Cognitive shuffling, read to you

Why is cognitive shuffling hard to do on your own?

The do-it-yourself method asks for two things at once: think of a word, then picture it. The picturing is restful. The thinking-of is not — every next word is a small decision, and a tired, anxious mind turns small decisions into work.

The ways it goes wrong are familiar to anyone who has tried it:

• Losing the thread — which letter was it? — and starting to track your place, which is the opposite of letting go.
• Running dry. The easy words for B run out, and hunting for more wakes you up.
• Words that lead somewhere. A pan becomes tomorrow’s dinner becomes the shopping you forgot.
• Checking whether it is working, which is the one thought guaranteed to keep it from working.

That last one is the core problem. Sleep does not respond to effort — in one experiment, people told to fall asleep as fast as they could, under a mental load, took longer than people told to fall asleep whenever they liked (Ansfield, Wegner and Bowser, 1996). A technique you have to run is still something you are doing. Why trying to sleep keeps you awake covers the research on effort.

Guided shuffling removes the part that takes effort. You do not choose the next thing; it arrives.

What kinds of cognitive shuffling audio are there?

Single words, with pauses

The research form, called serial diverse imagining: one concrete word, a pause long enough to picture it, then another with nothing to do with the first. The trial that tested it used an app playing a word about every eight seconds (the eight-second gap explains the rhythm). Most cognitive shuffling apps do this, usually with a choice of voice and pace.

Short descriptions to imagine

Instead of a bare word, a short phrase that gives the image a little more to hold. mySleepButton, the app made by the technique’s inventor, Luc Beaudoin, reads descriptions like this for the listener to imagine.

Scenes without a story

The same principle stretched into scenes: a place, some objects, a colour, then somewhere else entirely, joined by nothing that could become a plot. This is what Sheeps does, and it is ours, so weigh the description accordingly: a new story, written for you, sentences that shrink as it goes and pauses that grow, and silence at the end. The story form keeps the shuffle’s rules — unconnected, harmless, no goal — and has not itself been clinically tested. Plotless sleep stories explains why it is built that way.

Your own voice

A recording you make yourself costs nothing and carries no voice you have to get used to. The next section explains how.

Which kind suits you?

• If the worries rush back into the gaps between single words, try something denser: descriptions, or scenes, which give attention a little more to hold.
• If a narrator pulls you in and you start listening for what happens next, go the other way — single words — or make sure the story has no plot to follow.
• If sound underneath keeps you listening, choose audio that lets you turn it off. Several shuffle apps add music or rain; Sheeps plays nothing under the voice.
• If you cannot picture things at all, a voice still gives attention somewhere to rest: see cognitive shuffling with aphantasia.
• If you are still awake at the end, that is not failure. Let it finish, and let the silence be the next thing.

The apps are compared side by side here, with what each one reads, in which languages, and at what price.

How do you record your own?

1. Pick thirty or forty words from a cognitive shuffling word list, never two from the same group in a row.
2. Open a voice-memo app somewhere quiet, and speak lower and slower than you normally would.
3. Say one word. Count slowly to eight in your head. Say the next.
4. No music, no introduction, and no sign-off at the end — just stop, and leave a minute of silence before you end the recording.
5. Play it in bed with the screen locked and the volume low enough that you have to be still to hear it.

A recording of about forty words at that pace runs for five or six minutes. Record a few, so that you are not hearing the same order every night: a list you know by heart starts to predict itself, and prediction is the thing the shuffle exists to prevent.

Is guided shuffling better than doing it yourself?

Nobody has tested one against the other. What exists is one trial of the guided form: in a study presented at SLEEP 2016, university students with a racing mind at bedtime who used serial diverse imagining reported feeling less wound up, trying less hard to sleep, and sleeping better — about as much as with a structured problem-solving exercise (Beaudoin and colleagues, 2016). It did not report how quickly they fell asleep. What the research actually shows sets out that trial and its limits.

So guided shuffling is the form with the evidence, such as it is — and the do-it-yourself form is the same idea, free and always available. If one turns into work, try the other.