How I Cleared My Mental Fog Using a Pencil and the Back of a Gas Bill

Finally, a cognitive offloading system rooted in the ancient wisdom of the South Wales Valleys, optimised for the modern overwhelmed mind, and available in three tiers.

Apparently, I have been living with cognitive overload for sixty-three years.

I didn't know that's what it was called. I thought I was just a bit busy. I had things to remember, jobs to do, shopping to fetch, and a head full of noise that wouldn't quiet down.

Then I discovered the Brain Dump.

Not immediately.

First I had to be told that what I was experiencing had a name.

That the constant low-level mental chatter, the half-remembered tasks, the 3am "did I ring the doctor" panic, was a recognised condition called Cognitive Load Syndrome, and that it was epidemic, and that it was making me less productive, less present, and less able to show up as my best self.

I learned this from a beige PDF I found on Etsy for $7.

It changed my life.

Mostly it changed my life by making me realise I had been doing the right thing for sixty three years without knowing it was a thing.

The Ancient Wisdom

In the South Wales Valleys, we have always known something that the productivity industry is only now beginning to monetise.

When your head is full, you write it down.

My mother did it on the back of envelopes.

Her mother did it on whatever was nearby.

My father, a man of few words and considerable practicality, kept a stub of pencil behind his ear at all times for this precise purpose.

He did not call it a Brain Dump.

He called it "making a list."

He did not have a system. He did not have a framework. He did not have a Founder's Circle membership with an enamel pin and a signed waiver.

He had a pencil and something to write on and a brain that worked perfectly well once you got the contents out of it and onto paper.

This is the Ancient Welsh Brain Dump Protocol™.

I have spent sixty three years doing it wrong without knowing it was right.

The Science

When you write something down, your brain stops holding onto it.

This is not ancient wisdom. It is not proprietary. It is how memory works. The act of externalising a thought signals to your working memory that the information has been safely stored and can be released. The mental chatter quiets. The 3 am panic subsides.

Researchers have known this for decades. A 2019 paper in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Offloading Infrastructure confirmed that writing things down makes you feel better about the things you have written down.

David Allen built an entire industry on it in 2001.

The Etsy template industry built another industry on top of that industry.

It's in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), in all likelihood. Gareth hasn't checked.

None of them invented the pencil.

The pencil was invented in 1565 in Borrowdale, Cumbria, which is not Wales but is close enough for our purposes.

The gas bill has been available since the introduction of domestic gas supply.

Together, they constitute a complete cognitive offloading system requiring no subscription, no beige background, and no illustrated corners.

Big Stationery doesn't want you to know this.

The Protocol

The Ancient Welsh Brain Dump Protocol™ has been refined over generations of Valley pragmatism and requires the following equipment:

Something to write with. A pencil is traditional. A biro works. The stub from behind your ear is ideal.

Something to write on. The back of a gas bill is the ancestral choice. An envelope. A napkin. The margin of a newspaper. A Post-it note if you're feeling flush.

That's it.

That's the protocol.

You write down what's in your head. All of it. Without filtering, without prioritising, without colour coding or categorising or assigning to quadrants. You write it down and your brain lets go of it.

You may never look at the list again. This is fine. The looking was never the point.

Gareth has been doing this since 1987. He wrote "ring dentist, buy milk, check the boiler" on the back of a TV licence reminder and felt immediately better. He did not ring the dentist. He bought the milk. The boiler was fine. The note is still in the kitchen drawer under the takeaway menus.

He considers this a success.

The Tiers

For those who require more structure, the Ancient Welsh Brain Dump Protocol™ is now available in three tiers.

Basic - £47.99

The PDF guide to finding a pencil. Includes a illustrated map of common pencil locations (kitchen drawer, behind the ear, bottom of a coat pocket, the cup on the desk that also contains three dried-out biros and a USB stick of unknown origin).

A downloadable checklist confirming that you have found the pencil.

A second downloadable checklist for writing the first checklist on.

Pro - £97.99

Everything in Basic, plus the Cognitive Offload Framework™, a proprietary system for determining which thoughts to write down first. (Write down whatever comes into your head. This is the framework.)

