Could the Cognitive Shuffle Help You Fall Asleep?
Having trouble quieting a busy mind at bedtime? As we head into fall, the counsellors at Gather Clinical Counselling in Victoria are preparing for our upcoming Drift: Reset Your Sleep group. One of the practical techniques we teach is the Cognitive Shuffle - a simple, surprisingly playful way to give your mind something different to focus on as you settle toward sleep. In this post, we explore where the technique came from, why it may help, and how you can try it yourself tonight.
As we move into fall, the counsellors at Gather Clinical Counselling are preparing to host their next round of the Drift: Reset Your Sleep group. Drift is a three-week counselling group informed by neuroscience, sleep psychology and CBT-I, designed to help people better understand their sleep and develop strategies for more restful nights. While improving sleep can involve looking at everything from our daily routines to our relationship with bedtime, sometimes the thing keeping us awake is simply a mind that won't switch off.
In Drift, we teach people a number of practical strategies they can use to support better sleep. One technique we often introduce is called the Cognitive Shuffle, a simple way of giving your busy mind something gentle and low-stakes to focus on at bedtime.
If your mind tends to become unusually busy the moment your head hits the pillow, the Cognitive Shuffle may be worth trying. The idea is simple: instead of trying to force yourself to sleep, you give your mind a stream of loosely connected, ordinary images.
The Cognitive Shuffle was developed by Dr. Luc P. Beaudoin, a cognitive scientist and adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His work looks at the mental processes involved in falling asleep, and the Cognitive Shuffle grew out of his research into how our thinking changes as we become sleepy.
Why might it help?
One of the frustrating things about being unable to sleep is that trying harder often seems to make things worse. You check the clock, think about how tired you'll be tomorrow, replay something that happened during the day, and suddenly your brain is wide awake.
The Cognitive Shuffle offers a different job for your attention. Rather than telling yourself don't think about anything, you give your mind something deliberately simple and slightly random to do.
The technique is also known as serial diverse imagining. Early research by Beaudoin and colleagues found that the approach could reduce some of the mental arousal and sleep-related effort associated with bedtime. For everyday use, the technique is remarkably simple.
Choose a neutral word. Take its first letter and think of a word beginning with that letter. If you run out of ideas, move to another letter and start again. Pick a word - say, “garden” - and imagine something beginning with G. Picture a guitar for a few seconds. Then a glass. Then a giraffe. Move from one image to another, all of words beginning with G, without trying to create a story or make the ideas connect. The important part is not to turn it into a story. A guitar, a glass, and a giraffe don't need to have anything to do with each other. In fact, the randomness is the point.
And if your mind wanders back to tomorrow's to-do list or something that's bothering you, that's okay. Just notice it and start shuffling again.
It may not work every night, and it isn't a substitute for getting help with persistent insomnia. But if your biggest bedtime problem is a mind that refuses to switch gears, a few minutes of harmless mental randomness might be worth a try.
Original research
Beaudoin, L. P. (2014). A design-based approach to sleep-onset and insomnia: Super-somnolent mentation, the cognitive shuffle and serial diverse imagining. Simon Fraser University.
Beaudoin, L. P., Digdon, N., O'Neill, K., & Rachor, G. S. (2016). Serial Diverse Imagining Task: A New Remedy for Bedtime Complaints of Worrying and Other Sleep-Disruptive Mental Activity. Poster presented at SLEEP 2016.