This transformed a client's sleep recently

Read time: 5 minutes

From the outside looking in, it might look like I'm having a post-break-up, midlife crisis at 35, when you see that I've spent 6 weeks in Albania, of all places.

All those closest to me know this couldn't be further from the truth. In truth, I'm in a great place physically, mentally, and emotionally, with the last two getting genuinely stronger with each passing day.

And at the foundation of it all is my sleep, and I'm a GREAT sleeper!

Something that can't be said for a LOT of people, including in recent weeks, one of my good clients.

So, I gave her a piece of advice that can genuinely have a transformative effect on your sleep, and I've got the science to back it up.

Let's get stuck into this week's newsletter...

We've all been in this horrible situation in bed, and it doesn't involve soiling yourself 😂

You know the one.

You're tired. You've had a long day. You're ready for it to be over. You climb into bed expecting sleep to come nice and easily, but instead, your brain decides it's the perfect time to run a full audit of your life.

Tomorrow's to-do list. The email you forgot to send. The conversation you should've handled differently. The thing you've been putting off for three weeks. The bigger question you've been avoiding for three months. Did you or did you not forget to lock the front door?

You lie there. Eyes open. Mind sprinting.

It's a horribly frustrating feeling.

Twenty minutes pass. Then forty. Then it's past midnight, and now you're stressed about being stressed about not sleeping.

As far as vicious circles go, it's certainly up there with the worst.

I've been there more times than I can count. Most of my clients have too.

And the fix, backed by some surprisingly strong research, is one of the simplest tools I've ever recommended.

It takes five minutes. It costs nothing. And the evidence behind it is better than any sleep supplement on the market.

It's writing.

Yep. Boring, old school, but tried and tested writing.

In 2018, a research team led by Dr Michael Scullin at Baylor University's Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory published a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (1).

They took 57 healthy young adults into a controlled sleep lab.

Five minutes before lights-out, they randomly split them into two groups.

Group one spent five minutes writing a detailed to-do list of everything they needed to get done over the next few days.

Group two spent five minutes writing about tasks they'd already completed.

Then the researchers monitored everyone overnight using polysomnography, the gold-standard method of measuring sleep, the same one used in clinical sleep medicine.

The result even surprised the researchers.
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And not only that, but the more specific and detailed the to-do list, the faster they fell asleep.

This was a massive contradiction of the intuition many researchers had.

The common assumption was that writing about future tasks should increase worry and delay sleep.

But the exact opposite turned out to be true.

Reviewing completed tasks kept it busy. Writing the list down emptied the mind.

The brain doesn't need the tasks done. It just needs them somewhere other than its own working memory.

And this is where your pen and paper come into play.

Why this actually works

There's a deeper mechanism worth understanding.

In 2007, a team at UCLA led by Dr Matthew Lieberman published a study in Psychological Science using fMRI brain scans (2).

They showed participants images of emotional faces, angry, fearful, and sad, and watched what happened in the brain.

When participants simply looked at the faces, the amygdala, the brain's threat-detection centre, lit up.

But when they were asked to put what they were seeing into words, something remarkable happened.

The amygdala went quiet, and the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the rational, regulatory part of the brain, switched on.

Lieberman's analogy is the one I always come back to:

That's what's happening when you write something down at night.

Your brain treats unfinished tasks and unprocessed worries as open loops.

They demand attention until they're closed. You can lie in bed mentally rehearsing them for hours, and the brain stays alert.

Or you can take five minutes, write them down, and the loop closes.

Honestly, you won't know how powerful this is until you try it.

Not because the task is done. Because the brain trusts that you've captured it.

Kinda like a Pokemon 😆

You've moved it from working memory onto a piece of paper, and the brain, finally, can stand down and go to dreamy snoozy land.

This is something I've been doing personally for years, both the drifting off to dreamy snoozy land, and brain dumping before bed.

When I'm stressed, overwhelmed, juggling too many threads in both my business and personal life, the kind of stress that used to keep me awake at 2 AM thinking about everything I needed to do, I sit down with a notebook, and I just splurge onto the page.

Sometimes it's two minutes. five minutes. Sometimes it's ten.

I write down everything.

Tasks, worries, half-formed ideas, things I'm dreading, things I'm avoiding, content ideas, client needs.

No structure. No filter. Just everything that's taking up space in my head.

