Brain dumping is a great way to help manage anxiety, help accomplish deadlines and stay stress free! Before I get into all the benefits brain dumping has, I should explain what brain dumping is. Brain dump means writing down every single thought you have on a specific subject. This method allows you to give light to your stressors, nagging ideas or thoughts. This is also a great way to hone your creative writing skills. It’s kind of like doing a factory reset on your brain so it can process the ‘important’ information.
Brain dumping is great for managing anxiety and stress if you’re a forgetful person or struggle with ADHD, like myself. Within this article I’ll touch on a few ways that I use brain dumping to help me plan and get through my day. Hopefully you’ll be able to implement a few of these strategies to make your own lives easier.
Curing Writers Block
Writer’s block is simultaneously the worst and most annoying thing a writer like myself can experience. This lack of inspiration/motivation can be costly to those that depend on words for a living. The best way to avoid this problems is to brain dump and do it often! Try writing about your latest obsession, hobby, special interest or something in front of you. Everything you know about it, see about it, wonder about it, and every way you imagine it should go down on paper. Get comfortable allowing yourself to be uncensored, this is for you and only you! Don’t worry about other people seeing it.
I use this method whenever I’m constructing a world or building a new novel. The image above shows the notes I wrote at the end of a passage I had just written. That passage was a brain dump of a scenario for an idea that’s been plaguing me. The notes were to help me continue after I found myself at a dead end, staring blankly at the screen. Just further thoughts to maybe turn into scenes later down the line, expanding upon them brings more content and questions. To learn more about my upcoming projects and research click here. Who knows, maybe you can use your brain dumping to help create writing work you can submit to contests and magazines/articles.
Here are a few creative ways I use brain dumping to cure writers block:
- ‘A place’: sometimes I like to pick random places on a map and enter them into google images. I’ll scroll through the images for a while, maybe pin a few photos to a word document and craft a quick story about it. Imaginary animals, people and events. Thing’s I’d love to do there and see there. What I think it smells like, the food tastes like. Is it hot or cold?
- FanFiction: I’m never going to grow out of writing fanfiction! I’m not ashamed to admit it, especially if it helps me test an idea I’d like to use for publishing. When it comes to these characters, you know them like the back of your hand and the world is already built for you. You can stretch boundaries, get used to describing things you’ve seen regularly and get used to writing in a voice that isn’t yours. It’s a great test of your creative capabilities to try to emulate and craft your own style to set a story apart.
- What happened today/personal pictures: Going through and writing down your experiences in a journal is a great way to brain dump. It’s also a great test of your memory! The goal is to write down everything you thought was fun or interesting. Describe why you thought the lake was pretty. Why did you want to take a picture of that tree? What made that dog so cute to you? Did you talk to anyone and what about? Use this as a test of your descriptor skills and how natural conversation flows.
Stress Free Scheduling & Planning
Brain dumping isn’t only great for creative writing, its perfect for people who struggle to remember tasks that need to be done! Take the image above for instance: I brain dump and use that to fill in my planners and make scheduling less stressful. Typically to start I take a blank sheet of paper and list everything I need to do this month: that includes bills, prior engagements, work deadlines and goals I set for myself. Next I wrote down chores or house/car maintenance that needs to be completed. This method helps ensure I don’t miss anything important and leads to a stress free time planning my schedule.
After your done jotting down everything you can remember, it’s time to be realistic. We didn’t just spend all that time listing out tasks, bills and engagements that need to be done just to try to cram it into one week and not get it all done. The purpose of brain dumping was to show what needs to get done and then break it up in manageable sections. The break down is up to you but remember to keep it within your capabilities, we aren’t super heroes. We also don’t want to start associating dumping with our failures and never want to try again.
Last but not least, have fun decorating! If you’re not great with picking images or colors then randomly select two or three to work with. Don’t think to hard and just go with whatever your brain picks. It’s like a visual version of brain dumping. There is no right or wrong way to decorate a planner/journal.
Application
Now that you’ve seen what brain dumping can do for you, its time to apply it to your daily life. It’s not just for novelists who want to avoid burnout and subsequent writers block. This strategy can be applied to people who want to improve their memory, creative skills and make organizing/chores less stressful. Dumping can benefit those with over active imaginations and anxiety by expelling everything on paper. It’s not a cure all to your negative thoughts but it can be helpful when needing to pinpoint a problem with your therapist or closer inner circle.
Brain dumping has many uses for a variety of different things and I hope this article has highlighted a few ways it can help you improve your everyday life. Thank you for reading and be sure to comment your favorite use for brain dumping below.
