Get It Out of Your Head

You’re carrying too much in your head.

Right now, as you’re reading this, there’s probably a churning mess of half-finished thoughts, nagging worries, brilliant ideas you’ll probably forget, and about seventeen other things you’re supposed to remember to do later. Your brain’s not meant to hold too many thoughts consciously at any one time.

Often, when someone sits down, shoulders up around their ears, and I ask what’s wrong, they can’t even articulate it properly because there’s just too much noise in their head. Their thinking capacity is maxed out; they’ve got no bandwidth for anything else in their lives. They’re continually mentally exhausted before they can even focus on what they need to do to help themselves.

Here’s what’s actually happening in your skull. Your working memory, the bit that handles your moment-to-moment thinking, can hold about four items at once. That’s it. Four things (Cowan, 2001). Not the forty-seven things you’re trying to juggle right now. When you exceed this capacity, your brain doesn’t politely queue the overflow. It starts dropping things, you start making mistakes, your concentration deteriorates, and your stress response cranks up as you feel overwhelmed.

The Weight You’re Carrying

I think of a patient, a composite of several people I’ve seen with this pattern: a 34-year-old woman I’ll call Claire, who came to see me suffering from tension headaches. It seemed like she was carrying the weight of her entire life in her head; all of this was just floating around, taking up conscious space, using mental energy, creating stress. There was so much noise that none of the important stuff was getting done. She wasn’t sleeping well, her concentration was poor, and her situation was getting worse.

Unfinished goals intrude on your thinking in a very specific way. Masicampo and Baumeister found that unresolved tasks keep popping back into consciousness and interfering with your performance on other things — but simply making a specific plan for how and when you’ll deal with the task is enough to quiet that intrusion, even before you’ve actually done anything about it (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011). That’s the mechanism behind why writing things down works, even though nothing has actually been finished.

Your brain’s doing this because it’s trying to help. It’s worried you’ll forget something important, so it keeps all these open loops active, constantly pinging you with reminders. The problem is, this protective mechanism is absolutely exhausting. It’s like running dozens of programs or having too many browser tabs open simultaneously on your computer. Eventually, everything slows down, and nothing works properly.

The Space Problem

Think about physical space for a moment. If your desk is covered in papers, half-empty coffee mugs, random post-it notes, and three months of unopened mail, you can’t work effectively. You spend half your time looking for things and the other half feeling overwhelmed by the mess.

Your mental space works exactly the same way. When it’s cluttered with unprocessed information, unfinished tasks, and unresolved worries, you’ve got no room to think clearly about anything. You’re constantly context-switching between different concerns, and every switch costs you time and energy (Monsell, 2003).

The Time Dimension

Here’s another thing about mental clutter. It distorts your sense of time. When you’re carrying dozens of concerns simultaneously, everything feels urgent. You can’t distinguish between “needs doing today” and “needs doing eventually” because it’s all just one big overwhelming blob of stuff.

David Allen, who developed the Getting Things Done methodology, calls this getting things out of your head and into a trusted system you review regularly (Allen, 2001). Your brain isn’t good at making these distinctions when everything’s floating around untethered. You need to get it out, look at it objectively, and sort it properly.

I’ve seen people markedly reduce their anxiety just by writing down everything they’re worried about. Not by solving any of it, mind you. Just by getting it out of their heads and onto paper. Suddenly, seventeen massive problems become three urgent things, eight important-but-not-urgent things, and six things that don’t actually need doing at all.

The Pain Factor

Mental clutter creates genuine physical pain. Those tension headaches Claire was experiencing? Directly related to the constant cognitive load she was carrying. When your stress response is chronically activated by an overloaded brain, you get muscle tension, poor sleep, digestive problems, and yes, pain (McEwen, 1998).

Your body doesn’t distinguish between “I’m stressed because I might forget something” and “I’m stressed because I’m being chased by a tiger.” The physiological response is remarkably similar. Cortisol goes up, muscles tighten, and inflammation increases. Do that for months or years, and you’ve created a perfect storm for chronic pain conditions.

I can give you all the painkillers in my prescription pad, but if you’re still carrying everything in your head, you’re just treating the symptoms, not the cause. The cause is that overloaded, stressed-out brain of yours, causing nervous tension and not letting you relax, rest or switch off.

The Brain Dump Solution

Right, here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to do a proper brain dump. Not a half-hearted list of three things. A complete, exhaustive, unfiltered evacuation of everything currently occupying mental real estate.

Get a notebook, open a document, grab a stack of paper. Whatever works for you. Then write down absolutely everything that’s in your head. Every task, every worry, every idea, every commitment, every thing you’re supposed to remember. Don’t organise it, don’t prioritise it, don’t judge it. Just get it out.

This isn’t new-age nonsense, by the way. It’s solid cognitive psychology. Writing things down frees up working memory, reduces cognitive load, and demonstrably supports better problem-solving. When you externalise information, you literally create more mental capacity for thinking.

Making This Stick

Here’s the critical bit. This isn’t a one-time exercise. Your brain accumulates clutter constantly. You need a regular practice of getting things out of your head.

I recommend a daily brain dump. Five minutes at the beginning and the end of each day, writing down anything that’s accumulated. Weekly, do a more thorough review. The specific system of how you do this doesn’t matter. David Allen’s Getting Things Done method, bullet journaling, a simple task list on a pad of paper, whatever. What matters is that you consistently externalise information instead of storing it mentally.

Next, concentrate on the priority items, and when you can, sort those issues and tick them off.

Clear Your Head

Your brain is phenomenally powerful, but it’s got limits. When you exceed those limits, everything suffers. Your thinking, your stress levels, your physical health, your relationships, your work. You’re essentially trying to run a high-performance machine whilst deliberately hobbling it.

So externalise every single problem, and believe me, you’ll sleep better. You’ll think more clearly. You’ll make fewer mistakes. You’ll feel less stressed. And those tension headaches? They’ll probably ease too.

So right now, before you move on to whatever’s next in your day, spend ten minutes doing a brain dump. Everything that’s in your head, onto paper or screen.

Clear your head. You’ll be amazed at how much space you create.

Once your mind is clear and your systems are in place, the question becomes: how do you make the most of the time and energy you have? The final article in this section gives you seven practical strategies to do exactly that.

Further reading

1. Allen, D. (2001). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Viking.
2. Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114.
3. Masicampo, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667–683.
4. McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators. New England Journal of Medicine, 338(3), 171–179.
5. Monsell, S. (2003). Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 134–140.