Health & body · 2017
Before bed, does writing about upcoming tasks help you fall asleep faster than writing about completed tasks?
Yes—in this sleep-laboratory experiment, people who wrote about upcoming tasks fell asleep faster than those who wrote about completed tasks. The study involved 57 healthy adults aged 18–30 who wrote for five minutes before bed; it does not establish whether the benefit lasts or carries over to sleeping at home.
Details
Researchers tested whether the time focus of bedtime writing mattered: looking ahead to unfinished tasks or looking back at completed ones. They randomly assigned participants to spend five minutes listing tasks they needed to remember over the next few days or tasks they had completed over the previous few days. Sleep was then monitored overnight in a controlled laboratory.
The upcoming-task group fell asleep faster than the completed-task group. Within the upcoming-task group, more specific lists were associated with falling asleep sooner; for completed-task lists, the trend went in the opposite direction. That association does not show that adding more detail itself caused faster sleep.
The abstract does not report how many minutes faster participants fell asleep. It also describes no comparison with doing no writing, so the finding supports upcoming-task writing over completed-task writing—not necessarily over skipping writing altogether. Its scope is healthy young adults in a laboratory, rather than people with insomnia or repeated use at home.
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