If I didn’t discover brain-dump journaling, I’m not sure how I could function. There are moments in my life when my brain starts to channel one of those rotisserie chickens at the grocery, frantically spinning beneath a heat lamp. Right side. Stomach. Left side. Back. Repeat. My thoughts race, flitting from question to conclusion to counterpoint.
The most recent offense came from Love Island USA’s infuriatingly bad Episode 26. In short, Chelley Bissainthe and Olandria Carthen faced undeserved branding as “mean girls” for calling out castmate Huda Mustafa’s disloyal, boundary-crossing hypocrisy. (And don’t even get me started on Huda’s textbook redemption arc.)
See what I mean? Once I start, it’s hard to stop.
After the usual debrief with friends over FaceTime, I tried to sleep. My brain had other plans. The problem: I can’t let thoughts pass through me—they take up residence and demand follow-up questions. 30 minutes into my attempt to “call it a night,” I found myself still rummaging through my strong perspectives on the cast and the drama, none of which seemed to align with what the loud majority online were saying. This is where my “thought dump” journal has saved me.
By nature, I’m not a person who can easily move on from anything. I’m a serial hyperfixator who gets caught in mental loops with ease. My brain refuses to hit pause, and this chronic looping has cost me plenty: sleep, focus, time. The Notes app on my phone is positively overflowing. Not with diary entries, but scattered reminders, ideas, observations, random links, I swear I’ll read “later.” That’s when I realized—I was journaling, just in a way that worked for how my brain actually functions.
I’ve always wanted to use journaling to mark moments in time and keep track of where I’ve been, through the good days and the hard ones. But, I’d start, stop, forget, restart, stop again. My dad still laughs about the stacks of untouched notebooks I swore I’d fill as a kid…eventually. What I realized is that attempting to structure my scattered brain with random and persistent thoughts popping up every few minutes was useless and discouraging, because these thoughts, especially when placed next to one another, would never make “sense.”
I’d approach journaling with the typical, “Dear Diary…” and it never felt authentic. I’d start with something like, “Today I did XYZ,” but even as I wrote about this generic “XYZ,” my mind had already moved on to 10 other things. I was journaling like someone else, not myself. Without an authentic desire or expression tied to traditional journaling, I had no incentive to continue and eventually stopped altogether. But then I discovered “dump journaling,” and my mind was completely changed.
A dump journal blends free writing with thought mapping. Writer and former therapist Saya Des Marais, MSW, describes it in PsychCentral as “the act of writing down everything that comes to mind on a particular topic.” I was first introduced to the concept during my sophomore year of college, in a session with my therapist—whom I still see—after yet another spiral over looming deadlines and an ever-mounting load of coursework.
Her assignment was simple: write out every essay, reading, and discussion post I had due, then organize them by what needed to be tackled first. It changed everything. Seeing it all laid out made me realize that what felt overwhelming in my head was manageable on paper. Initially, I used this technique strictly for school—to-do lists disguised as journaling. But after struggling to keep up with regular journaling, I started applying the same method to my thoughts. Instead of trying to craft perfect reflections, I simply dumped them onto the page as they came, one unfiltered thought at a time.
Journaling, for me, is like a photo dump for the mind. The up-to-20 photo limit in a singular post may be Instagram’s greatest contribution to the social media platform—there’s something freeing about throwing a collection of random moments together, without overthinking the “aesthetic”. I treat my journal the same way.
Whenever there is a persistent thought in my mind that seeps into the pattern of lingering, I write it down on the blank, unruled pages—the absence of lines, grids, and boxes invites this feeling of no boundaries. It’s not pretty in any sense of the word. There are random squiggles, sometimes clouds to spotlight a certain word I wrote in particular, arrows pointing to different sections on the page, and no blank space, but it’s my mind.
I usually begin with the date. It’s not necessary, but memory has always felt sacred to me—what we choose to preserve, to make permanent. Even fleeting thoughts, like my takeaways from Love Island, are things I want to look back on, whether next year or decades from now. I tend to start writing when a single thought feels too loud to ignore, the kind that menacingly penetrates my focus. That urgency becomes my entry point. From there, I slip into what psychologists call a “flow state,” and the rest unravels naturally.
But my journaling never takes the form of full paragraphs. I write in fragments exclusively: words, phrases, and standalone sentences. One entry from my spring 2024 study abroad semester reads something like: “Portugal, Praia de Benagil, crying on the beach.“ From there, the mood turns introspective: “Gratitude,” “reflection,” “wanting to bring all of my family to experience the same,” and finally, “progression.”
“There’s something about writing in this way, to feel understood by the pages. ”
Suddenly, I’m mapping out potential job paths or recalling a conversation with my grandmother, who might have sparked one of those thoughts. It’s scattered but genuine, and somehow, it always connects. My goal is to keep my journaling as unrestricted as possible, with no set schedule—only writing when it feels necessary, which isn’t every day. Sometimes that means jotting down thoughts midday after listening to a video essay on the subway, or right before bed to detox the mind before sleep; sometimes both.
There’s something about writing in this way, to feel understood by the pages. To look back and be able to trace those thoughts that formed in a way only I can understand. It’s this level of intimate understanding that allows my mind to fully and completely rest, and gain back some level of sanity that would have been chipped away from me had I not vomited on the paper.
The post My Brain-Dump Journal Is Saving My Sanity One Page at a Time appeared first on The Daily Beast.
