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Give Your Head a Break and Write Stuff Down

Give your head a break and write stuff down

December 2025

Give Your Head a Break

With the silly season upon us, many people are preoccupied with wrapping up work before the Christmas break, attending social events, purchasing gifts for various people, and navigating busy shopping centres or other crowded places. As such, it can be particularly worthwhile at this time of year to keep our minds calm and organised so that we don’t become overwhelmed.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a book that was relevant to this topic. It was called The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel Levitin. According to the author, one of the best ways to allow our cognitive processes to function optimally is to write stuff down, or find other ways to externalise what would otherwise be kept in our heads (e.g. by placing visual cues around us to trigger our memory). The author writes:   

“The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world. If we can remove some or all of the process of our brains and put it out into the physical world, we are less likely to make mistakes.”

Around the same time that I finished the book, I spoke to someone who’d just had a tarot reading but couldn’t remember many specifics afterwards. He said the reader was okay and she had covered his main topic of concern, but he hadn’t asked everything he wanted and didn’t write any questions beforehand (this relates to pitfall number one of the top 5 psychic reading pitfalls to avoid). He said he’d forgotten to jot down notes during the reading as well. So it was that large chunks of the session remained lost, seemingly vanished from his awareness forever.

Ironically, he had also relied on his brain rather than an external note or electronic reminder to remember the tarot appointment itself. He turned up at the right time but wrong date – only suspecting that something was amiss after seeing that the reader’s office was closed. Later, after getting the appointment mixed up a second time, he wrote down the booking details on his phone and finally attended on the correct day.

No, this person does not have a memory impairment that anyone’s aware of. He is a high-functioning individual with a busy schedule, and keeps his to-do list up to date for his job. He’s also not alone in the tendency to forget things that aren’t written down, including readings.

While doing intuitive consultations for people who’ve booked with me before, guidance will often come through which turns out to be a repeated message from an earlier session. Even if that message resonated with the person at the time, if it wasn’t recorded in some way then it usually ends up being forgotten and therefore never acted upon. By contrast, I’ve found that those who record their readings or write notes are more likely to apply the advice given.

Why Keep It In Your Head?

During my first year at high school, a French teacher told us a few things she wanted all students to take seriously. One was that skipping her class and truanting was unacceptable: “You may think it’s not personal, but I will take it personally…” The second was that buying cut flowers is a terrible waste, so we ought to get potted plants instead (how this was relevant to learning French, I’ll never know). The third point was to write information down if we want to remember it, whether it be a date for an event, a homework task, or a list of everyday to-do items.

I think of that third piece of advice whenever I’m at a restaurant and the server tries to remember customers’ orders with a simple nod of acknowledgment, hands clasped behind their back. At that point, my teacher’s message will echo in my mind: “Why keep it in your head when you can write it down?” If waitstaff rely on their brain to remember an order, I’ve noticed that more than half the time something will be missed or the wrong dish will be served, unless they come back to the table before the meal is prepared to clarify what exactly was requested (the implicit message being that it was already forgotten).

More recently, I heard the saying that “the bluntest pencil is better than the sharpest memory.” This is so true, and is not limited to serving the right meal, completing French homework, or recalling advice from a psychic reading. It’s relevant to our own thoughts and inspired ideas too.

Write Stuff Down

Earlier this year, I was encouraged by my older sister to start sharing videos about intuitive-related things, especially for people who prefer to watch content rather than read articles. The prospect of creating such videos did not thrill me. My first and last video was posted in July 2018, and only because it was a minimum requirement to enter Channel into a Publishizer contest. As a compromise, my sister asked me to come up with just five ideas that could potentially be used for a video, without committing to making one. I said yes.

The next morning, I went for a stroll at the beach with the intention to brainstorm. Five ideas popped up relatively quickly. As I turned to walk back along the sand, I thought it’d be nice to message my sister to share what I’d come up with. To my surprise, only one of the ideas remained with me. Where had the others gone? It was as though they’d been washed away in the ocean I’d just waded in.

I walked back to the water in the hope of remembering more, the way that retracing one’s steps can occasionally help to find a lost item. Those ideas did come back, but only after waiting a while and exerting a fair amount of mental effort. I resolved to take notes straight away in future, if any thoughts, intuitive guidance, or ideas should pop up in my head that I want to recall later.

In these final days before the end of 2025, we might be tempted to keep everything in our heads, rush, and multitask as much as possible. According to The Organized Mind, this may not be such a wise approach to getting things done.

Apparently, keeping our awareness on multiple things at once is not actually possible (we can switch our focus rapidly between tasks, which is an inefficient use of our brain’s resources, but we are unable to properly pay attention to more than one thing at a time). Also, contrary to what many of us assume, our productivity tends to soar and many parts of our brains work best – including our ability to problem solve – after periods of rest and daydreaming (this is consistent with the idea that sometimes we need to forget a problem to solve a problem).

So, why not give our heads a break from holding so much inside, and write stuff down instead? That may go a long way towards clearing our minds, staying aligned with our best selves and our intuition, and keeping our sanity even while the world seems crazy on the outside.

Wishing you a peaceful holiday period and a Happy New Year for 2026.


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