Can't Sleep? Make a To-Do List

Having trouble getting to sleep?  Maybe do one of the things I hate most.  Make a to-do list.

A new study says that writing a “to-do” list at bedtime may aid in falling asleep, according to a Baylor University study, newswise.com reports. Research compared sleep patterns of participants who took five minutes to write down upcoming duties versus participants who chronicled completed activities.

“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,” says lead author Michael K. Scullin, Ph.D., director of Baylor’s Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory and assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience. “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 nighttime difficulties with falling asleep."

Think you're alone?  Other studies show that 40% of Americans have trouble dropping off.

“There are two schools of thought about this,” Scullin notes. “One is that writing about the future would lead to increased worry about unfinished tasks and delay sleep, while journalling about completed activities should not trigger worry. The alternative hypothesis is that writing a to-do list will ‘off-load’ those thoughts and reduce worry."

While anecdotal evidence exists that writing a bedtime list can help one fall asleep, the Baylor study used overnight polysomnography, the “gold standard” in sleep measurement, Scullin reports. With that method, researchers monitor electrical brain activity using electrodes.

Participants stayed in the lab on a week night to avoid weekend effects on bedtime and because on a weekday night, they probably had unfinished tasks to do the next day, Scullin points out. They were divided into two randomly selected groups and given five-minute writing assignments before retiring. One group was asked to write down everything they needed to remember to do the next day or over the next few days; the other to write about tasks completed during the previous few days.

Students were instructed they could go to bed at 10:30 p.m., and “we had them in a controlled environment,” Scullin states. “We absolutely restricted any technology, homework, etc. It was simply lights out after they got into bed.”

And guess what?  Those who penned to-do lists.  Well, you get the drift.

So the next time you can't quite escape into dreamland, think about those milk and eggs you need tomorrow.