By the time I'm done, my head feels lighter, and my chest feels freer.

The problems haven't disappeared; it isn't magic, but they're not running circles in my mind anymore.

They're on paper, and I can see them.

And once I can see them, I can deal with them.

It's hard to explain, but it's like when you start writing, you're literally emptying your stress onto the page with your pen, and with each stroke, you feel lighter.

That's not an innuendo 😂😂

I recommend it to every client I work with. Most try it. The ones who stick with it tell me, almost without fail, that it changes how they sleep.

I had a client recently start doing this nightly. Within a few days, she noticed her sleep had improved. Within a week, she was falling asleep faster than she had in months.

Nothing else in her routine had changed. Just five minutes with a pen before bed.

This isn't magic. It's biology.

Your brain doesn't want to run an endless loop of unfinished business.

It just doesn't trust you to remember unless you write it down.

So write the damn thing down 📝

Before I let you go, there's actually a second piece of the puzzle worth knowing about.

A 2009 study led by Dr Alex Wood at the University of Manchester, published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research, surveyed over 400 community adults, 40% of whom had clinically poor sleep (3).

What they found was super interesting:

The mechanism was the part I found most interesting.

It wasn't gratitude itself doing the work. It was what gratitude displaced.

Grateful people had fewer worrying thoughts and more positive thoughts as they fell asleep.

The pre-sleep cognitive state, what's running through your mind in the minutes before sleep, was the variable that mediated everything.

This builds on the foundational work of Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, whose 2003 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who kept gratitude journals reported better well-being, more optimism, fewer physical symptoms, and, in one sub-group, longer and better sleep (4).

One nuance worth knowing:

Their gratitude group wrote weekly, not daily.

Daily tends to become a bit of a chore and lose meaning for a lot of people.

Once a week, with a bit of specificity, produced the cleanest effect.

So the practical version of this:

Brain dump at night to empty the mind. A weekly gratitude reflection to deliberately curate what you fill it with.

If you're struggling with where to start, here's how I'd suggest using this.

Five minutes before bed, every night, do a brain dump.

Write down everything you need to do tomorrow and over the coming days.

Be specific. Don't just write "work", write the actual task.

Remember the earlier study. The more specific the list, the faster sleep came.

Don't journal about your day. Don't review what you finished.

Write forward, not backwards.

Once a week, ideally on a Sunday evening or whenever fits your rhythm, take ten minutes to write down three to five things you're genuinely grateful for.

Not generic ones. Specific ones.

Not "my family" or "the conversation with my daughter on Tuesday."

That's it. No app needed. No fancy notebook. A pen and a piece of paper.

We live in a culture that sells solutions.

Pills, supplements, devices, apps, weighted blankets, mouth tape, and cooling mattresses.

Some of it works. Most of it is expensive BS.

The most evidence-based tool for a racing mind at bedtime is one humans have had for thousands of years.

It costs nothing. It takes five minutes. It's been validated in scans, sleep labs, and randomised controlled trials going back four decades.

You don't need a better mattress. You need an empty head.

And the fastest way to empty your head is to put what's in it somewhere else.

Again, that's not an innuendo, but it sure as hell sounds like one 😂

Try it tonight. Five minutes. See what happens.

Catch you next time.

Mark ✌️

Quote for the day

Mark Gray

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P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are a few ways I can help you:
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1. ​My NEW sleep ebook is live — and yours free. If you’re tired of feeling tired, this guide breaks down how to fix your sleep and boost energy, focus, and recovery. Grab your copy by clicking here now.​
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References:
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1. Scullin, M.K., Krueger, M.L., Ballard, H.K., Pruett, N., & Bliwise, D.L. (2018). "The Effects of Bedtime Writing on Difficulty Falling Asleep: A Polysomnographic Study Comparing To-Do Lists and Completed Activity Lists." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(1), 139–146.

2. Lieberman, M.D., Eisenberger, N.I., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S.M., Pfeifer, J.H., & Way, B.M. (2007). "Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli." Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

3. Wood, A.M., Joseph, S., Lloyd, J., & Atkins, S. (2009). "Gratitude influences sleep through the mechanism of pre-sleep cognitions." Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 66(1), 43–48.

4. Emmons, R.A., & McCullough, M.E. (2003). "Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377–389.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Any guidance related to training, nutrition, supplementation, or lifestyle is general in nature and not a substitute for personalised medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your health routine.