Includes the bonus Pencil Sharpening Protocol™ (sharpen the pencil) and the Advanced Surface Selection Guide™ (write on something flat).

Access to the private Facebook group where members share photographs of their gas bills and discuss whether the back is better than the front.

Founder's Circle - £247.99

Everything in Pro, plus a signed waiver confirming that you understand the Ancient Welsh Brain Dump Protocol™ is not a medical intervention and that Gareth accepts no responsibility for anything you write down or subsequently forget to do.

An enamel pin depicting a pencil stub on a field of beige.

A Post-it note personally handled by Gareth, blank, suitable for immediate deployment.

A thirty minute video call with Gareth during which he will watch you write a list and confirm you are doing it correctly. (You are doing it correctly.)

Testimonials

"I bought the Basic tier. The PDF told me to look in the kitchen drawer. The pencil was there. I wrote down seven things. I remembered all of them before I even finished writing. I'm not sure what I paid for but the enamel pin is lovely." - Gareth, 54, Cognitively Offloaded

"I've been doing the Brain Dump every morning for three weeks. I write my list, feel immediately better, and then lose the list. My husband says I could just remember the things. I've signed up for the Pro tier." - Imogen, 44, Systematised

"I joined the Facebook group. Everyone is posting photographs of their gas bills. One woman in Swansea writes her list on the back of her electricity bill for variety. There is some debate about whether this constitutes a different protocol. The discussion has forty seven comments." - Cordelia, 41, Engaged

"I did the Founder's Circle call with Gareth. He watched me write a list. He said I was holding the pencil correctly. I asked if there was an advanced module. He said no. I felt the Founder's Circle fee may have been optimistic in retrospect. The Post-it note is on my monitor. It says 'ring dentist.' I have not rung the dentist." - Gerald, 67, Correctly Postured

The Disclaimer

The Ancient Welsh Brain Dump Protocol™ has not been evaluated by any medical, psychological, or stationery body.

Results may vary. Gareth's results are not typical, largely because Gareth has been doing this since 1987 and has refined his technique to a degree most newcomers will not immediately achieve.

The enamel pin is not a medical device.

Writing things down will not cure you of anything. It will, however, mean you remember to buy milk more often than you currently do, which is something.

Big Stationery would prefer you purchased a premium notebook with dotted pages and a ribbon marker. The Ancient Welsh Brain Dump Protocol works equally well on the back of a pizza box.

Do not attempt the Founder's Circle protocol without first locating a pencil.

The pencil is in the kitchen drawer.

It has always been in the kitchen drawer.

The Ancient Welsh Brain Dump Protocol™ is part of the Grumpy Welsh Man Wellness Series, which also covers the Ancient Welsh Hydration Protocol™ (drink water when you're thirsty), the Traditional Valley Sleep System™ (go to bed, close your eyes), and the Ancestral Walking Framework™ (go outside, move your legs). All available in three tiers. Gareth endorses none of them but has somehow ended up in all of them.

First published on GrumpyWelshman.com

How a discredited 1930s cancer treatment became a five-star Amazon category

Steve the Hypothetical Gerbil's summary, for those in a hurry: A German doctor made coffee enemas central to a 1930s alternative cancer regimen. It didn't work, and cancer organisations still warn it can be dangerous. Nearly a century later, Amazon sells the kit with next-day delivery, and the reviews are the most honest writing on the internet.

I was looking for coffee.

The kind you drink, from a cup, using your mouth, like every human being who has ever wanted to be awake.

The algorithm had other ideas.

Somewhere between the search bar and the checkout page, Amazon decided I might also enjoy "Organic Enema Coffee", medium grind, Fair Trade, specifically calibrated, the listing assured me, to avoid clogging the equipment.

My what?

I clicked.

I should not have clicked.

What followed was several hours discovering that the practice of administering coffee via the rectum rather than the mouth is not a fringe curiosity confined to one seller with a name like HerbalDetox4U.

It is a mature, competitive marketplace with tiered pricing, brand loyalty, and a customer review section that deserves its own place in the literary canon.

The doctor who made it famous

The story begins with Max Gerson, a German-American physician who developed what became known as Gerson therapy in the early twentieth century. Gerson believed cancer was the result of the body accumulating toxins, and that the cure lay in a strict organic vegan diet, enormous quantities of fresh juice, and coffee enemas administered several times a day.

