must work with yourself, your limitations, and your strengths. Choose whichever method works best for you. If you find yourself over-thinking often, you might feel satisfied in having mini-brain dumping sessions throughout each day, where you write down your obsessive thoughts and worries as they come, jotting them in a journal to be dealt with at a later time.

This activity will undoubtedly make your mind feel better since you’re telling it that you’re serious about your concerns and that you’ve written them down so you won’t forget them. Because your brain believes that its issues are being handled or will be addressed, it will stop stressing.