Do you ever do a version of this math at 2:47 a.m? It goes something like “If I fall asleep right now, I get four hours and thirteen minutes. Now four hours and eleven. Oh no, it’s been 30 minutes…”
I’ve done this math on the ceiling of every house I’ve I’ve ever lived in.
And every time, somewhere in the back of my head, the same advice I’d been given my whole life was playing: clear your mind. Empty it. Think of nothing.
It took me embarrassingly long to notice that I had never once fallen asleep by thinking of nothing. Nobody has. The nights sleep actually came, it came while my thoughts were wandering somewhere pointless and unsupervised.
A Canadian cognitive scientist noticed the same thing, and built a technique around it.
It’s called cognitive shuffling, and the premise sounds backwards on purpose: instead of quieting your mind, you fill it with deliberate nonsense.
Why trying to clear your mind keeps you awake
The problem with “think of nothing” is that your brain treats it as a job.
In 1987, the psychologist Daniel Wegner ran what became one of the most famous experiments in psychology. He asked people to speak their stream of consciousness aloud for five minutes with one rule: don’t think about a white bear. They were given a bell to ring each time the bear showed up anyway. On average, it rang more than once a minute.
Worse, when those same people were later allowed to think freely, the bear came back harder than it did for people who’d never suppressed it at all. Wegner called this ironic process theory: the act of monitoring your mind for a forbidden thought keeps the thought active.
Now swap the white bear for “the presentation tomorrow” and put the whole experiment in a dark bedroom. Every time you check whether your mind is finally clear, you’ve just confirmed it isn’t.
Sleep researchers have followed this thread for decades. Work on nighttime thought control has found that people who aggressively suppress their bedtime thoughts tend to report worse insomnia, not better. The standard advice isn’t just useless. For a lot of people it’s an accelerant.
What cognitive shuffling actually is
Luc Beaudoin started chewing on this problem as an undergraduate nearly forty years ago, when he couldn’t fall asleep on Sunday nights. He was taking a cognitive psychology course at the time, and he became fixated on a strange question: if the brain has a sleep-onset control system, could you trick it into switching on?
Beaudoin, now a cognitive scientist and adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, spent years building a theory of how that system works, and even coined a term — “insomnolence” — for the ordinary, miserable sleeplessness that doesn’t rise to the level of clinical insomnia.
The technique that came out of it, formalized around 2009, is the cognitive shuffle. The instructions are almost insultingly simple: lie in bed and deliberately think of random, emotionally neutral things, one after another, with no story connecting them. A bicycle. A banana. A lighthouse. Let each one flicker as a mental image for a few seconds, then move on.
No sequence, no logic, no plot. The randomness isn’t a bug in the method. It’s the entire method.
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How to do it tonight
Beaudoin later built an app, mySleepButton, that reads random words aloud so you can picture them, but his own published do-it-yourself version needs nothing but a pillow.
Here’s how cognitive shuffling works: You get into bed, ready to sleep.
Pick a neutral word with at least five letters. Something boring is ideal: “wagon,” “planet,” “kitchen.” Take the first letter and start generating words that begin with it, picturing each one briefly.
W: watermelon, window, walrus, Wisconsin. When that letter runs dry, move to the next one. If a word tugs at something stressful or exciting, skip it and keep shuffling.
The first time I tried it, I made it through one and a half letters. I have no idea which word came last. That’s the entire point, and it’s also the strangest part of the experience: you don’t get to witness it working.
Fair warning — it feels stupid for the first minute. You will lie there picturing a walrus and thinking, this is what my life has come to. The stupidity is load-bearing. Anything clever enough to feel worthwhile would be engaging enough to keep you up.
Why random images make you sleepy
Here’s the piece of this that rearranged how I think about falling asleep: a drifting, fragmenting mind isn’t an obstacle to sleep. It’s what sleep onset looks like.
As people naturally drop off, structured thinking dissolves into disconnected flashes of imagery — brief, dreamlike fragments that don’t follow from each other. Beaudoin’s insight was that you can run this in reverse.
By imitating the scattered mental state of someone falling asleep, you signal to the brain that it’s safe to power down. Counting sheep fails, in his view, precisely because it’s too orderly: one sheep follows the next in a neat sequence, which is exactly what wakeful thinking looks like.
The imagery also hogs the machinery your worries need.
In a 2002 study, the sleep researcher Allison Harvey and Suzanna Payne gave 41 people with insomnia different instructions for the night: distract yourself with engaging mental imagery, distract yourself however you like, or nothing at all.
The imagery group fell asleep faster and reported less distressing bedtime thinking — the researchers concluded the images occupied enough “cognitive space” that worries couldn’t re-enter.
Beaudoin has a warmer way of putting it. Adulthood, he’s pointed out, strips us of internally generated imagery; we outsource all of it to screens. Asked about the technique’s popularity on WBUR’s Here & Now, he offered what might be the most disarming explanation for a sleep hack ever given: “This is a form of play.”
What the research actually shows
Time to be straight about the evidence, because most coverage of cognitive shuffling isn’t.
The main direct test came in 2016, when Beaudoin and the psychologist Nancy Digdon studied 154 university students who complained of racing minds at bedtime. Some used a shuffling app that fed them a new word to visualize every eight seconds; others used structured problem-solving, a standard technique where you work through your worries on paper before bed; a third group did both.
The shufflers improved as much as the problem-solvers on pre-sleep arousal, sleep effort, and sleep quality — with one practical advantage. Problem-solving has to happen before bed. Shuffling happens on the pillow, exactly where the racing mind ambushes you.
Now the caveats, plainly. That study was presented as a conference poster, not published in a peer-reviewed journal. It measured self-reports, not brain activity. And Beaudoin owns the company that sells the app, which doesn’t make the results wrong but does make them worth holding loosely.
Clinical psychologist Leah Kaylor, asked by CNN why clinicians endorse a technique with such a thin direct evidence base, gave the honest answer: the underlying theory “aligns with established principles in cognitive neuroscience and sleep psychology.”
My read: the brand name is under-studied, but the two mechanisms it runs on — suppression backfires, absorbing imagery shortens sleep onset — are among the better-supported ideas in sleep psychology. And the downside risk of picturing a walrus is zero. There are worse bets in the wellness aisle. Most of them, actually.
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When it works beyond bedtime — and when it won’t work at all
The technique’s best use case might not be bedtime at all. It’s 3 a.m.
The middle-of-the-night waking is where every other intervention betrays you: you can’t journal without turning on a light, can’t listen to a podcast without a phone, and the phone is the enemy. Shuffling was designed with exactly this moment in mind. It requires no light, no device, no getting up — just a word and a letter, started mid-dark. Some therapists have also begun borrowing it outside the bedroom entirely, as a circuit-breaker for daytime rumination and anxiety spirals, though that use is running ahead of any formal evidence.
What it is not, and doesn’t claim to be, is a treatment for chronic insomnia. If sleeplessness is arriving three or more nights a week and bleeding into your days, the intervention with decades of trial evidence behind it is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, delivered by an actual clinician, and no word game substitutes for it.
But for the ordinary, miserable, tomorrow-math nights — the ones where your mind won’t stop being a mind — you now know the trick I wish someone had told me years ago.
Stop trying to turn the noise off. Change the channel to static, and let the static carry you out.