The theory was that caffeine, absorbed through the colon wall, would stimulate bile production in the liver and flush toxins from the system.

It is worth pausing here to give Gerson his due. He was working in an era before modern oncology existed in any recognisable form, when doctors were genuinely groping in the dark for anything that might work against cancer.

Trying something is not, in itself, a crime.

The crime is what happened next: the theory never cleared a single controlled clinical trial. In 1947, both the National Cancer Institute and the New York County Medical Society reviewed the case files and found no evidence it did anything. The American Cancer Society has since described the regimen as potentially very harmful. The National Cancer Institute's own records link coffee enemas to documented deaths from septicaemia and severe electrolyte imbalance, the latter capable of triggering cardiac arrest.

This is not a controversial fringe opinion. It is the settled, boring position of reputable cancer bodies that have looked at it.

And yet the therapy persisted. Not because the evidence supported it, but because the story supported it.

Gerson offered something that conventional oncology, with its brutal surgeries and punishing chemotherapies, could not: a narrative where the patient, not the doctor, was in control. Where cancer was not a random genetic catastrophe but the predictable result of a lifetime of accumulated "toxins", and where the cure was not poison but purity.

It was a story of personal agency, dietary virtue, and moral redemption dressed in medical language. That story, once told, proved remarkably difficult to kill with facts.

The Gerson Institute is still operating clinics, mostly in jurisdictions with looser rules than the country next door. But the coffee enema itself has long since escaped its original cancer-cure packaging.

Somewhere along the way, exactly when is hard to pin down, the enema detached from cancer entirely. By the time the wellness industry hit its stride in the 1990s, it had reattached itself to something far more commercially viable: the vague, marketable, infinitely renewable sense that your body is full of something it shouldn't be.

The target audience was no longer the terminally ill, but the merely anxious.

And anxiety, unlike cancer, never goes into remission.

The marketplace

What Amazon has done is take a discredited medical theory from the 1930s, strip it of its original context, and give it a shopping cart.

The entry point is a €15 silicone bulb that resembles nothing so much as a turkey baster. From there the range extends upward to stainless steel bucket systems with medical-grade tubing and, in the more serious kits, a one-way valve engineered specifically to prevent what the listing delicately calls "backflow."

But the equipment is only the beginning. The most telling detail is the coffee itself.

One brand, trading under the name IT'S GERSON GOOD, sells a 0.5kg bag of medium grind for €74.95, which according to the Amazon Ad works out to €165.24 per kilo.

For context, that is roughly ten times the price of a perfectly drinkable specialty roast from a roaster who does not, in their marketing copy, use the word "detoxifying" as a selling point for something that will never touch your taste buds.

You are not paying for the beans. You are paying for the permission structure.

The brand name is not a description; it is a badge, a signal to other believers that you are in the know. At that price, the coffee is almost incidental. What you are buying is the idea that you are doing something serious, something that requires its own proprietary grind, its own brand.

The colon is just the delivery mechanism.

The real target is the wallet.

And then there is the valve.

I want to dwell on that valve for a moment, because it tells you everything about how seriously this business takes itself. Someone, somewhere, sat down and designed an engineering solution to a problem that only exists because of the practice itself.

That is not a fringe hobbyist tinkering in a shed. That is a supply chain, a manufacturing spec, and presumably a quality control process.

Capitalism does not build a one-way valve for a niche nobody is paying for.

The valve prevents backflow; the price prevents second-guessing. Together, they form the skeleton of an industry that has no scientific justification but impeccable commercial logic.

The reviews

The customer reviews are where this story stops being about pseudoscience and starts being about people, which is where it gets interesting.

There is the true believer, convinced the practice has resolved ailments with no plausible connection to bowel function, migraines, chronic fatigue, skin conditions, writing with the sincerity of someone who has found meaning and is not going to let a lack of mechanism get in the way of it.

There is the seasoned practitioner, several years into the habit, whose one-star deduction is not for the coffee but for a poorly placed hose clamp, the kind of specific, technical complaint that only comes from repetition. This is a person with a system, and I found myself oddly moved by the competence on display, even while being unsettled by what the competence was for.

