How to stop thinking at night, starting with a five-minute list

To stop thinking at night, write tomorrow's tasks, and the next few days' tasks, on paper for five minutes before you get into bed. In a 2018 sleep-lab study, people who did this fell asleep in 15.82 minutes on average, against 25.09 for people who listed tasks they had already finished.

That is a stronger starting point than telling yourself to stop. Ordering a thought to leave is not a method: you are lying in the dark running a loop of tomorrow's tasks, and the order gives the loop nothing to do. A list is a method, and one lab has tested it.

This post gives the study's design, its numbers and its limits, then a way to run the list tonight, and a plain line on when the problem needs a doctor.

What the 2018 study tested

Scullin and colleagues ran the experiment at Baylor University and published it in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. The Baylor release and the accepted manuscript give the same design.

There were 57 university students. They came to a sleep lab, and a polysomnography recording tracked brain activity overnight. Before lights out, each student spent five minutes writing. One group wrote a to-do list for the next few days. The other group wrote a list of activities they had already completed.

Note what the comparison group did. They also wrote for five minutes. The study compared two kinds of writing, so it does not compare a list with no writing at all.

What it found

In the accepted manuscript, mean sleep onset latency, the time from lights out to sleep, was 15.82 minutes for the to-do group (28 students) and 25.09 minutes for the completed-list group (29 students). The paper reports this in its Table 1 as t(55) = 2.32, p = .02, d = .63. That is about nine minutes.

The paper also reports that total sleep time, awakenings and sleep efficiency did not differ significantly between the groups. The lab result is about how fast sleep started, and nothing else the recording measured differed significantly.

The comparison was a list of finished tasks, not no writing at all.

What it cannot show

State the limits as plainly as the result.

• Healthy young adults. The paper calls them healthy adults aged 18 to 30. The Baylor release says it is unknown whether the finding carries over to patients with insomnia.
• A lab-sized sample. The release calls the sample appropriate for a lab study and says a larger study would be of value.
• One lab night. The paper reports the first night in the lab only. Whether lists work on later nights is not something it shows.
• Worry was not measured. The authors did not measure worry, so why the list worked is untested. "It empties your head" is a guess, not a finding.

Read the result as a specific, small, well-built hint. It is not a promise that a list will work for you tonight.

How to run it tonight

You need paper, a pen and a timer. Do it before you get into bed, not after, so the bed stays a place for lying down.

1. Set the timer for five minutes.
2. Write tomorrow's tasks, then the tasks you expect over the next few days. Include the small ones.
3. Use all five minutes, as the study's writers were told to. In the same study, to-do writers who listed more items tended to fall asleep faster; the authors treat that correlation as secondary, so read it as a hint. If you run dry, keep going.
4. When the timer ends, stop. Fold the paper and leave it by the door or on your desk.

Here is an illustrative list (invented, not from the study):

• Reply to the vendor about the invoice
• Book the dentist
• Print the boarding pass for Thursday
• Ask about the slide deck before the Friday meeting
• Buy printer paper

Write the specific item, not the worry about it. "Book the dentist" is a task you can finish. "Everything is behind" is not, so leave it off the page.

The tradeoff is time and paper. Five minutes of writing is five minutes you could spend in bed, and a phone note is easier to reach than a pen. We would still use paper: a phone in your hand at 11 PM brings the inbox with it. The study used writing, and this post cannot say whether typing does the same.

If the list is done and the loop continues

Sometimes the list is finished and your head keeps going. The study tested a list and nothing else, so what follows is our view, not a finding: hand your attention a dull, low-stakes job. A familiar audiobook is one such job. So is a podcast that goes nowhere.

Ho-Hum is one option. It is an iPhone app for adults that writes a boring bedtime story that begins with the dull parts of your day, and reads it aloud. An AI writer and an AI voice make the story, so expect it to be uneventful and sometimes odd. No study has tested Ho-Hum, and this post does not claim it quiets anything. If you already own a book you know by heart, that is a good choice too.

When this is not enough

A list is a small, cheap step for a busy mind. It is not a treatment for a sleep problem.

The RACGP guidance page from Australia's college of general practitioners covers cognitive behavioural therapy for chronic insomnia, known as CBT-I. If your sleep has been poor for months, a doctor is the right call, and CBT-I is the kind of care to ask about.

Questions people ask

A dull story, if the list is done

Ho-Hum writes a boring bedtime story that begins with the dull parts of your day, and reads it aloud. Your day goes to an AI writer and a voice service, to be written and read aloud. Ho-Hum is coming to iPhone.