Cluttercore is out, clean girl is in. For your brain, that is.
We’re taking a cue from Mel Robbins by getting out of our head and sharpening our focus. It requires us to take our eyes off our screens and out of the space between our ears, which holds immense power over the way we think, feel, and approach the world. (This sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not.)
So what exactly is a brain dump? Well, it involves a pen, and it involves paper. Don’t try and cheat the system by typing into your notes app, or hammering away at your keyboard. This is an analog break from such activities so that we can really savor the time to process things.
We find it helpful to do a brain dump at the beginning of the week. Whether that means Sunday evening or Monday morning is up to you, but we like to think it’s a Sunday-at-some-point-kind of activity. (We have enough to do on Mondays, right?)
However, you don’t have to wait til Sunday rolls around to do it. You can lock into brain dump mode anytime you feel stressed, overwhelmed, scared, or even heartbroken.
Consider it a quick perspective shift: you unload, you re-center, you reclaim your power.
Here’s how to do a brain dump:
Write down everything that’s swirling in your head: the anxieties, the errands, the big ideas, the small nagging thoughts.
As Mel puts it:
“You’re going to take everything that’s up in your brain that’s weighing you down and you are going to get it out of your brain and dump it onto a piece of paper. It is the equivalent of mental vomiting. You’re just going to put it all out on paper.”
Graphic, yes. Effective, absolutely.
The idea is that now that its new home is on paper, the choice or ability to reflect on it is yours. You can revisit it if you want—or you can let it live there and walk away lighter.
Think of it as a new filing system for your worries and concerns. Things can get very messy in our heads, and it’s hard to complete any other vital tasks or stay present when our immediate surroundings are chaotic. Brain dumping into our journals removes those stacks of unorganized paperwork from our brains and makes sense of them on paper, most often effectively removing them from our line of vision so we can focus on the very moment we’re in.
Some dumps might morph into to-do lists. In fact, Mel encourages it. Write down every single thing on your plate, then cross off what doesn’t actually matter—or move it to “later” status.
Remember: if everything feels urgent, nothing truly is. Writing it down helps you see what deserves your attention right now, so you’re not stuck spinning.
Brain dumping, in effect, brings us to Mel’s “Progress Principal”— tackle one meaningful thing, celebrate it, and let that momentum carry you forward. Because at the end of the day, being “stuck” is just a feeling. The second you unload, you’re free to move.
Shop our favorite journals:
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Next: dive into our guide on functional freeze—aka the nervous system’s version of the spinning rainbow wheel of doom—and then learn how to do one of our favorite (free!) hacks for banishing anxiety quickly.
