Is cognitive shuffling the secret hack to shut off your mind at night?

To be completely honest, I have never related to “counting sheep.” The idea does sound cute, but in my head, the sheep never really behave. One starts running, another wanders off, and suddenly I feel like I am managing a tiny farm instead of falling asleep. Most nights, I lie on my bed, trying every fake-calm trick I know. I flip the pillow to the cooler side. I adjust the blanket. I pretend I don’t hear my own thoughts screaming about the next day’s to-do list. At some point, I even end up doom scrolling in the dark like a raccoon with Wi-fi, convinced I’m the only person awake at 3 am. 

But being chronically online in the early hours of the morning paid off, and I came across something called “cognitive shuffling.”

Luc Beaudoin, a cognitive scientist who developed this technique, clearly understood the chaos of the human mind. In simple words, cognitive shuffling is a sleep method that breaks your thought patterns on purpose. Instead of lying awake while your brain builds a full PowerPoint presentation of everything you have ever done wrong, this technique nudges you to think about harmless, random things that have no emotional charge. The goal here is to help you confuse your overactive mind just enough that it gives up and slips into sleep mode. 

Think of it as the opposite of spiralling. You pick a word, say ‘water’, then list unrelated things that start with each letter. So, W for window, A for avocado, T for tomato, you get the idea. There’s no story to build, no logic to follow. Here, you are basically feeding your brain loose puzzle pieces, so it stops building a five-act theatre play at bedtime. And because the thoughts are light and pointless, your mind starts to drift the same way it does right before you fall asleep. It’s low effort, a little silly, and oddly relaxing.

The struggle to “switch off” 

Most of us don’t actually know how to shut our brains off. We try to, but the moment the lights go off, our minds end up overplaying every interaction we have ever had. You suddenly remember a text you forgot to send. You question every life choice that brought you to this exact moment in bed, eyes wide open, like you’re auditioning for a role in a horror movie. 

A big part of this comes from the way our brains love patterns. The moment you start thinking about one stressful thing, your mind goes, “Great! Let’s pull up five more.” That chain reaction keeps you alert, not sleepy. Cognitive shuffling cuts that chain. You give your mind something that leads nowhere, random, useless words that don’t link to anything emotional or stressful. Your brain can’t build a narrative out of nonsense, and without a narrative, it has nothing to hold on to. Nothing to analyse. Nothing to fix. And that’s when sleep sneaks in.

Once you get past how odd cognitive shuffling sounds, the science is clear. Dr Ashutosh Shah, consultant psychiatrist at Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital in Mumbai, explains that when you sort through random, unrelated words, your attention shifts away from your usual stress cycle. “Cognitive shuffling is intended to activate brain regions that compete with the anxiety and rumination circuits,” he says. In other words, your brain can’t spiral and alphabetise random objects at the same time.

He breaks it down even further: the default mode network (DMN), the part of your brain that loves to overthink, stays active during anxiety and rumination. When you start shuffling unrelated words, “the prefrontal cortex region activates and reduces activation of the DMN,” he explains. That tug-of-war is what helps your mind downshift rather than run laps.

This technique also helps people who get stuck in the space between wakefulness and sleep. Dr Shah points out that cognitive shuffling mimics the hypnagogic state, the blurry stage right before Stage 1 sleep. “It reduces anxiety, reduces hyperarousal, and mimics fragmented thoughts which occur in the hypnagogic state,” he says. Your brain gets a little taste of that sleepy, dreamlike drift, and then it follows through.

Why your brain likes this better than ‘trying to relax’

Clinical psychologist Mehezabin Dordi notes that the real problem starts the moment you try to fall asleep. That effort flips on a mental spotlight. “Your brain often slips into a state called cognitive arousal, a mild ‘threat check’ that activates when you focus too closely on internal states like fatigue, breathing, or sleep itself,” she explains. You can think of it as your brain asking, Are we sleeping yet? No? Should we panic?

According to Dordi, cognitive shuffling taps into two core mechanisms. First, it reduces rumination because random words leave no space for “What if?” spirals. Secondly, it induces cognitive fatigue. Processing unrelated imagery can tire out your attention system in a gentle and predictable way.

“It’s a task that is just engaging enough to hold attention, but not stimulating enough to keep you awake,” she explains. For people who hate meditation or feel like their thoughts are too loud at night, this method gives the mind permission to keep thinking, just not about anything dangerous.

Beyond neuroscience, there’s also the energetic side of restlessness. According to Priya Banerjee Patil, an energy field therapist at Atmann Project, cognitive shuffling quiets the mind by “replacing stressful thoughts with lighter ones,” giving the brain a temporary break from heavier emotional processing. She adds that while it helps the mind ease up, “it doesn’t delete the thoughts completely…they settle in the subconscious.” So yes, it’s not really a deep cleanse, but a reset. 

She also points out that insomnia often goes deeper than racing thoughts. “It definitely has a lot to do with suppressed emotions and feelings that haven’t been processed yet,” she says. Sometimes, you’re not awake because you’re stressed. You’re awake because your system hasn’t had a chance to digest what you’re carrying.

Even on an energetic level, she sees clear patterns. When she tunes into someone’s field, “distinct patterns or frequencies” show up during sleep deprivation, restlessness, overactivity, and emotional overflow. And sometimes, awareness alone begins the shift. “Gaining more awareness and understanding of our own patterns can slowly help us get rid of sleep deprivation,” she explains. It’s less about forcing sleep and more about listening to what’s underneath.

So the next time you’re lying in bed, aggressively willing yourself to “just relax,” maybe ditch the pressure and embrace the chaos. Let your brain think about waffles, staplers, clouds, whatever. If cognitive shuffling works, amazing. If it doesn’t, at least you won’t spend the night replaying that awkward thing you said in 2019. And honestly? That’s already a win.

Lead image credit: Prime Video

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