Mel Robbins shares a two-phase brain dump method for sleep: write down every unfinished task and worry, then pick five to ten high-impact items to tackle on a designated day. Research from Baylor's Sleep Neuroscience Lab shows offloading thoughts helps you fall asleep faster.
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You're going to do a brain dump the day or the night before the perfect life admin day. It's as simple as it sounds. You're going to take everything that is on your mind and you are going to dump it onto a piece of paper. Everything that's unfinished, everything that's bothering you, everything that is piled up somewhere in your house, every errand that you keep meaning to run, everything you keep meaning to return. Because if it lives in the paper, it actually can die in your head. And there's some really interesting research that explains why this works. This is Michael K. Scullen, who's got a PhD, is the director of Baylor's Sleep Neuroscience and Cognitive Laboratory. And he says, we live in a 24/7 culture in which our to-do lists seem to be constantly growing and causing us to worry about unfinished tasks at bedtime. So they wanted to explore in this study whether the act of writing down all the unfinished things that were on your to-do list before you go to bed, if it had any impact on your ability to go to sleep. They found that writing a to-do list offloads all of those thoughts that are up in your mind and it reduces worry. When people would write down their to-do list, they would fall asleep Faster because putting it on paper allows it to live on the paper and it erases the worry in your mind. And so that's what we're gonna do in phase 1. What are all the things that you need to do that are bothering you? Just keep writing 'em down. You can do this throughout the day before because things are going to keep coming up. Now you're gonna choose your top 5 to 10 priorities. They're the things that you've avoided for months. They're things that cost you money or time by not doing it. For example, TSA PreCheck or getting that Real ID. There's something called a Real ID that's been here in the United States for, I guess, for like 10 years. They've been warning us it's coming. 90% of us in my company either don't know what it is or we don't have it. I want you to highlight the top 5 to 10 things that you're gonna commit to tomorrow. And here's the thing, Just making the brain dump is going to shift something inside of you because you're shifting the mental load from managing it upstairs to putting it on a piece of paper. Now you are ready to jump into your perfect life admin day.
