Lying Awake Planning Tomorrow? Try a Five-Minute To-Do List

Sunday night is when it usually starts. The lights are off, the weekend is gone, and your head begins working through Monday: the email you still haven’t answered, the form for your daughter’s school trip that was due on Friday. None of it can be dealt with from bed. That doesn’t stop you going over it, and each time round you feel a little more awake.

A sleep-lab study published in 2018 points to a cheap way to interrupt this: spend five minutes before lights out writing down what you still have to do. It won’t fix insomnia, and it rests on one small study. It is easy to try tonight, though, and it fits well with what psychologists have learned about why unfinished tasks keep nagging at us.

What Happened in the Sleep Lab

Michael Scullin and his colleagues brought 57 healthy young adults into a sleep laboratory, where electrodes recorded the moment each person actually fell asleep instead of relying on their own estimate. Before lights out, everyone wrote for five minutes. One group wrote a to-do list for the next few days. The other wrote about tasks they had already completed.

You could reasonably have expected a list of unfinished jobs to stir people up. Instead, the to-do group fell asleep about nine minutes faster on average. Among the list-writers, the more specific the list, the faster they dropped off.

Scullin, M.K., Krueger, M.L., Ballard, H.K., Pruett, N. & Bliwise, D.L. (2018). “The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: A polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(1), 139-146.

Nine minutes may not sound like much, but if you usually lie there for half an hour, it is a noticeable share of the wait. Keep the limits in mind. These were healthy young people with no sleep complaints, spending a night in an unfamiliar room with wires attached to their heads. Whether the same trick helps people with real insomnia is a question this study didn’t test.

Why Writing a Plan Seems to Help

The likely explanation comes from research on unfinished goals. In a series of experiments, E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that a goal left hanging keeps sending thoughts about it into your head, uninvited. When people made a specific plan for that goal, the intrusive thoughts dropped off, even though they hadn’t done any of the actual work.

Masicampo, E.J. & Baumeister, R.F. (2011). “Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667-683.

That lines up with the specificity finding. “Call the garage at nine about the brakes” is something your mind can put down for the night. “Sort out the car” leaves the job open, so it probably keeps coming back.

Bedtime worry is worth taking seriously because it tends to feed itself. In Allison Harvey’s cognitive model of insomnia, worrying and going over things in bed raises arousal, and an anxious mind starts watching for signs that sleep isn’t coming, such as the time on the clock or how few hours are left before the alarm. Noticing those signs makes the worry worse. Clearing tomorrow’s tasks out of your head before you lie down removes one of the easiest places for that loop to start.

Harvey, A.G. (2002). “A cognitive model of insomnia.” Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40(8), 869-893.

How to Try It Tonight

Give it five minutes before bed, sitting up at a table or on the sofa rather than with your head already on the pillow. Paper is fine. A notes app works too, as long as you put the phone down afterwards instead of letting it pull you into your inbox. Cover the next few days, not only tomorrow, and make each item specific enough that you’d know how to start it.

If something new surfaces once you’re in bed, add it to the list and lie back down. Sunday is a good night to begin, since that’s when the week ahead tends to feel biggest. If you’ve had trouble sleeping on three or more nights a week for three months or longer, a list probably won’t be enough. The recommended first treatment for that kind of insomnia is cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), and it’s worth raising with your doctor.

Lamplit’s free journal already has a small version of this. One of its three daily prompts, “Tomorrow’s intention”, asks what you’ll do tomorrow to keep growing, and gives you up to 300 characters. It’s aimed at whatever you’re working to improve, but nothing stops you using it in the evening for the one task most likely to keep you awake, written as the first concrete step. Then close the app.

In the morning, log the night in the sleep tracker with your bed time, wake time and a quality rating, and add the late-screen tag if the phone came to bed with you. The log won’t time how long you lay awake, but after a couple of weeks you can scroll back through your sleep history and see whether the nights you wrote something down were rated any better.

Open the journal in Lamplit and write down tomorrow’s first step. It’s free.