Summary:
According to a new by scientists from Baylor and Emory University, they advise that you should write a journal 5 minutes before you sleep. The study shows that people who write simple to do lists before they sleep help them fall asleep 9 minutes faster. Previous research shows that writing has helped with anxiety and sleep. The reason that writing helps with falling asleep is that it helps with relieving some of the memories you had in the day rather than thinking about it. This helps reduce rumination and cognitive arousal and that makes you fall asleep faster. Writing a to do list before bed helps ease the tasks that was left uncompleted. People tend to remember the things they didn’t finish rather than the one’s they did. This causes a cognitive activation of the unfinished tasks that is hard to leave alone. The to-do lists however only have been tested once and only done on one night.
Reflection:
I think I would be willing to try out this method. It takes me a very long time to go to sleep, because I am always playing video games or watching YouTube videos. My eyes are always constantly watching the bright blue light from screens, so that might be the reason I am unable to sleep fast enough. It usually takes me 30 minutes for me to fall asleep after viewing on a screen. Although sometimes I would do my unfinished homework in my bed at midnight, and it does help me sleep faster at night. That’s probably because the only time where I’m not exposed to the blue light before I go to sleep. It was surprising that the study was only done in night, as there were only 57 participants that took part in the study. If there were more participants and if the study was conducted for a longer period of time, such as a couple of weeks, rather than one night, then maybe they may have produced a completely different result. I personally think there might be a better solution rather than writing a to do list, because sometimes I finish all the tasks for the day. This would probably mean that I wouldn’t have be thinking about anything and not have a heightened cognitive activation because I’m not. But even then, I still have a lot of trouble sleeping at night.
Citation:
Denworth, Lydia. “The Connection Between Writing and Sleep.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 12 Jan. 2018, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-waves/201801/the-connection-between-writing-and-sleep.
