A new study shows that if you can’t sleep, writing before bedtime
helps you fall asleep, but content matters.
Forty
percent of American adults have difficulty falling asleep at least a few times
each month. The most common reason is an inability to stop thinking.
A new
study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that you write in a journal
for five minutes before you go to bed. But critically, what helps most is not
writing about what you accomplished during the day, but writing your to-do list
for tomorrow.
In the
study of 57 young adults, psychological scientists and sleep researchers from
Baylor University and Emory University found that writing to-do lists
rather than writing about completed tasks helped people fall asleep an average
of nine minutes faster—in about 16 minutes versus 25 minutes. That’s comparable
to recent pharmaceutical clinical trials in which people taking sleep aids have
fallen asleep nine to ten minutes faster than usual, says lead author, Michael
Scullin, of the Baylor University Study.
Previous
research has connected writing and lessening of anxiety, and even writing and
better sleep, but Scullin’s research is the first study to use EEG to
determine exactly how much faster people fall asleep. And it’s the first study to
specify the content of the writing.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive monitoring method to record electrical
activity of the brain. Diagnostic applications generally focus either
event-related potentials (which investigates potential fluctuations linked to
an event like a stimulus or button press) or on spectral content of EEG (which analyses
the type of neural oscillations – brain waves – that can be observed).
The physical act of writing
something on paper (not on computer) tends to decrease cognitive activation
(thoughts) and reduce anxiety or anxious thinking. When you have a task that’s
unfinished, it’s on your mind a lot more than a task that you have
completed. Hence, it seems that unfinished tasks have a heightened level of
cognitive activation.
However, a to-do
list fluctuates – sometimes there is a lot to do tomorrow and sometimes there
is not much to do tomorrow. So maybe writing a to-do list is going to be most
effective on the nights when you have a lot of things to do the next day. Scullin
plans to study this more – i.e. to add this to his to-do list.
References
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom
(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest
Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The
Sudan Curse (2009).
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