Want to Fall Asleep Faster? Write a To-Do List Before Bed
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Nothing deters sleep like a nighttime mental ambush. Just as your head hits the pillow, tomorrow’s to-do list crawls out from under the bed. You’re suddenly answering emails in your mind, crafting meeting agendas, and ruminating over the appointment you still need to schedule. Try this instead: Write down tomorrow’s to-do list tonight.
“One of the most common things I hear from patients with insomnia is, ‘I’m tired and exhausted, but my mind won’t shut off,’” says Dr. M. Taruj Ali, medical director of sleep medicine at Mary Washington Healthcare in Fredericksburg, Va. His patients often describe “a running mental inventory of unfinished tasks and what needs to happen tomorrow.” Spending a few minutes putting those thoughts on paper can give your brain permission to set them aside for the night.
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The timing matters, however: Don’t save the exercise for the moment you climb into bed. Experts recommend spending five to 10 minutes on it in the evening when you wrap up your structured tasks, like finishing work, chores, or whatever occupies the bulk of your time. “Getting those things out of your head and onto paper can reduce the pressure to keep thinking about them,” says Sari Chait, a clinical psychologist in Dedham, Mass. If a forgotten task pops into your head later, jot it on a notepad by your bed without turning it into a full-blown planning session.
Here’s how to create a list that quiets your mind rather than revving it up.
Why does writing a to-do list help?
There’s some evidence that the habit can improve sleep. In a small 2018 study, researchers randomly assigned 57 adults ages 18 to 30 to spend five minutes at bedtime either writing about tasks they needed to complete over the next few days or listing what they had accomplished during the previous few days. The to-do-list group fell asleep an average of nine minutes faster—and the more specific their lists were, the faster they drifted off.
That doesn’t mean a nightly list cures insomnia (or that reflecting on your accomplishments is a waste of time). The study included only healthy young adults who spent just one night in a sleep lab, and the researchers noted that they didn’t know whether the results would extend to people with insomnia. Still, it supports the idea that writing down unfinished tasks helps put them to rest.
This strategy is a form of cognitive offloading: using an external tool—in this case, a physical to-do list—to reduce how much information your brain has to keep track of. Stephanie High, a psychology doctoral candidate in Spokane, Wash., thinks of every unresolved task as a browser tab running in the background of your brain. “You have all these tabs, you have all these apps open, and there’s always some activity in the background,” she says. Even when you’re not actively looking at one, it’s using a little battery and memory. Writing the task down allows you to acknowledge that it requires your attention—and then set it aside. “I know that I need to put my attention on this,” she says. “But I don’t need to do it right this second.”
The benefits extend beyond bedtime. Planning tomorrow before you wrap up today creates a clear dividing line between work and the rest of your life, says Alexis Haselberger, a time-management and productivity coach in San Francisco. “It helps you disconnect, mentally, from work at the end of the day,” she says, rather than running through your responsibilities while you’re trying to talk to your kids, catch up with your partner, or watch TV.
There’s a morning payoff, too: “You have a list, so instead of spending 30 minutes getting into your day, you can just start.”
Start with a brain dump
If your current organizational system could most accurately be described as “chaos,” Chait suggests starting with one big brain dump: “Get it all out on paper, and then you can organize it from there,” she says. Once you’ve made that initial list, the daily exercise can be much smaller. At the end of each workday, choose three priorities for tomorrow.
Next, compare those priorities with your calendar. “If you have five meetings tomorrow, you’re probably not going to be able to make much headway on that big project,” Haselberger says. Move anything that won’t fit to another day. The goal is to make a plan you can reasonably stick to—not compile an unrealistic wish list.
Specificity matters, too. “‘Prep for meeting’ leaves the loop half-open because your mind still has to hold on to what ‘prep’ means,” High says. “‘Pull Q3 numbers, email the deck’ closes the loop, because there’s nothing it has to remember.” The same goes for the difference between “call Mom” and “call Mom about Thursday’s appointment.” Include enough detail that when you wake up, you’ll know exactly what you meant.
You don’t, however, need to produce a display-worthy masterpiece. “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” Chait says. “It doesn’t have to be pretty.” The sleep study used pen and paper, but it didn’t test whether handwriting works better than typing. Chait says a notebook or a notes app on your phone will do the trick; the best method is the one you’ll actually use.
Don’t turn it into another obligation
For some people, writing a to-do list can increase anxiety, especially if it morphs into a tedious planning session or an inventory of everything you failed to accomplish. If the page starts filling up with every unresolved problem in your life, it can feel less like a plan and more like self-flagellation. “You’ve just handed your nervous system a threat list right when you’re trying to wind down,” High says.
Keep the exercise brief, and focus on what you’ll do next rather than dwelling on what went wrong that day. The goal isn’t to plan out your entire life. It’s to spend five or 10 minutes capturing what needs to be remembered—and then disengage from planning until the next day.
If another task pops into your head later, write it down—but stop there. Chait keeps a pen and paper next to the bed for exactly that reason. You don’t want to spend time processing your feelings or actually acting on the thoughts, like writing an email,” she says. “You simply want to write down what the thought or to-do is.” Then put the paper away.
Finally, treat the habit like an experiment, not a new obligation. “It only works if it works for you,” High says. Try it for a few days, notice whether you feel calmer at night and more focused in the morning, and adjust how much detail you include. Otherwise, she points out, you risk opening “another tab of how I need to close more tabs”—when the whole point is to give your brain less to do.