Article #243058

Cognitive shuffling is apparently the remedy for a spinning mind at 3am. But it made me question all my choices

A doctor has gone viral – which sounds like the beginning of a dad joke, but isn’t – with a hack for getting back to sleep if you wake at 3am. Cognitive shuffling is apparently the remedy for a spinning mind in the middle of the night. “Work, money, kids, planning, scheduling, problem solving. Your brain is too active to let you sleep – in fact the stress of all these thoughts tells the brain that it’s not safe to sleep, you have to stay on high alert,” says Bradford GP Amir Khan.

Cognitive shuffling interrupts this process, and invites your brain to go into sleep mode. Khan says to do it, choose a random word – like “bed”, or “dream” – then think of objects starting with each letter of it, while picturing them in your head. “Bed begins with b, so maybe bat, binoculars, baseball, banana,” he adds, helpfully, “Once I’ve exhausted the letter b I move on to e – emu, elephant, eyes. And so on.”