There is the enthusiast who reports repurposing the bulb for "automotive purposes" after modification, a review I have chosen not to think about further, and will not be helping you think about either.

And then there is the reviewer who wrote, without embellishment, that it felt good "in his butt" and that others should try it.

No toxins, no liver, no theory. Just a direct, unashamed statement of preference.

Of all the voices in that review section, that one felt like the only entirely honest one.

What this is actually about

I have spent enough time around human beings to know that people do things to their bodies that horrify onlookers and make perfect sense to them, so I am not going to pretend I'm shocked that coffee enemas have a fan base.

People are allowed to do what they like with their own colons. That was never the interesting part of this story.

The interesting part is the machinery around it.

Watch how it works: a theory with no scientific support, formally rejected by serious bodies that have examined it, and linked to documented deaths, is decoupled from its original life-or-death context and rebranded as a lifestyle choice.

The cancer patient is replaced by the wellness consumer.

The clinic is replaced by the Amazon listing.

The doctor's prescription is replaced by the five-star review.

The need is replaced by the want.

And suddenly, what was once a desperate gamble by the dying becomes a Tuesday afternoon ritual for the mildly anxious, complete with next-day delivery and a four-and-a-half-star average rating.

Nobody selling the kit needs you to believe in the Gerson protocol specifically.

They don't need you to believe in cancer, or toxins, or the liver, or even coffee.

They only need the algorithm to notice you searched for something warm and caffeinated, and a review section persuasive enough to do the rest.

Coffee, taken the ordinary way, has done this job perfectly well for several centuries.

It goes in the top, it comes out the bottom, in that order, and no valve is required to stop it changing its mind halfway through.

First published on JustRodents.com

Because the business model is working exactly as intended.

Facebook recently showed me an ad for a device that claims to reverse Type 2 diabetes using a copper patch applied to the wrist.

Then one for a supplement that dissolves kidney stones while you sleep.

Then one for a shoulder massager endorsed by a doctor who does not appear to exist.

Then a spinal stenosis cure that has been on sale “tonight only” for the past several months.

I know about these products because I have been writing about them.

I know about them because Facebook keeps showing them to me.

I know about them because Facebook’s advertising system approved them, targeted them at people likely to be suffering from the relevant condition, and served them at scale to people who were frightened, in pain, and looking for help.

This is not an accident.

This is the product.

The Mission

“Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

That was one of Facebook’s favourite public lines. It appeared in annual reports, investor presentations, and the kind of carefully worded statements that get read out at parliamentary hearings by people who have been coached to look concerned without accidentally admitting anything useful.

It does not appear to be the mission of the ad approval system.

The ad approval system has a different question.

Will this ad generate clicks?

If the answer is yes, the ad runs.

The mission statement is aspirational.

The algorithm is operational.

These are not the same document, and only one of them runs the platform.

The Technology

Facebook possesses sophisticated content moderation tools.

Artificial intelligence.

Human reviewers.

Automated flagging systems.

Entire departments dedicated to Trust and Safety.

These tools are real.

They are also selectively applied.

Hate speech is removed, eventually.

Misinformation is labelled, sometimes.

An ad claiming that a herbal patch dissolves kidney stones while you sleep can still be approved and shown to people looking for medical help.

The reason is not simply technical limitation.

It is financial incentive.

Hate speech generates outrage. Outrage generates bad press. Bad press affects the share price.

The kidney stone patch generates revenue.

Revenue affects the share price in the other direction.

The system understands this distinction perfectly.

It has been designed to understand it.

The Claims

“Most violating content is removed before users report it.”

The statistic is always precise.

The methodology is always less clear.

What counts as violating content is defined by the platform.

What counts as removal is defined by the platform.

What counts as success is also defined by the platform.

The number may be real.

Its meaning is negotiable.

“We are committed to fighting misinformation.”

The commitment is stated regularly. The enforcement is inconsistent daily.

Political misinformation is visible, noisy, and embarrassing.

Health misinformation is profitable, targetable, and often hidden in the advertising system, where it can be shown directly to the people most likely to respond.

