Have you ever felt like there are too few bandwidths left and on the verge to blow up at every tiny thing? What if we could get rid of unwanted thoughts?

👉THE TRAIL:

I’m not an expert and not a scientist but it’s fascinating to see how far the research on the brain has come and to listen to the specialists in this field willing to popularise knowledge.

In our society that is going so fast we forget to take the time to be present to the now, it feels like a must to declutter everything: from our desk to our brain to try to get a clear space… All this in a wish for new ideas or thoughts to arise. In fine what we are striving for is some sense of peace for creativity to rise despite all the urgency. Let’s face it, we as Human beings like to feel in control of ourselves and our surroundings. We prefer predictable environments that provide a sense of stability and calm. And this preference has been hit hard by the long-lasting effect of the pandemic.

But there is some good news! The more the scientists learn about brain functioning (from its plasticity to the memory lane), the more it opens up areas for us to operate from. It’s like we can enter an adventure race into the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal cortex - the parts of the brain that control thinking and memory, with a map when previously there was none.

It’s fascinating to picture our brain working memory as per the description of Lewis-Peacock - a cognitive neuroscientist at UT-Austin: “the "scratch pad" of the mind where we store thoughts temporarily to help us carry out tasks.” And it is empowering to know that actually, we can only keep three or four thoughts in working memory at a time! Empowering because that’s a priceless confirmation AND it urges us to pay real attention to the thinking and memorizing process.

This is what makes a strong case for us all to work on “decluttering or mind”. It’s about learning to let go of something we need to do in the future or something we have just done so that we are not clogging up our mental resources. Just like we would not let our garbage pilling up, we shall clean out our brain to make new ideas possible.

And another good news is that there are scientists who are working on finding out the best strategy for the human brain to do so using brain imagery.

A recent study conducted in the US combining novel brain imaging with machine learning techniques has been able to get a first stab at identifying the most effective strategies to declutter our brain. What they did –I’m putting my own words here- they observed the brain activity of their participants and worked with them using different techniques to capture how their brain was activated through the pattern of the thought (the participant’s brain signature) and then how it fades away as participants worked to replace, clear or remove that same thought. Basically, they used the scanner to identify how long our mind holds on to a thought, even after we try to get rid of it. "We found that if you really want a new idea to come into your mind, you need to deliberately force yourself to stop thinking about the old one," said co-author Marie Banich, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. So WE as humans are equipped to get rid of an unwanted thought 👌! What’s more? The study highlighted that certain tricks work better than others when it’s time to declutter our minds our flush our working memory. “The bottom line is: If you want to get something out of your mind quickly use ‘clear’ or ‘replace,’ but if you want to get something out of your mind so you can put in new information, ‘suppress’ works best,” Banich reports.  Behavioral studies outside the scanner yielded similar results.

As a BeInnovActiv’ and movement advocate, I could not help but mention here that many studies have also shown the direct beneficial impact of physical activity to improve memory, thinking skills. Indeed, exercise literally changes the brain in ways that protect those areas both directly and indirectly. “Engaging in a program of regular exercise of moderate intensity over six months or a year is associated with an increase in the volume of selected brain regions,” says Dr. Scott McGinnis, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School.

📌 PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:

I lately realized thinking and working on productivity and time management, reading on the mental toll that even if you are good at time management, we tend to end up trapped under a pile of mental clutter quite often… As if this was the fate of our current fellows. Something that is insane when we look into it as we have never been more equipped with tools to get access to information and organize our life… So we shall be less overwhelmed as we do not need to feel the pressure of storing too much information… Well… that would be if we were not sense-making species which somehow explained why our brain is busier than ever before as an information-processing system…

My own reality-checked allowed me to verbalize there is nothing more frustrating to me than hearing/feeling the noise of my busy mind and being unable to focus on what matters. Thinking about too many things at once is exhausting. And well… as a deep thinker and questioner, I’m might be a champion 🏆 at it... 😂

So I knew I needed to 🧹work on it.

It is not until working on this newsletter and making my research though that I realized the sporty challenge and new habits I got in 2020 may have also helped me. So 🥂 cheers to this as well 😉

Getting back to what I intentionally worked on recently as regard decluttering my brain, I’m really into the idea of the ‘livewired’ brain as developed and introduced by David Eagleman – a concept to demonstrate that our brain reconfigures itself, adjusts, and adapts to whatever’s going on around it to optimize its function. However, it helped me to visualize for a moment the thinking and memory process as a bunch of hardware and software, therefore, allowing me to be intentional in creating a tool/mechanism to close the running tabs, block unwanted pop-up or save for later, just like Tabby, Adblock and Pocket extensions do for Chrome.

I did it for myself using two distinct approaches.

Firstly, I created my own “stop the dwelling on something” tool through mindfulness. It’s one thing to feel annoyed by the noise of our brain… it’s another to notice your brain is getting loud before it paralyzes you! Through meditation and therefore a greater sense of mindfulness, I’ve been able to allow me to stop and pause. When I feel too overwhelmed and sense my brain crying out of despair… I pause everything and decide to clear out what can be by breathing in and out. Sometimes it takes just 30 seconds, sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 15…but these minutes are not lost they rather represent what’s needed to get my focus back.

I also decided to be pro-active in getting a stab at taking ownership and responsibility for those annoying run-around thoughts and develop an external brain system where I could dump all-important but irrelevant as of now thoughts. And this went beyond the usual To-do list, though it can be a starting point. So I started building my own brain-dump system to free up some space and be in the capacity to decide what’s important. This system is a combination of writing down and using technology. With my morning journaling, I dump down thoughts and process my feelings – I find it helpful to identify recurring patterns and thoughts. And with my “external brain” I can store all info available on a specific subject as well as articles or books I want to read into a machine with no storage limit.

It’s been a long and sometimes difficult path of ‘try, learn, adjust’. It’s a work still in process. But one of the main lessons so far: even if there is nothing easy about taking those steps… Any steps I took toward curating a healthy environment for myself were well worth the effort.

Getting clarity in our mind, helps us reconnect to what really matters, therefore elevating us to a new level of thinking and feeling.

Thank you for being awesome, stay healthy and stay curious.

Until next time.