Cognitive shuffling 101 and why it's grabbing the attention of struggling sleepers

John Maytham, in for CapeTalk's Lester Kiewit, speaks to Associate Professor Melinda Jackson, a sleep scientist and psychologist at Monash University in Melbourne.

Listen below: 

Time to sleep but can't because your mind is racing?

According to Jackson, 30% of adults will experience difficulty sleeping at any given time, and falling asleep is often the biggest challenge for people.

This might mean that people have tried many strategies to fall asleep such as counting sheep or drinking sleepy time tea.

But have you tried cognitive shuffling?

The sleep technique is trending on TikTok.

Cognitive shuffling attempts to mimic the thinking patterns good sleepers typically have before drifting off.

The idea is to engage your mind with random ideas and images with a specific technique: 

1. Pick a random word (such as 'cake').
2. Focus on the first letter of the word (in this case, C) and list a bunch of words starting with that letter: cat, carrot, calendar etc.
3. Visualise each word as you go along, so see a cake in your mind's eye.
4. When you feel ready, move onto the next letter (A) and repeat the process.
5. Continue with each letter of the original word (so, in this case, K and then E) until you feel ready to switch to a new word or until you drift off to sleep.

The key is "not to overthink it and try not to let logical thinking get involved too much and just embrace the randomness of this process... the idea is to try and distract you from the unwanted thoughts, rumination, the worry, the planning, the to-do list that often interferes with our ability to fall asleep," explains Jackson. 

The process of shuffling through different thoughts is very similar to how our brain naturally drifts off to sleep because during the transition to sleep, brain activity slows down, the brain starts to generate disconnected images and fleeting scenes without conscious effort to make sense of them.

So, the cognitive shuffling idea might mimic these scattered and disconnected random thought patterns that might help us from wakefulness to sleep, adds Jackson.

But is there any science behind this technique?

Jackson says there's "some evidence", possibly unpublished, behind this sleep strategy.

"There's been a couple of studies. I can't say they've been published just yet, but there's some evidence... some studies by university students showed that by doing this technique, it reduced their pre-sleep arousal, improved their sleep quality, and reduced the effort people took to fall asleep - but we do need some more evidence and more studies."

- Melinda Jackson, Sleep Scientist and Psychologist - Monash University

Scroll up to the audio player to listen to the full conversation.