Improve Your Sleep with the Pre-Sleep Task Dump: A Key to Productivity and Well-being

actually making new health habits stick. And the reason why you have trouble sticking to a new healthy habit is probably going to be different to why your partner or your best friend has trouble. So in the book, I help you assess what the biggest barrier getting in your way actually is, and from there, I help you design your own, personalized and actionable plan to change your habits.

So if you are feeling stuck repeating the same habits and looking for practical solutions that will improve your health for good, then I promise you The Health Habit is your solution. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavior change consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you get so much more out of the hours in your day. For the next few weeks, I'm going to be sharing a few extracts from the Health

habit on how I Work. Today's extract is all about how to get a better night's sleep with the pre sleep task dump. It's ten PM and you're trying to get to sleep. But does your brain think it's the ideal time to remind you to stock up on dishwashing liquid to correct the error that you made on the sales chart for the presentation you'll be delivering tomorrow and use up that broccoli for dinner tomorrow night because it's looking so miserable and limp in the back of the fridge.

You bet it does. Or perhaps your brain thinks that two am is the optimal time to be solving the world's problems. Mine definitely does. Sadly, I can also confidently say that the solutions I'm coming up with at two am are not going to help with anything except keeping me awake. According to the National Sleep Foundation in the United States, forty percent of American adults have trouble falling

asleep at least a few times every month. The most common reason why people have trouble drifting off is because they're worrying about or ruminating on something. Historically, a lot of psychological research into the difficulties people have falling asleep has focused on the impact of ruminating on past events, events that ironically we have no control over because they

have already happened. However, researchers have also found that people have the greatest trouble falling asleep at the beginning of the work week because they're worrying about what lies ahead. So perhaps it's the future keeping us up, unless so our past Associate professor Michael K. Scullen from Baylor University was curious as to whether thinking about the future deliberately before bed could help people get to sleep more easily, so he invited a group of fifty seven people into

a sleep lab to find out. Before it was time for lights out, half the group were asked to spend five minutes writing it to do list of tasks they needed to complete in the next few days. What is known as a future focused list. And here's the instructions that they were given. We'd like for you to spend the next five minutes writing down everything you have to remember to do tomorrow and over the next few days. You can write these in paragraph form or in bullet points.

All five minutes to think and write about tasks you have to complete tomorrow and in the near future, even if you are coming to you. The other half of the group were given similar instructions, except they were asked to think about activities that had been completed that day and during the previous few days. A small but important

difference is here. A problem with past research that has examined strategies to help people fall asleep faster is that it has relied on self reporting, whereby participants estimate how long it took them to fall asleep. And you can probably imagine that this data is full of errors. How on earth can you know exactly when you fell asleep? It's like trying to pinpoint the exact time you were rendered unconscious by a magical spell cast by a wizard

in training from Hogwarts. Instead of self reporting, Scutland hooked people up to a sleep monitor in the lab to obtain an overnight polysobnography recording, so researchers had an accurate read on how long it actually took people to fall asleep. Scullin found that people who wrote there to do list, as opposed to a to done list focusing on the past, fell asleep significantly faster, and in addition, those who included more specific details in their to do list fell asleep

more quickly. The reason the intervention was so effective is that our minds are filled with countless thoughts that, if left unchecked, conspiral, out of control, and wreak havoc on a good night's sleep. It's akin to unleashing a pack of excitable Jack Russell puppies at the dog park, each with liver treats tangling from their tails. The result a frenzy of adorable chaos, although in the case of your thoughts,

not so adorable. When I spoke to Scullen about his research, he explained to me, there are so many people who tell me that they can can feel really sleepy during the day, but the moment their head hits the pillow when they want to go to sleep, that's when they feel more alert than ever. One of the key reasons this happens is because after finally switching off the lights, for many of us, it's the only time that we are without distractions, especially those of the digital variety and

those distractions. Yes, you smartphone, highly effective at keeping all our worries, ruminative thoughts, and the unfinished list of things we still need to do at bay. When you remove all those distractions, guess what you're left with? A tsunami of stress. If you don't do anything to combat it, then your mind's just going to cycle through it skull and points out and at first glance, it seems like

our brain is doing something bad to us. If you have an unfinished task, it stays at this heightened level of arousal. But really our brain is doing us a favor because it's like you did not finish this. We don't want you to forget it, so your very kind brain keeps you awake by continuing to remind you what you still need to sort out. As our brains have evolved over hundreds and thousands of years, they unfortunately didn't anticipate the twenty first centuries demands where we could be

working at any time of day. For a lot of us, we never truly switch off. I know while I was working on this book, even when I wasn't typing at my computer or conducting an interview or reading research papers. It was constantly in the back of my mind and would frequently pop into the front of my mind, almost always at opportune times, such as when I wanted to sleep. The trick to circumventing this problem is simple, write it

all down. Scullen says that when we write something down, we signal to our brains it's okay, stop reminding me because it's been offloaded. And as an added benefit, when we write things down, we often move from rumination into solution mode. And the more specificity we can apply when adding down unfinished tasks or thoughts, the more at peace our brain will feel, and thus the more likely it is we will fall peacefully and easily to sleep with not a single Jack Russell puppy in sight. Put this

into action. Step one, thirty minutes to one hour before bed, grab a pen and paper. Please don't grab your phone, as it's too tempting to open up digital distractions that will suppress what's on your mind, thereby defeating the purpose of this strategy. Step two, write down all the things you didn't finish today and the tasks you need to complete tomorrow or in the next few days. And remember

the more specific the better. For example, instead of noting down create presentation for meeting, you could instead write one collect data from report X, Y, and Z. Two, present the data in graphs or charts. Three, insert the graph's charts into a PowerPoint presentation for write commentary on the data. Step three. If some of your unfinished tasks involve thinking about solutions, feel free to write those down two. Step four.

While Scullen's experiment ask people to spend five minutes on this task, don't worry too much about how long it takes you. If you're done within two minutes, great, and if it takes you twenty minutes, that's fine too. Step five repeat nightly. If you found today's episode useful, then I guarantee you will love my new book, The Health Habit. Search for The Health Habit wherever you get your books, and pre order your coffee today. Thank you for sharing part of your day with me by listening to How

I Work. If you're keen for more tips on how to work better, connect with me via LinkedIn or Instagram. I'm very easy to find. Just search for Amantha Imba. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangery People, part of the cool and Nation. I am so grateful for being able to work and live on this beautiful land and I want to pay my

respects to elders, past, present and emerging. How I Work is produced by Inventium with action support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimba who did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise