Writing helped me sleep better. It can help you too.
When racing thoughts keep me awake at night, pen to paper put me to rest.
Too often have I hit the bed physically exhausted and eager to sleep, but unable to from my racing thoughts. Replaying the day’s events, projecting into the future and processing existential crises as they come, my mind is anything but ready to shut down. As someone who overthinks on the regular, I lie awake micro-analyzing more often than I should and definitely more than I’d like.
While in the past I’d just let my brain run through the gamut of thoughts — it’ll exhaust itself eventually right? — I recently came across a random online tidbit: if you can’t sleep, write out whatever thoughts are keeping you awake. Not necessarily a journal entry (although it could be), but more so a list of everything your head, essentially transferring the contents of your brain to an external hard drive.
I tried this hack for several months: my sleep has improved dramatically.
A 2017 study published by the American Psychological Association found that writing a to-do list before going to bed can help your quality of sleep. The more specific the list, the faster you can fall asleep. According to the study, “bedtime worry,” the anxious thoughts running through our heads prior to sleep, is a large factor in our inability to go to bed.
While writing the next day’s tasks (and other thoughts) doesn’t completely eliminate my sleeping troubles, it does help with offloading white noise and unnecessary worries about the future. Rather than churning through all of my thoughts in real time, exporting them elsewhere — somewhere more permanent than my short term memory— gives me some peace of mind.
Getting to know myself better over the past few years, I realized that I continue to stress about deadlines until the moment I press “submit.” This doesn’t bode well for my future, as my 24-year-old self will have thousands of them from now until retirement. Such apprehension doesn’t just apply to work. Housework, personal errands, daily obligations… I struggle greatly with the “let’s worry about it when it comes” philosophy. I try to decrease this anxiety in any way possible; writing at night has definitley helped.
I’m comforted knowing that I’m not alone in my overthinking tendencies: a University of Michigan study shows that 73% of adults aged 25 to 35 are likely to overthink. Be it the transition into full-blown adulthood or the hard crash with reality, this demographic has a lot to comtemplate about.
A lot of my more recent worries are pandemic-induced: school, upcoming graduation, job hunting (this is a big one!), etc. There is a lot of grey area to unearth in the impending few months, but through writing and other methods, I’ve learned to pace out my stress, reserving my energy for when it counts.
Regardless of what keeps you up at night, writing a list for yourself just might help you get sleep better. Give it a go.