by Celes | | Email this post

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Today I’m going to share a simple exercise I use to quickly get mental clarity. You will find this very useful for many uses, such as…

1. To clear your head (especially if your mind is feeling cluttered)
2. To calm yourself down from a restless, troubled or stressed state
3. To free up mental energy (if you are feeling tired)

I’ve been doing this of late and found it to be incredibly helpful for the above functions, and more. It’s also the same exercise I recommend to my clients to clear up mental blockages.

How It Works – Via Increasing Mental RAM

Imagine your brain as a computer. Every computer has RAM which determines its processing capacity. The more applications the computer is running, the more RAM is used and the slower your computer gets. If you have used resource-intensive programs such as 3D Max Studio or played graphic laden games like World of Warcraft or Halo before, you probably found it’s better to close all unwanted applications to free up RAM for these programs.

Likewise, our brain has its own RAM too. This RAM is used for all kinds of brain work, from thinking, recalling, analyzing, to the subconscious actions. You want to have as much free RAM as possible to function at top capacity of your brain.

However, not all our RAM is available when we want them. At least half is occupied with mental clutter – thoughts running in the background. What are these thoughts about? Anything, really – whether its some task we have to yet to do, some issue we are facing, some advertisement we just saw on TV just now, music we just heard in the mall, etc.

Majority of the clutter are triggered by external stimuli. The second you wake up in the morning to the point when you sleep for the night, you are exposed to many stimuli from your environment. Of course, the more active contact you have with the world, the more stimuli you are exposed to. If you are a busy corporate executive with typical lifestyle of a cosmopolitan citizen, you probably get bombarded with lots of stimuli every day, especially from your work, the society and mass media. Even if you have a sedentary lifestyle like a hermit, you will still be faced with your own set of external stimuli.

It’s never obvious how much of these stimuli impact us until we stop to observe our mental activity, say through introspection or meditation. Think of this clutter as the unimportant programs and applications running in your computer. You don’t need them for your computer to function. By virtue of their presence, they are freezing up mental RAM. If we don’t process the clutter, it gets to a point when we have lesser and lesser available RAM, till there’s no more.

Luckily, we have a biological process in which we clear this clutter – Sleep. Specifically REM sleep. However, it’s not the most effective clutter clearing process since only 25% of our sleep is REM. The other 75% is non-REM. This comprises of the induction phases into REM.

We also have meditation as a method for clearing clutter as well. Many people who meditate experience clearer states of minds and feel calmer because of the same reason. However, there may be times when you want to clear off the clutter, but for some reason or other you can’t. Maybe you are at work and you can’t do that. Maybe you are too restless to meditate. Maybe you are afraid you’ll just sleep when meditating.

This is where this exercise comes in.

Freeing Your Mental RAM via Brain Dumping

I refer to this as brain dumping, since you are dumping the contents of your mind, specifically via writing.

1. Pick a medium of writing – Either pen/paper or a word processor. As with all writing exercises, my pick is the word processor cause I type faster than I write.
2. Type whatever comes to mind. And when I say whatever, I really mean whatever! For example, if you are looking at the paper and thinking “wow, this looks so white”, then write that. If you don’t know what to write, then just write “I don’t know what to write”. Basically just get whatever is on your mind down. There’s no need to overthink this! It’s just to get down what you are thinking.
3. Just keep doing this for the next 15 minutes, or however long it takes for your mind to feel clearer. Sometimes just 10 minutes is sufficient for me, while during the times I’m really bogged down I can take over an hour.

This exercise uses writing as the active method to transfer the clutter from your mind down to somewhere else. I find this to be a more effective way of processing clutter than just sleep or meditation. With sleep, you have to wait till REM before clutter is processed. With meditation, the thought is processed as it “floats” around and out of your head. With this exercise though, the speed you write determines how fast it gets processed out. If you type fast, you can process a lot of clutter really quickly.

I typically use this when I’m feeling mentally bogged, when I need to my full focus on an upcoming task, or even when I’m feeling tired but I can’t sleep because I need to get something done. I can usually get a lot of clutter cleared off in just 15 minutes, resulting in a much clearer state to do my next task. If I’m sleepy, the exercise leaves me more awake and mentally “lighter” afterward. I can definitely concentrate better.

It’s interesting too to read back at what you have written after the 15 minutes. Usually you will notice your thoughts jumping from all places. One moment you may be thinking about what you had for breakfast, the next you may be thinking about your meeting with your boss last week, then the next you may be thinking about your vacation for next holidays. As random as they may be, as queer as they may see, these thoughts have always been on your mind – the exercise merely brought them out so they’re now cleared from your mind. The longer you spend on this exercise, the more clutter you can clear, and the higher your mental clarity afterward.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that you stop thinking about XYZ after you clear a thought about it. Maybe you have 50 strands of thought about XYZ and the exercise only removed 2 strands of those thoughts. Maybe you get back into contact with XYZ later or something that reminds you of XYZ, thus retriggering the thought.  Since you will always be exposed to other stimuli, you need to repeatedly do it to maintain this mode of increased mental clarity. Just like bathing, eating, or sleeping, you need to do this frequently as part of the clearing/up keeping process. Do this often, and you will be more mentally clear and calmer.

As for the contents of what you wrote, you can just delete or trash them. There’s no need to keep them unless certain things gave you new insights and you want to keep them as an evaluation process.

Have fun doing this exercise! It works very well for me and I’m sure it’ll be very useful for you too

Filed in: Awareness & Growth, Productivity | Posted on Dec 21 2009