A new bedtime to-do list, courtesy of sleep researchers at Baylor University:
1. Write a to-do list before bed.
2. Go to sleep.
3. Sleep better than all the non-list-writing people you meet tomorrow.
It sounds simple, but there's evidence that it just might work. According to a small study published in the January issue of Journal of Experimental Psychology, participants who took 5 minutes to write out a to-do list before bed fell asleep more quickly than participants who wrote about tasks they had already completed. The key, according to researchers, is in mentally "offloading" responsibilities before bedtime, theoretically freeing the mind for sound sleeping. [How to Sleep Better]
"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," lead author Michael Scullin, director of Baylor's Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory, said in a statement. "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."
To test this hypothesis, researchers invited 57 men and women between ages 18 and 30 to spend one weeknight in a controlled sleep lab. The rules were simple: lights out at 10:30 p.m., and no technology, homework or other distractions allowed.
Five minutes before bedtime, each participant was instructed to complete a short writing exercise. Half of the participants wrote about anything they needed to remember to do in the upcoming days, while the other half wrote about tasks they had completed during the previous days. When the exercise was done, participants tucked in for bed. Researchers measured each participant's brain activity overnight using a technique called polysomnography, which records eye movement, muscle activity and other biological changes.