Lots of people have trouble nodding off to sleep at night. If you’re one of them, there’s a practice you can do that’s been proven to help.
It’s easy and it takes only a few minutes, but it could have a profound impact on the amount of shuteye you get every time you hit the sack.
It’s all about clearing your brain of all those items on your to-do-list.
Researchers did an experiment to find out about the impact of writing before bed. They wired up a group of healthy young adults so they could track their sleep habits.
Half of the participants wrote about their accomplishments from the past week. The other half wrote down a to-do list of things they wanted to accomplish the next day.
Then the participants went to sleep in the lab.
Researchers looked at their brainwaves and tracked all of their movements, as well as their blood-oxygen levels and heart rates.
They found that the participants who wrote down a to-do-list for the next day fell asleep faster. About nine minutes faster, to be exact.
And while that might not seem like a lot of time, the improvement is equivalent to what you might expect from some prescription sleeping pills.
So how does this work? Well, researchers aren’t 100 percent sure. But they think it might have something to do with the idea that “dumping” stressful thoughts from the brain allows it to rest.
When we have tasks to accomplish, our brain cycles through through them and tries to keep them in the forefront of our minds. If we don’t offload them into the real world, the brain has a tendency to bring them to mind when we have nothing else going on. Like when we’re trying to fall asleep.
So what are some takeaways from this fascinating new research? Here are a few of my prescriptions.
- Take five or ten minutes every night to write down a list of the things you need to do for the next day.
- Consider keeping a journal, as well. Previous studies have shown journaling to be therapeutic for things like grief and depression.
- Be sure to avoid smartphone and computer screens before bed. The light from these screens has been shown to interrupt sleep patterns.
- Keep your bed for sleeping only. This helps the brain associate the two together, and may help you nod off more quickly.
Now, researchers from the sleep study stress that we’re wise to take this information with a grain of salt since the tests took place in a lab setting.
It’s unclear if the results would be the same if someone jumped on an iPhone after writing their to-do list. But try taking a few minutes to write down tomorrow’s to-do list before bed tonight. It might help you wake up feeling better about tackling those tasks.
