Cognitive overload

Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, April 11, 2025

“I use journaling as a tool for organization, stress reduction and clearing my head.” — Tim Ferriss

I have been thinking hard about certain aspects of mental health. Mine, yours, all of ours. How do we floss our brains the same way we floss our teeth — to get the detritus out, keep things fresh and optimize function?

I recently threw away a pile of journals, notebooks and college papers that I had hauled around for many years, some of them from as far back as the late 70s. There had never been any clear reason for me — a person who pares down — to keep them, just a vague sense that they were not to be tossed. All that inky cursive — the details, victories and traumas, dreams, emotions, laundry lists, theses — the accruing mass hauled around for miles and many years by the engine of my psyche. And to what end?

I looked at them all in a box one day and just — got over it.

Flipping through random pages, I wondered if I would ever really think as well as I did when I was 20. Probably not, honestly. I also wondered how necessary it was to keep tabs on my dreams, the vast tidal washes of flotsam bits and their real life jetsam coordinates. What did all this represent to me now?

I basically just stopped asking and started sorting, the whole thing accomplished in less than half an hour. Almost everything went except my kindergarten and first grade cahiers, French notebooks from my years of school there, where, I kid you not, I learned to write with a dip pen, blotter and purple ink poured into a glass well that was set into the desk. These I keep to remind myself that once upon a time I had exceptional handwriting (age 6) and because I have to love anything in my life so blatantly historical.

In most of the intervening years between back then and now, I have not kept journals because of the rather rough writing they elicit, whether it feels mundane, repetitive or whiny. Recently, however, I am reexamining the idea that the value of journals lies not in the 19th century style of documenting life and times for posterity — but in the fact that downloading ideas, tasks and feelings and forcing them out has its own set of mental health benefits. The topic has become enormously popular in recent years.

Slot all this into a mental health folder under the filename “cognitive load,” a term coined by John Sweller in the 1980s, whose Cognitive Load Theory involves maximizing learning and capacity by not overloading human RAM, our working memory. Current proponents of journal writing know that when cognitive load is high (i.e. there is too much on your mind), anxiety, burnout, a sense of being overwhelmed and trouble focusing are more likely to infiltrate.

As with many other things, increased self-awareness is the key. If we sense overload and we develop an ability to manage it, we can attend to our lives better, be more effective, more grounded and happier.

Champions of this kind of cognitive offloading (journaling) are many and varied, from psychologist Jordan Peterson and authors Tim Ferriss and David Allen to Ryder Carroll (Bullet Journaling), Brene Brown (researcher and sociologist) and Julia Cameron (writer). For some, the idea is to organize the mind and the hours in the day in order to attend to all of it better and with less stress, and for others, it is to process emotion and declutter in order to free ourselves and be more creative. Emotional regulation is at the core of each. Of course, this goes back to Marcus Aurelius (2nd century BC), a self-improvement progenitor, whose journals are still read and studied by many to this day.

The question to ask, for the purposes of greater clarity and self-coaching is: What is my bandwidth today? Do I feel overwhelmed or anxious or like I have very little breathing space? If things feel tight, the time could be ripe for brain flossing via journaling, whether the focus is on organization and clarity or on mental dumping and emotional release.

For those wishing to begin right away, get yourself a deliciously fresh journal or rummage around the house for an old composition book and dig in. Journal prompts have their own corner, and some will resonate more than others. For example: List everything that is on your mind right now. Or, write about the one thing you can control. Or, what are you feeling, and where is it located in your body? Or, what are your goals for this day, week and month?

For me, it felt great to let old journals go the way of common rubbish. The new process will be about reducing cognitive load and clutter: We’ll see how it goes.