Count sheep, have a hot bath and a glass of warm milk, douse yourself in lavender spray, cool down your room, wear socks to bed.

The internet is full of advice on how to get to sleep faster - and how to improve the quality of that sleep.

But not all of these will be practical, or work for you in terms of getting to sleep .

Maybe you hate milk and lavender makes you want to vomit.

In which case, a new and dazzlingly simple trick may be worth a try.

数绵羊、洗个热水澡、喝杯热牛奶、把自己浸在薰衣草喷雾中、用空调将房间调到很舒适的温度以及穿上袜子睡觉。

互联网上充满了各种各样的建议，来教你如何快速入睡以及如何提高睡眠质量。

但是这些建议并不都是实用的，或者对你有用。

有可能，牛奶或薰衣草的味道会让你感到恶心，甚至让你想吐。

在这种情况下，一个新奇且极其简单的小把戏值得你尝试一下。

Make a list.

Not an Arya Stark-style kill list, but specifically a to-do list of all those tasks and jobs which you haven't yet got round to doing.

这个有趣的方法就是列一份清单。当然了，我可不是让你像艾莉亚·史塔克(《权力的游戏》里斯塔克家族的小女儿)那样列一份杀人清单，而是一份你还没有完成的任务和工作的待办事项清单。

Dr Michael Scullin and his team at Baylor University in Texas studied 57 adults aged 19-30 and split them into two groups, which both slept over in a lab.Each group were given a writing task.

The first wrote about things they had already completed while the second wrote a list of tasks they needed to do.

What the researchers found was those in the second 'to-do list' group fell asleep a whole 16 minutes before the other group.

迈克尔·斯卡林博士和他在贝勒大学(位于德克萨斯州)的研究小组对57名19-30岁的成年人进行了研究。研究人员将这些成年人分成了两组，让他们分别在实验室里的不同位置过夜，并给每个小组都安排了一个列清单的任务。

第一个小组的成员列下的是他们当天已经完成的事情，而第二个小组的成员则需要列出他们明天要去做的事情。

研究人员对这些进行了跟踪调查，结果显示，第二组(“待办事项清单”组)的成员比第一组(“完成事项清单”组)的成员平均早睡了整整16分钟。

Insomnia - sleep countdownWriting in the journal Experimental Psychology - researchers said worrying about future tasks “is a significant contributor to difficulty in falling asleep." They added:

"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."

研究人员们在《实验心理学》杂志上表示：“担心未来的任务”是使人入睡困难的一个重要因素。他们补充说道：“参与者写下的待办事项清单越具体，他们随后就入睡得越快;而当参与者写下已完成的活动时，我们所观察到的趋势正好相反”。

Worth a try?

值得一试吧?