July 2, 2026
I hadn’t done brain dumps before, though I’d occasionally watched u-tubers talk about them. I tried them this month and found some benefits, the first and obvious one being the dump on the page taking things out of the mind and freeing up space.
I decided to do them weekly, the weekend or Monday. I did them over a double page in a traveler’s notebook blank insert. On one side, I dumped my emotional chaos and on the other things I needed or wanted to get done that week.
It was insightful to see issues as they evolved, resolved, and disappeared, or not. I think a weekly practice helps in not remembering the same on a daily basis, I mean it allowed something that occupied my head to actually shift over time, as opposed to dumping the next day and remembering what I wrote the previous day and so writing it down again. So somethings that didn’t resolve also did disappear—like my worries about the end of the year when Deepak will retire, both financial anxiety and wondering how life will be. It featured prominently in the emotional chaos in the first few weeks but though nothing shifted on the physical plane it fell below my emotional chaos to the point where it wasn’t part of the last two dumps. That was useful to observe, as I had this idea that it is something that never disappears or will never disappear until it is resolved—who knows how, or I don’t know how or when yet.
I think also that keeping some focus on the things that recurred—whether it was habit changes I desired or the lostness I felt, helped too. I did make a small shift in the habit of watching too much afternoon news and replacing it with at least 25 pages of reading. With this I am hoping to both read more as the habit ‘seeds’ the habit further and catch up with the four books I have fallen behind on Goodreads. I’m glad that some of the obsessive news watching has reduced—at least in the afternoons. Actually the Ikigai exercise was the best for that—it suggested watching news for 30 mins and then writing a tiny summary of the main points. Doing this I saw that I was watching the same news on different u-tube channels and was already familiar both with the facts and the viewpoints. (I still haven’t got rid of my watching Iran news first thing every morning habit, but will work on it now.)
Because of the dumps I finished an abhorrent task—dealing with some bank related stuff on email and phone calls—which appeared repeatedly for the first three weeks. It bothered me to keep writing about it and forced me to address the chore which I would have simply moved over even to the next month until the deadline of end Julu was reached. It appears no more and that makes me happy.
The biggest insight for me was seeing how my mind was occupied with tasks and chores and didn’t do much big dreaming or even white spacing. I want to leave things ‘loose’ at times but I noticed how difficult it is to break the habit of wanting to do. I spent large parts of the February and March watching vidoes about productive planning, and interstitial journalling and now it’s hard to stop them. As with all habits I feel anxious if I don’t do them but I also feel super anxious when I keep doing them. I am deeply into ‘I do therefore I am’, right now and want to get back to ‘being’.
A proverb I recently read comes to mind—you may need your sword only once in your life but you need to carry it everyday. It has a connection to big dreaming doesn’t it?
Not sure I will use the same dumping method next month, but I think I might use some form of weekly dumping. Do you do brain dumps? Have they been useful?
