“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.
Here’s how to create a list that quiets your mind rather than revving it up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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