the cognitive shuffle
A technique that scrambles your thinking on purpose, invented by a cognitive scientist who wanted to fall asleep and found that the trick was to stop making sense. It's what the shuffle track is doing, and it's the best available answer to a mind that won't stop planning.
why a racing mind won't stop
The mind that keeps you up is rarely doing anything dramatic. It's usually just being useful. It's rehearsing tomorrow's conversation, or working an email you haven't sent, or turning over a problem that has waited three weeks and has apparently chosen 12:40am to insist on being solved.
The trouble is that this is exactly the mode of thinking that sleep will not begin in. Coherent, sequential, goal-directed thought is the signature of a brain that is on duty, and a brain on duty stays on duty. Telling it to stop doesn't work, because "stop thinking about it" is itself a thought about it, and it puts the thing back at the front of the queue.
Luc Beaudoin, a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University, took this seriously as an engineering problem rather than a moral one. The mind won't stop thinking. Fine. What if it thought about something so scattered and useless that it could not build any momentum out of it?
sleep doesn't arrive while you're being coherent. so stop being coherent.
how the shuffle works
Beaudoin's version, which he called serial diverse imagining, goes roughly like this. Pick a word. Any ordinary word, five or more letters, no emotional charge. "Blanket", say.
Take the first letter. B. Now think of any word starting with b, and picture it. Bicycle. Hold the image for a moment. Don't tell a story about the bicycle, don't remember whose it was, just see it, then let it go. Another b word. Bridge. See it. Let it go. Bird. Bakery. Bottle. When the b words run dry, move to the next letter of blanket. L. Lemon. Ladder. Lighthouse.
The images must be unrelated. That's the whole mechanism. If you find yourself connecting them, if the bicycle is crossing the bridge, you've started building a narrative and the mind is back on duty. Break it. Jump to something that has nothing to do with the last thing.
What you're doing is imitating, deliberately, what the mind does on its own as it drifts off, which is to produce short, disconnected, faintly absurd images with no thread between them. You can't force sleep. But you can perform a decent impression of the thinking that precedes it, and the brain, which reads its own state to decide what to do next, appears to take the hint.
where it fits
Beaudoin and colleagues presented experimental work on the technique in 2016, and it has since been folded into more than one insomnia app. It's a young idea by the standards of this library, and the research base is much smaller than the one behind stimulus control or sleep restriction. Treat it as a promising tool rather than a settled treatment.
Where it earns its place is with a specific complaint, and one of the most common ones: "My body is exhausted but my brain won't shut up." For that person, breathing exercises can be maddening, because a slow exhale leaves the mind entirely free to carry on planning in the background, and it will.
The shuffle occupies the exact faculty that's causing the problem. You cannot build a worry and picture a random lighthouse at the same time. The mind will not hold both at once, and the shuffle spends that limit on your behalf, deliberately, on rubbish.
If you lose your place, or forget which letter you were on, you're doing it right. Losing your place is the point. People who keep perfect track of the shuffle are usually still awake.