EVEN WHEN YOUR sleep hygiene is dialed-in, you're going to have moments where you can't easily fall asleep—or fall back asleep after waking up. You can try to count sheep, but there's a different—and science-backed—technique worth considering: cognitive reshuffling.
It sounds complicated, but it's actually simple. Cognitive reshuffling leans heavily on putting your brain to work to try to crowd out other stuff that may be keeping you from sleeping, like stress, anxiety, or worries. I tried it the other night when my toddler decided to wake me up at 2 a.m., and I managed to conk back out pretty quickly. I do have some notes from the experience, though.
If you're consistently struggling to fall asleep, it's important to rope in a healthcare professional to try to get to the bottom of things. But if you spend a random night here and there trying harder than usual to fall asleep, cognitive reshuffling is a sleep hack worth keeping in your back pocket.
What does cognitive reshuffling mean?
COGNITIVE RESHUFFLING IS a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) technique to help people fall asleep. "Cognitive reshuffling is essentially a mental distraction technique designed to interrupt the repetitive, emotionally-loaded thinking that often keeps people awake," says Thea Gallagher, PsyD, clinical associate professor at NYU Langone Health and cohost of the Mind in View podcast. "Rather than lying in bed thinking about tomorrow's meeting, replaying a conversation, or worrying about why you aren't asleep yet, you deliberately direct your attention toward random, neutral thoughts or images."
This is essentially another form of counting sheep, according to Christopher Winter, MD, a sleep medicine specialist, neurologist, and author of The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep Is Broken and How to Fix It. He says this is a common type of "first step" treatment suggested when someone has insomnia. "Can we reduce the performance anxiety you feel around sleep by getting you to focus on something other than 'I need to fall asleep now, why can't I fall asleep, bad things will happen if I don't sleep?'" he says.
How to do cognitive reshuffling
IT IS A fairly simple technique: You pick a word and try to think of unrelated, ideally relaxing or neutral words that start with each letter, before moving on to the next. Picture each word in your mind when you think of it.
"One common version is to pick a word, such as 'bedtime,' and move through its letters," Gallagher says. That means thinking of things like ball, banana, and boat, before moving on to elephant, envelope, and earring.
"The point isn't to create a coherent story or solve anything," Gallagher says. "In fact, randomness is part of the exercise."
The idea is similar to doing things like counting backwards from 1,000 by sevens, according to Winter. "It's all simply a means of distraction," he says. "It's built around helping people stop trying to sleep."
Does it actually work?
IT CAN. “THINK of it less as a magic sleep trick and more as a way of giving the brain something neutral to do," Gallagher says. When people can't sleep, they tend to get caught in worrying, planning, problem-solving, and replaying things from the day, she points out. "That increases arousal, which is exactly the opposite of what we want when we're trying to sleep," Gallagher says.
A technique like cognitive reshuffling may help because it occupies enough attention to interrupt those loops without giving the brain something overly stimulating or emotionally meaningful to engage with, she says.
I fell back asleep pretty easily when I tried this, but I also usually do anyway. I thought of the word "read" and found myself getting annoyed when I couldn't think of words that started with the letter "r" that weren't aggressive. It took me a while to come up with "raspberry" after things like "rocket" and "race car" and I started to get frustrated when I couldn't think of more words for each letter. In the morning, I tried to repeat it to see what obvious words I'd missed. Ultimately, this exercise tapped into my inner competitor a little too much and may have kept me up for longer while I was trying to top myself.
"Techniques like this are fine, but working with people who can help you understand your sleep better and who can help you manage stress is more likely to create lasting change and confidence in your sleep," Winter says.
Still, Gallagher says this is worth trying. "If someone finds cognitive reshuffling calming, it's a perfectly reasonable tool to have in the toolbox," Gallagher says. "The goal is simply to give your mind a less activating place to go."
Korin Miller is a seasoned freelance writer specializing in general wellness, sexual health and relationships, and lifestyle trends, with work appearing in Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Everyday Health, Food & Wine, and more. She has a master’s degree from American University and lives by the beach.