The human brain is a remarkable limp of electrified glob – the most complex object in the known Universe, or so we’re told. But every now and again, especially at night, don’t you wish it would just shut up?
Racing thoughts are one of the most common symptoms when we can’t sleep. The lights go out, our heads hit the pillow, but our frontal cortex isn’t done for the day. Egged on by caffeine, anxiety or everyday stress, our brains start acting like a pinball machine as thoughts ricochet from one place to another.
Psychologists call it rumination or mental perturbance. It’s a repetitive pattern of negative thinking, and some of it is not even conscious. We dwell on mistakes, over-analyse the day, worry about tomorrow.
It’s worse in people with mental health conditions, but it can happen to anyone, especially when there’s too much to do or life isn’t going the way we want it to.
So what if there was a way to control our runaway minds when we’re trying to get to sleep?
Psychologist Dr Luc Beaudoin believes he has a solution. It’s called ‘the cognitive shuffle’, a non-Jedi mind trick that exploits what happens in the brain during sleep onset, that dream-like in-between land where you’re not quite conscious, but not quite asleep.
“Sleep onset isn’t instantaneous. It proceeds gradually,” explains Beaudoin, an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada who has also built businesses around cognition and sleep. “It’s a unique time in the day when your thinking isn’t really connected.”
The cognitive shuffle aims to bring some light structure to your thoughts, just when it feels like they’re spiralling out of control. It mimics what the brain does naturally, producing something like a picture show of unrelated imagery that lulls you unconscious.
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“It basically gets you to imagine things one after another,” Beaudoin says. “One way to do that is to pick a word, any word, like the word ‘piano’. Now, imagine a piano for 5-6 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 start with P: peach, Pluto, pupil, pumpkin and so on. Keep each object in your mind for 5-6 seconds and when you run out of Ps, you move on to the I, then the A.
The hope is to fall asleep long before you get to the end.
Part of why it seems to work is that each image you bring to mind is only loosely connected with the next. “We want your brain to be thinking different things because as you naturally fall asleep, that’s what the brain does.”
Cognitive shuffling also hits a sweet spot between conscious and unconscious thought – enough of a task to keep unwelcome thoughts at bay, but not complicated enough to warrant much in the way of executive function.
“All the while you’re doing it, you’re not thinking as much about your mortgage,” Beaudoin says.
The technique is one part of a broader theory of sleep onset that Beaudoin has developed, called ‘somnolent information processing’. The idea describes a kind of control system for sleep onset and lists factors that help smooth this process as well as some that hinder it.
Mental perturbance – those racing thoughts we all experience from time to time – are one of the things that hinder it.
Beaudoin has run a number of pilot tests on cognitive shuffling, but wants to do more, 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 says. “And it’s important to emphasise that no cognitive treatment, including the cognitive shuffle, is expected to be used in isolation.”
He says that good sleep hygiene and other science-backed recommendations are also important. If you drink a double espresso just before bed, no amount of cognitive shuffling will send you to sleep. Do it right, however, and maybe tonight you’ll shuffle off to sleep in record time.
About our expert
Dr Luc Beaudoin is a Psychologist, an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada and the founder of CogZest. He has a book published: Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective. He has been published in journals including Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Prospects for Artificial Intelligence and Sleep Medicine Reviews.
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