EVER feel ready to keel over from tiredness, only for your thoughts to start racing as soon as your head meets the pillow?
As your brain bounces from one topic to the next – the email or text you forgot to reply to, a conversation you handled badly, an embarrassing encounter from five years ago – it can feel impossible to shut it up so you can get some much needed sleep.
According to psychologists, this cyclone of repetitive negative thoughts and excessive worry is called rumination or mental perturbance.
For many of us, this pattern of thinking – dwelling on mistakes, negative feelings and distress – is not even conscious.
Psychologists say it can impact your mental health and also intensify symptoms if you already live with depression or anxiety.
But it can happen to anyone, especially if you’re feeling overwhelmed or like life isn’t quite going your way.
If your brain starts going at 100 miles per hour when you’re desperately trying to snooze, there might be a way to tame your errant thoughts.
Called ‘cognitive shuffling’, it involves visualising random images to help you drift off.
It sounds deceptively simple, but psychologist Dr Luc Beaudoin says it mimics what your brain does naturally when you’re drifting off and you’re not quite conscious but not asleep either – a picture show of unrelated images that slowly lull you to sleep.
“We want your brain to be thinking different things because as you naturally fall asleep, that’s what the brain does,” the adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada told BBC Science Focus.
It may also help get your spiralling thoughts in check, giving them some structure, so you won’t stray to thinking about stressful topics – like your mortgage.
The hack has recently made its rounds on social media.
While many trends that cycle through TikTok and Instagram aren’t the most legit, with some users claim the mental exercise helps distract them from stressful thoughts keeping them awake.
Here’s how it works, according to Dr Beaudoin.
He told BBC Science Focus: “It basically gets you to imagine things one after another.
“One way to do that is to pick a word, any word, like the word ‘piano’.
“Now, imagine a piano for five to six seconds, maybe touching it or playing it, even if you don’t know how.
“Then, we’re going to spell the word piano and for each letter, we’re going to come up with as many associations with each letter as we can.”
So for ‘piano’, you’d try and think of as many words starting with the latter ‘P’ as you can – parakeet, pilot, pumpkin, powder puff, pooch, and so on.
Dwell on each image for a few seconds and imagine yourself interacting with it before moving onto the next, until you run our of words starting with ‘P’.
The best sleep routine and environment
Thomas Høegh Reisenhus, TEMPUR® sleep specialist & sleep counsellor, reveals the key components of a good bedtime routine and environment...
A sure-fire way to facilitate a better night’s sleep is to practice good sleep hygiene.
Establish a sleep routine that works for you and stick to it.
This will help your body establish a consistent, natural sleep-wake cycle which can do wonders for your overall sleep quality.
As such, try to avoid making up for lost sleep with a lie-in.
Instead of sleeping in, spend your morning reading a book in bed or having a leisurely coffee in the kitchen.
Ensure that your bedroom, bedding, and sleepwear are fit for purpose too.
The ideal sleep environment is dark, quiet, and cool – much like a cave.
If you find unwelcome sources of light are keeping you up, consider investing in an eye mask or black-out curtains.
Adding soft furnishings can be a great way to reduce noise, with the surfaces having an absorptive quality, but if this doesn’t work, consider embracing a soothing soundtrack to block it out.
In terms of temperature, try to keep your bedroom at 18°C. You can further reduce the risk of waking up due to overheating by ensuring that all your bedding and sleepwear is made with natural, breathable materials such as cotton and linen.
Bear in mind that everyone is different; what might work for most, may not work for you!
Whilst knowing how much sleep you should get, how to overcome common barriers, and practicing good sleep hygiene can facilitate a great night’s sleep, if you continue to struggle with sleep or fatigue persistently, do not hesitate to visit a doctor or health professional for support.
After that, go through words starting with ‘I’, then ‘A’.
Hopefully you won’t make it all the way to ‘O’, as the idea is that you’ll fall asleep long before you get to the end.
At a glance, cognitive shuffling technique may sound similar to the concept of counting sheep’.
But Dr Beaudoin said focusing on the same object over and over might be too repetitive and precise, preventing your mind from truly resting.
He told Women’s Health that he first came up with the concept as an undergraduate student studying cognitive psychology in 1989.
He was struggling with insomnia and claimed the method helped him, but he didn’t become formally studying the cognitive shuffling technique as a researcher until about 2009.
The technique is one part of a broader theory of sleep onset that Dr Beaudoin has developed, called ‘somnolent information processing’.
The idea describes a kind of control system for sending yourself to sleep and lists factors that help smooth this process as well as some that hinder it.
Dr Beaudoin has run a number of pilot tests on cognitive shuffling, but wants do more research in comparing the technique with other cognitive strategies used to help people get to sleep.
“We’ve had encouraging results, but we need to do more studies,” he told Science Focus.
“And it’s important to emphasise that no cognitive treatment, including the cognitive shuffle, is expected to be used in isolation.”
Making sure you’re following other science-backed recommendations for better sleep is also important, he added.
No amount of shuffling will undo the effects a coffee or heavy meal right before bed, the psychologist noted.
Experts also told Women’s Health that cognitive shuffling remains a theory, not a proven practice, and that more research needs to be done on it
Cognitive shuffling Dos and Don'ts
Here are some pointers to give the technique a go yourself:
- DO set yourself some guidelines to ensure that you don’t go off daydreaming up a whole story. Try thinking of all the words you can that start with the same letter before switching to another.
- DON’T just think of a word, visualise it. Fully imagine the piano, how it feels and sounds, rather than just picturing the word to slow your brain down a bit.
- DO make yourself the star of the show. Visualise yourself playing and touching the piano.
- DO know when to ask for help. If you regularly have trouble sleeping, experts say it may be time to put the technique to bed and call in a doctor.
