Getting to sleep quickly at night can sometimes be difficult, no matter how tired we are. Hot weather, stress, anxiety, illness or injury are all factors that could prevent you sleeping well.
In fact the NHS says that one in three of us will experience issues with our sleep at least once in our lives.
To help combat this there are lots of tricks out there designed to help you fall asleep quickly.
One such trick is known as cognitive shuffling, which is said to help people fall asleep in less than five minutes.
Speaking on social media platform TikTok, NHS surgeon Doctor Karan Rajan called it “the biological version of holding down the power button”.
He explained: “When you’re in bed, it’s easy to get into repetitive disrupting thought patterns.
“This can trigger a stress response which keeps you awake. The more you’re awake, the more unwanted thought patterns you get meaning less sleep.
“But cognitive shuffling can break this cycle of overthinking, by taking away your active cognitive effort, it’s the human brain version of picking ‘shuffle’ on your mind Spotify playlist versus having to manually change the song every time – less stress.”
To perform cognitive shuffling you think of a word – preferably with no repeating letters – and then try to think of as many words as possible starting with each letter of that word.
Dr Raj said: “Start by picking a random word like ‘bedtime’ and for each letter of that word think of another word starting with that letter and visualise it.
“So start by thinking of words beginning with ‘B’ until you get bored: ‘baby’, ‘big boss man’, ‘butter’, ‘banana’, ‘Belgium’, ‘beer’, ‘baseball’.
“It’s also important you visualise the words because it’s like you’re simulating micro dreams.
“Those are the fleeting images that occur as you transition to sleep.
“Once you’re bored of one letter, move on to the next. This trick helps to calm racing thoughts. So if your sleep software is malfunctioning, it’s worth giving it a go.”
Also known as Serial Diverse Imagining (SDI), cognitive shuffling was designed by university professor Dr Luc P. Beaudoin.
