A Bedtime To-Do List for Easier Sleep

You turn out the light and your mind switches on: the email you forgot, tomorrow’s schedule, the errand you keep putting off. A small experiment suggests a simple trick that costs nothing. Write it down. This is general education, not medical advice.

The experiment

In 2018, Michael Scullin and colleagues at Baylor University published a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. They invited 57 healthy adults aged 18 to 30 to a sleep lab and asked them to spend five minutes before bed writing. Half wrote a to-do list of what they needed to do over the next few days. The other half wrote about what they had already done that day and over the last few days.

• People who wrote the to-do list fell asleep in about 15 minutes on average.
• People who wrote about completed tasks took about 25 minutes, roughly ten minutes longer.
• The more specific the to-do list, the faster the participants tended to fall asleep.

Why it might work

Unfinished tasks tend to keep circling in the mind. Putting them on paper may signal that they are safely stored, so the brain can let go. It is an appealing idea, though the study did not test it directly.

Keeping it in proportion

• It was a small study. The participants were young, healthy and slept in a lab for a short time.
• There was no group that did nothing. The comparison was between two writing tasks, so it shows to-do lists were better than recalling the day, not that they beat a normal night.
• It is not a treatment for insomnia. If you struggle with sleep for weeks, talk with a healthcare professional.

Trying it yourself

• Write for about five minutes in the hour before bed.
• Be specific. Note what, and when, you plan to do it, as in our guide to if-then plans.
• Use paper if you can. A screen at bedtime can work against sleep, as our look at screens before bed explains.
• Pair it with good sleep habits. See our guide to sleep basics and the calming practices in breathing exercises for stress.

If you like writing things down, your free private journal on Weight Wire is a place to do it. Disclosure: it is our tool, and the research above did not study it.

Sources

• Scullin MK, Krueger ML, Ballard HK, Pruett N, Bliwise DL. The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: a polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2018 (figures from university and press summaries).