Ever lie awake at night, wishing you could fall asleep, but your brain keeps mulling over some problem? Is anxiety a constant companion? What if we could tap into more of the brain's pre-existing power?
This CYBORG_ issue is more of a challenge to you.
It's almost the end of the first quarter of the year, so it's a good time to do some reflection and shake things up.
The Problem
Our brains collect so much junk over time that it interferes with our focus, our productivity, and our default ruminations. "Cognitive offloading" will empty the garbage can in our minds and open up space for clarity, purpose, and intention.
When thoughts are transferred onto paper, it reduces the need for the brain to expend energy to retain and juggle the information. This is known as cognitive offloading. —Rian Doris
I'm not a therapist, but I have received recommendations from therapists to try externalizing my thoughts when I'm anxious or have "big emotions."
Journalling, rage-writing, drawing, anything to get my mind to release the need to spiral in these thoughts or worries.
Getting things out of your mind and into a safe place—whether so you can recall the thing or just process without anyone else accessing it—is a beautiful way to reset.
Your Task
Goal: externalize your thoughts so your mind doesn't need to work so hard to keep them in memory.
Write down literally everything in your mind for a couple of hours:
- worries
- regrets
- dumb ideas
- good ideas
- unclosed loops
- conversations you've been thinking about for years
- procrastinated to-dos
- random facts
- words that keep repeating
- literally anything else rattling in your brain
I've done this once before at this larger scale of really dedicating time to brain dump, and I was surprised at how refreshing it was. I used technology (software and hardware) to capture these these thoughts so that I can go back to them if I need to.
Background
This idea came from Rian Doris, a masterful teacher on the flow state. You can watch his explanation of this process and some of the science behind rumination here: How To Tap Into Your Intuition and Unleash Your Genius [24 minutes]
In the video, he said he likes to do this exercise for 10 days every quarter!
That might be a bit more than most people can ever do. So, I propose it's more manageable to do something like this for an hour or two each quarter. Do what works for you.
Balance
Like everything, there are negative consequences, so we'll want to do this knowing both the benefits and the drawbacks.
This was a great scholarly article outlining cognitive offloading—what we know, what we don't know: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6942100/#:~:text=Cognitive%20offloading%20refers%20to%20the,a%20cell%20phone%20or%20computer.
What I took away from the article is the intuitive sense that if we externalize the information we would've had to hold onto in our brain, we risk poorer recall when we don't have access to that information later. That info has been offloaded; delegated to something else.
It's the classic phone number problem. We probably know some phone numbers by heart (childhood family phone, perhaps?), but we don't know most of our friends' and neighbors' phone numbers anymore.
Why bother putting it to memory, when we have smart phones that store all the contact info for hundreds of people?
And then there's that one time you left or lost your phone and you need to call someone...
PKM
I'm still a big believer in personal knowledge management (PKM), which is a form of cognitive offloading. Something like Obsidian is a great way of offloading the technical details that don't generally serve you when you're away from the computer.
And sometimes the intrusive ruminations—the persistent thoughts we want to get rid of or at least want to calm—are exactly what we should offload.
As a teen, I remember trying something new one night when I was worried about something and couldn't fall asleep. I reached for my marker and wrote a scrawling note on my white board by my bed.
Now that my brain knew I was taking this thing seriously, and that I had it somewhere I wouldn't miss, it could finally rest.
Braintenance won't always be about improving task performance. Sometimes it's just a process of telling your brain, "I've got you."