Your Brain Needs a To-Do List, Not a Night Shift

There’s a particular kind of productivity that happens at 2am:

You remember the email you haven’t sent. The appointment you haven’t made. The thing you absolutely mustn’t forget tomorrow.

And then, having remembered it, your brain helpfully reminds you again (and again and again...)

Happily there may be a surprisingly simple answer: write it down before you go to bed.

In one small experiment, researchers asked people to spend five minutes writing either what they had already accomplished or what they needed to do over the next few days. Those writing a to-do list fell asleep faster. And (for me) interestingly, the more specific the list, the quicker they fell asleep.

The research is small, so don’t throw away your eye mask / white noise generator / melatonin tablets just yet. Instead, treat it as an experiment.

Tonight, spend five minutes writing down tomorrow’s unfinished business. Be specific. Then close the notebook. And give your brain permission to stop remembering them.

The original paper is Scullin et al., The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep (2018), in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. PubMed record and abstract