ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2018
The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: A polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Sleep Duration and Sleep Quality in Caregivers of Patients With Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.JAMA network open · 2019Pooled it
- Bedtime Music, Involuntary Musical Imagery, and Sleep.Psychological science · 2021Trial
- Association between caregivers of dementia and sleep quality : A nationwide population-based study.Sleep & breathing = Schlaf & Atmung · 2026Article
- Efficacy of a Personalized Mobile Health Intervention (BedTime) to Increase Sleep Duration Among Short-Sleeping Patients With Type 2 Diabetes: Protocol for a Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial.JMIR research protocols · 2025Article
- The role of offloading intentions on future-oriented thinking.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- The Stress Phenotyping Framework: A multidisciplinary biobehavioral approach for assessing and therapeutically targeting maladaptive stress physiology.Stress (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2024Review
- Sleep health early in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in the United States: integrating longitudinal, cross-sectional, and retrospective recall data.Sleep medicine · 2020Article
- Performance Habits: A Framework Proposal.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Rapid eye movement sleep mediates age-related decline in prospective memory consolidation.Sleep · 2019Article
- The 8-Hour Challenge: Incentivizing Sleep during End-of-Term Assessments.Journal of interior design · 2019Article
- The Eight Hour Sleep Challenge During Final Exams Week.Teaching of psychology (Columbia, Mo.) · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Bedtime worry, including worrying about incomplete future tasks, is a significant contributor to difficulty falling asleep. Previous research showed that writing about one's worries can help individuals fall asleep. We investigated whether the temporal focus of bedtime writing-writing a to-do list versus journaling about completed activities-affected sleep onset latency. Fifty-seven healthy young adults (18-30) completed a writing assignment for 5 min prior to overnight polysomnography recording in a controlled sleep laboratory. They were randomly assigned to write about tasks that they needed to remember to complete the next few days (to-do list) or about tasks they had completed the previous few days (completed list). Participants in the to-do list condition fell asleep significantly faster than those in the completed-list condition. The more specifically participants wrote their to-do list, the faster they subsequently fell asleep, whereas the opposite trend was observed when participants wrote about completed activities. Therefore, to facilitate falling asleep, individuals may derive benefit from writing a very specific to-do list for 5 min at bedtime rather than journaling about completed activities. (PsycINFO Database Record
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.