The distinction is not ethical.

It is financial.

“We protect our community.”

The community is protected from some things.

It is not reliably protected from an ad claiming that dissolving a tablet under your tongue each morning will eliminate visceral fat without diet or exercise.

That ad is not a failure of the system.

That ad is the system working.

The Enforcement Loop

An ad is submitted.

It claims that a weight loss patch worn on the wrist for eight hours dissolves vast amounts of excess body weight in a few weeks.

This claim violates the Advertising Policies.

The Advertising Policies prohibit claims that are false, misleading, or medically unsubstantiated.

The ad is approved.

A user reports it.

Facebook reviews it.

Facebook finds no violation.

The user reports it again.

Facebook finds no violation again.

After enough reports, the ad may eventually be removed.

The advertiser creates a new ad.

New brand name.

New logo.

New video with different background music.

Same patch.

Same claim.

The new ad is approved.

This is not a bug.

It is the feature.

The reporting system exists to give users the impression of recourse.

The approval system exists to give advertisers a reliable pipeline.

Both are functioning exactly as designed.

I have reported ads on Facebook.

Most people who use the platform regularly have reported ads on Facebook.

The experience is consistent: you report, Facebook reviews, Facebook finds no violation, the ad continues running, and eventually you stop reporting because nothing changes and you have other things to do.

That attrition is also part of the design.

The Economics

Meta’s revenue is not a side issue here.

Advertising is the machine.

Reuters reported, based on internal Meta documents, that the company had projected roughly 10 percent of its 2024 revenue, about $16 billion, would come from ads for scams and banned goods.

The same reporting said Meta earned about $7 billion annually from ads it considered high-risk for scams, and that users were exposed to an estimated 15 billion higher-risk scam ads every day.

Meta disputed the way the documents were interpreted, saying the estimates were rough and overly broad.

Even with that caveat, the direction of travel is not difficult to understand.

Weight loss supplements.

Miracle cures.

Financial opportunity schemes.

Crypto investments.

Affiliate marketing funnels.

Wellness devices that claim to decompress the vagus nerve, reset your core muscles, restore blood flow to suffocating shoulder tissues, or reverse chronic disease by attaching something vaguely metallic to your body.

These are not strange little accidents at the edge of the system.

They are part of the advertising sludge the system has learned to monetise.

Removing them properly would require defining misleading claims in a way that actually excluded misleading claims.

That definition would cost money.

The current definition does not cost money.

It is the product of careful legal, technical, and financial calculation.

And it is working

The Meta-Irony

Facebook claims to build community.

The community is the product.

Facebook claims to fight misinformation.

Misinformation generates engagement.

Engagement generates revenue.

Facebook claims to protect users.

The users are sold to the people they need protecting from.

This is not a contradiction.

It is the business model.

The mission statement exists to be quoted at hearings.

The algorithm exists to generate revenue.

The Community Standards document exists so that someone has something to point to when asked whether standards exist.

An ad promising impossible weight loss can be approved.

A public statement can say the platform is committed to safety.

Both of these things can be true simultaneously.

That is the trick.

What This Site Is About

The ads I have been writing about, the spinal stenosis cure, the fictional Italian orthopaedic surgeon, the copper patch, the vagus nerve collar, the face-lifting tape, and the rest, none of them would reach you without a platform willing to approve them, target them, and serve them to the people most likely to be vulnerable to them.

Facebook is not the only such platform.

But it is the largest, the most sophisticated, and the most practised at presenting this arrangement as something other than what it is.

The products I write about here are symptoms.

Facebook is the condition.

The patch is not the grift.

The pill is not the grift.

The platform that approves the ad, targets it at people likely to be interested in weight loss, pain relief, diabetes, kidney stones, or chronic illness, serves it at scale, and takes the money is the grift.

Understanding that distinction is the starting point for everything else on this site.

The Alternative

Report the ads by all means.

Reporting may remove a specific ad.

It may make you feel as if you have done something useful.

Occasionally, you may even have done something useful.

But reporting will not change the system, because the system is not broken.

The exit, as always, is free.

It has always been free.

Almost nobody takes it.

Author’s Note

Paul is 71, writes from the Italian Alps, and has been scrolling Facebook for material for longer than is good for any man’s blood pressure. He is not a medical professional, a tech journalist, or a platform policy expert.

He is, however, persistent.

The copper patch was not purchased for review.

The money was spent on espresso and sunflower hearts for his birdfeeder.

The birds, as always, delivered.

First Published on JustRodents.com

Gareth's been in a mood all week.

Turns out it started with a hosting bill.

Not his own, mind. He doesn't have a website. Gareth thinks websites are for people who've run out of pub to shout in. But he heard about someone switching platforms, and it set him off on one of his tangents, the kind that starts with "you know what really gets me" and ends forty minutes later with him accusing a cookie banner of moral cowardice.

Apparently someone had moved from a platform that wanted to squeeze money out of their audience to one that just let them publish words on a page, and Gareth treated this as evidence that civilisation might not be completely dead after all.

So here's Gareth, unedited, more or less.

They Don't Want Readers. They Want Leads.

"Right," he says, "so you go onto a website. Doesn't matter what for. Recipe. News story. Some bloke's opinion on lawnmowers. And before you've read a single word, there's a pop-up. Subscribe to our newsletter. Then a cookie banner the size of a shipping container. 'We value your privacy,' which is corporate for 'we are about to do something to your privacy and we need you to click a button so it's legally your fault.'"

He's not wrong.

He's rarely wrong, which is the annoying thing about Gareth.

"And here's what gets me. It's not even hidden any more. They say it. 'Convert your audience.' 'Optimise your funnel.' 'Capture leads.' You're not a reader. You're livestock. They're not writing for you, they're farming you."

The Swiss Army Knife Nobody Asked For

Gareth's next complaint is about tools that do everything, which he blames, somewhat unfairly, on WordPress, Amazon, his smart TV, and the self-checkout at the Co-op.

"Everything wants to be everything now. You want to write a blog post, you end up needing a plugin, three widgets, and a decision about whether you're building a 'brand.' You wanted a blade. They sold you a multi-tool with forty-seven attachments, thirty of which exist to track what you do with the other seventeen."

This is, Gareth insists, not really about software.

It's about a way of thinking that's eaten the internet whole: the idea that nothing exists unless it's growing, and nothing grows unless it's measured, and nothing gets measured without someone, somewhere, harvesting your attention like it's a crop.

"Engagement," he says, spitting the word out like it's gone off. "Everything's about engagement now. Not whether it's good. Not whether it's true. Whether it engages. You can engage someone by setting their house on fire, mind. Doesn't make it a good idea."

The Radical Act of Not Being a Pest

Here Gareth brightens slightly, which for Gareth means he stops shouting and starts merely muttering with intent.

"But here's the thing. People are getting tired of it. There's a whole lot of them now, quietly building websites that don't do any of that.

No tracking.

No pop-ups.

No 'sign up before you leave!'

No cookies, because they've got nothing to put in the cookie.

Just writing.

Just reading.

Revolutionary stuff, apparently, in 2026."

He's talking, without quite knowing the word for it, about what people call "enshittification." Platforms start out useful. Then they reorganise themselves to squeeze every last drop out of you, until using them feels like walking through a car park full of clamps.

"You know what the actual radical act is now?" Gareth asks, entirely rhetorically, because he's not going to let anyone else answer.

"Building something that doesn't immediately try to pick your pocket, raid your inbox, or rifle through your browser history.

No email.

No data.

No 'we value your privacy' while nicking it out of your back pocket.

Just here's a thing I wrote, read it if you like, off you go."

Gareth's Verdict

"They spent twenty years building an internet that wants to sell you something before you've finished the first sentence.

And now the biggest insult you can pay it is to build a page that just... doesn't.

No funnel.

No leads.

No growth hacking.

Just a bloke, typing, hoping someone reads it because they wanted to, not because a pop-up cornered them into it."

He pauses, looking vaguely proud of himself.

"Anyway. That's not a business model, is it?

That's just manners."

He pauses again, a beat of false modesty.

"...mind you, no one's ever paid me for my manners either."

No, Gareth. It isn't a business model.

It's just manners.

Shame there's so little of it left.

First Published on GrumpyWelshman.com