Does counting sheep work?

Does counting sheep actually help you sleep?

Not reliably, and not for the people who most want it to. There is no good evidence that counting sheep helps, and — despite a popular story — no good evidence that it makes things worse. What there is instead is a clear account of why it is the wrong shape of task for a busy mind.

It gets one thing right. Monotony is useful: a mind with nothing interesting in front of it is closer to sleep than one with a puzzle. The trouble is everything else about counting.

Why doesn’t counting sheep work?

It is orderly

The cognitive scientist Luc Beaudoin proposes that the brain reads the shape of your thinking on the way into sleep, and lets sleep in when that shape suggests nothing needs doing. Orderly, sequential thought — one thing following from another — suggests the opposite. Counting is about the most orderly thing a mind can do: every number has exactly one next number.

It is too easy

A task that keeps worries away has to take up enough room to do it. Harvey and Payne, studying people with insomnia in 2002, put the benefit of an engaging imagery task down to it occupying enough “cognitive space” to stop people re-engaging with their worries. Counting takes almost none. The numbers carry on in one part of the mind while the worry carries on in another.

It looks ahead

The next sheep, the next number, the total. As people fall asleep, their thinking stops looking forward — a 2016 analysis of what goes through people’s minds at sleep onset found that future-directed language falls away as sleep approaches (Speth, Schloerscheidt and Speth, 2016). Counting keeps pointing at what comes next.

It is a task you can fail

Lose count and you start again, or wonder whether you should. That is a small performance, and sleep is one of the few things that effort makes worse: the clinical account of how poor sleep takes hold runs from paying attention to sleep, to intending to sleep, to trying (Espie and colleagues, 2006). See why trying to sleep keeps you awake.

Did a study show counting sheep makes it worse?

Not as far as the published record shows. The story usually told is that Oxford researchers found insomniacs who counted sheep took longer to fall asleep than those who did nothing. The study behind it, Harvey and Payne (2002), compared imagery distraction, general distraction and no instructions in 41 people with insomnia. The researchers did predict that general distraction would make people slower to fall asleep — and the abstract says that prediction was not supported. It does not mention sheep.

What the study did find is the useful part: people told to imagine an engaging scene in detail fell asleep sooner than those given no instructions. What cognitive shuffling research actually shows goes through it line by line.

What should you do instead of counting sheep?

Keep the instinct — something simple and repetitive to hold — and drop the order.

• Shuffle instead. Think of a neutral word — bedtime — and for each letter, picture a few unrelated things that start with it: bread, a bicycle, a bee; an egg, an elm, an envelope. No sequence, no total, nothing to get right. That is cognitive shuffling, and it is counting sheep with the counting taken out.
• Picture one calm scene in detail. The imagery task that did well in Harvey and Payne’s study: choose a scene you find engaging but not exciting, and fill it in slowly — the light, the sounds, the textures.
• Stop trying. Every check on whether it is working is a small act of effort. The aim is to give the mind something harmless to do, not to produce sleep.
• If you have been awake a long time, get up. When lying there has stopped being restful and turned into a struggle, go somewhere dim, do something undemanding, and come back when sleepy. See the bed is a cue.
• Let something else do it. Audio that supplies the words or the scenes removes the task altogether — word-by-word shuffles, or plotless sleep stories.

If you like the sheep

Keep them, and stop counting them. Let them wander off one at a time and do something unrelated: one asleep on a haystack, one wearing a scarf, one standing on a broccoli, one the colour of Tuesday. That is the same shuffle with a flock in it — concrete, disconnected, harmless, and impossible to lose count of, because there is no count.

Why is a sleep app called Sheeps against counting sheep?

Because the name is the argument. Counting sheep fails because counting is orderly, and order is what keeps a racing mind awake. Sheeps is what happens when the sheep wander off: the stories are built from harmless, unconnected scenes with nothing to follow and nothing to count, and they end in silence. The wrong plural is deliberate — the first small piece of nonsense, before a story has played.