Improve your sleep with the pre-sleep task dump

It’s 10 pm and you are trying to get to sleep. But does your brain think it’s the ideal time to remind you to stock up on dishwashing liquid, to correct the error that you made on the sales chart for the presentation you’ll be delivering tomorrow, and to use up that broccoli for dinner tomorrow night because it’s looking so miserable and limp in the back of the fridge? You bet it does.

Or perhaps your brain thinks that 2 am is the optimal time to be solving the world’s problems. Mine definitely does. Sadly, I can also confidently say that the solutions I’m coming up with at 2 am are not going to help with anything (except keeping me awake).

Historically, a lot of psychological research into the difficulties people have falling asleep has focused on the impact of ruminating on past events – events that, ironically, we have no control over because they have already happened. However, researchers have also found that people have the greatest trouble falling asleep at the beginning of the work week, because they’re worrying about what lies ahead. So perhaps it’s the future keeping us up, and less so our past.

Associate Professor Michael K. Scullin from Baylor University was curious as to whether thinking about the future deliberately, before bed, could help people get to sleep more easily. So he invited a group of 57 people into a sleep lab to find out.

Before it was time for lights out, half the group were asked to spend 5 minutes writing a to-do list of tasks they needed to complete in the next few days, what is known as a future-focused list:

The other half of the group were given similar instructions, except they were asked to think about activities that had been completed that day and during the previous few days. A small, but important difference.

A problem with past research that has examined strategies to help people fall asleep faster is that it has relied on self-reporting, whereby participants estimate how long it took them to fall asleep. You can probably imagine that this data is full of errors. How on earth can you know exactly when you fell asleep? It’s like trying to pinpoint the exact time you were rendered unconscious by a magical spell cast by a wizard-in-training from Hogwarts.

Instead of self-reporting, Scullin hooked people up to a sleep monitor in the lab to obtain an overnight polysomnography recording, so researchers had an accurate read on how long it actually took people to fall asleep.

Scullin found that people who wrote their to-do list (as opposed to a to-done list, focusing on the past) fell asleep significantly faster. And in addition, those who included more specific details in their to-do list fell asleep more quickly.

The reason the intervention was so effective is that our minds are filled with countless thoughts that, if left unchecked, can spiral out of control and wreak havoc on a good night’s sleep. It’s akin to unleashing a pack of excitable Jack Russell puppies at the dog park, each with liver treats dangling from their tails. The result? A frenzy of adorable chaos (although in the case of your thoughts – not so adorable).

When I spoke to Scullin about his research, he explained to me, ‘There are so many people who tell me that they can feel really sleepy during the day, but the moment their head hits the pillow when they want to go to sleep, that’s when they feel more alert than ever.’

‘If you don’t do anything to combat it, then your mind’s just going to cycle through it,’ Scullin points out. ‘And at first glance, it seems like our brain is doing something bad to us. If you have an unfinished task, it stays at this heightened level of arousal. But really, our brain is doing us a favour because it’s like, “You did not finish this. We don’t want you to forget it.”’ So your very kind brain keeps you awake by continuing to remind you what you still need to sort out.

As our brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, they unfortunately didn’t anticipate the twenty-first century’s demands, where we could be working at any time of the day. For a lot of us, we never truly switch off. I know while I was working on this book, even when I wasn’t typing at my computer or conducting an interview or reading research papers, it was constantly in the back of my mind and would frequently pop into the front of my mind (almost always at inopportune times, such as when I wanted to sleep).

As an added benefit, when we write things down, we often move from rumination into solution mode. And the more specificity we can apply when writing down unfinished tasks or thoughts, the more at peace our brain will feel. And thus, the more likely it is that we will fall peacefully and easily to sleep with not a single Jack Russell puppy in sight.

Put it into action

1. 30 minutes–1 hour before bed, grab a pen and paper. (Please don’t grab your phone, as it’s too tempting to open up digital distractions that will suppress what’s on your mind, thereby defeating the purpose of this strategy).

2. Write down all the things that you didn’t finish today and tasks that you need to complete tomorrow or in the next few days. And remember: the more specific, the better. For example, instead of noting down ‘Create presentation for meeting’, you could instead write ‘1. Collate data from Report X, Y and Z; 2. Present the data in graphs or charts; 3. Insert the graphs/charts into a PowerPoint presentation; 4. Write commentary on the data.’

3. If some of your unfinished tasks involve thinking about solutions, feel free to write those down too.

4. While Scullin’s experiment asked people to spend 5 minutes on this task, don’t worry too much about how long it takes you. If you are done within 2 minutes, great! And if it takes you 20 minutes, that’s fine too.

5. Repeat nightly.

Today’s post is an extract from my new book The Health Habit (coming out on January 9, 2024). Pre-order your copy today and email your purchase receipt to preorder@inventium.com.au to get some special goodies including:

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