If you’re having trouble falling asleep, a solution may be at hand: a pen and paper.

If you ever have trouble falling asleep, you may find that one of the things that keeps you awake is worrying about what you have to do the next day, especially if there are tasks that you have started, but not yet finished. .

In a study of employees at a German IT company, those who had unfinished tasks at the end of the work week were more likely to think about their work problems during the weekend than those who were more or less on top of their workload. . Researcher Christine Syrek of the University of Trier wrote that their results indicated that “the perception of not having completed the week’s tasks promotes employees’ perseverative cognitions and impairs weekend sleep, even beyond the impact of time pressure”.

“Perseverative cognitions” are ongoing thoughts about negative things that have happened in the past or might happen in the future. And they were also more likely to find that their sleep was disrupted this weekend.

Sunday evenings can be particularly difficult. If you slept in that morning, you may not be as sleepy at bedtime as usual. Tomorrow it will be back to work and it will be time to tackle all those unfinished tasks, as well as new ones, no doubt. So what can you do to stop those swirling worries from keeping you up at night?

We could count the sheep. You could read a book for a while, taking you to a world away from your worries. You can practice some mindfulness, focusing on your breathing and the sensations you can detect around you. Or you can turn on the light and make a list of all the things you need to do.

Yes, that’s right, I suggest you deliberately think about all the tasks that you have to accomplish and that worry you so much. And more, I suggest you write them down. In black and white. You might think that’s the last thing that would work, but a study in the United States found that it was surprisingly effective.

In fact, when Michael Scullin, director of the Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory at Baylor University in the United States, asked a group of volunteers to write a list just before bed of everything they had accomplished that day, and a second group to write a list of tasks they had to accomplish tomorrow and in the following days, it was this second group who subsequently fell asleep more quickly.

And how much faster? Nine minutes, no less. The scientists did not rely on the volunteers’ own assessment of their sleep (which is not always accurate), but confirmed when they were awake and asleep through a type of sleep study known as polysomnography. This involves attaching sensors to a person’s head and other parts of the body to monitor their brain waves, breathing and movements.

It’s fair to say that Scullin’s study is not large-scale, but there is a psychological mechanism that could explain why he got the results that he did. This is called “cognitive offloading” and it occurs when a person takes physical action to relieve a mental burden.

If you flip a card over to match the layout of the street in front of you, this is an example of cognitive offloading. You remove some of the mental work you have to do to get your bearings, reducing stress on your brain and making it a little easier to move in the right direction.

In the case of the to-do list written at bedtime, you download your tasks from your mind onto a piece of paper (or onto a phone if you prefer and if you are sure you are not drawn to social media or your emails) so that you reduce the need to think about it when you’re trying to fall asleep. And instead of having the tasks swirling around your head randomly, they’re arranged in some sort of order. They are in a way “classified”, ready to be processed in due time. As a bonus, you don’t have to worry about forgetting them.

It’s best to list each specific task rather than using general headings, although this will make your list longer. Professor Scullin’s study found that busy people who created lists of more than 10 tasks fell asleep on average 15 minutes faster than people who didn’t write a to-do list. They also fell asleep six minutes faster than those who only made shortlists. So make it complete.

Doing all of this can seem like hard work when you’re tired and about to fall asleep. But it might be worth it. Writing your to-do list right before you head out won’t make your life less busy, but it might just help you sleep and worry a little less. And when you get to tomorrow, you’re already ahead because you have a list of everything you need to do.