There’s plenty of advice out there for how to get a good night’s sleep, from avoiding looking at your phone before bed to consuming less caffeine.
But if you’ve tried all of that, and your nights are still restless, then the answer to your problems could be writing a to-do list.
According to a new study by neuroscientists, listing just 10 tasks you need to accomplish over the next few days can help you fall asleep 15 minutes faster.
This is because writing a to-do list helps ease anxiety and stress, and manages your feelings about having unfinished work. Without the list, brain activity can be triggered by worrying about everything that needs to get done, which can mean it’s harder to fall asleep.
Within the experiment, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57 people were asked to write either a list of activities they had already done, or a to-do list of tasks they needed to remember to complete over the next few days, just before bed. The two groups stayed in the laboratory for four nights where their sleep was monitored using electrodes to analyse their brain activity.
The to-do list group were found to fall asleep on average nine minutes more quickly than those asked to write about completed tasks. Those who wrote detailed to-do lists, however, fell asleep 15 minutes quicker than everyone else.
It is thought that the writing down of things that need to be done is an offloading process and reduces stress.
‘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,’ the study’s lead author, Dr Michael Scullin, from Baylor University in Texas, told Mail Online.
‘Most people just cycle through their to-do lists in their heads, and so we wanted to explore whether the act of writing them down could counteract night-time difficulties with falling asleep.’
This trick may come in very handy as almost half of people in Britain say stress or worry keeps them awake at night – 54% of women and 40% of men.
‘Writing that you have to return a call to Susan, pick up groceries on the way home, get milk or petrol because you are going to be driving, this specificity helps to offload all those things unconsciously ruminating around in your head,’ Dr Scullin said.
Why not give it a go?
