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. 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. 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.
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