December 11, 2025
Bruce Mars/UNSPLASH.COM
Cognitive shuffling is a mental exercise that helps people fall asleep by using words to distract the mind from worries.
Longer, darker days during this time of year leave many people feeling sluggish. But people still may find themselves struggling to fall asleep at night, their minds racing about upcoming family gatherings, holiday financial stressors or the everyday worries that persist any time of year.
It can be tempting to try to find a quick fix by popping supplements, such as melatonin and valerian, or by using over-the-counter medications, such as Benadryl and Tylenol PM, as soporifics. But before reaching for sleep aids, you might want to try these three hacks.
Cognitive shuffling is a sort of mental game, or trick, that Dr. Luc Beaudoin, of Simon Fraser University in Canada, came up with more than four decades ago, when he was having trouble falling asleep.
"People often have limited time to sleep, so it is important for cognitive scientists to develop methods to help them (a) quickly and reliably fall asleep initially and (b) promptly return to sleep after early awakenings," Beaudoin wrote in a 2013 paper. "There are effective forms of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) for sleep. However, many people who would like to accelerate their (sleep onset) cannot or will not seek psychological treatment for this."
Cognitive shuffling directs the mind away from what Beaudoin termed "insomnolent thoughts," such as worrying, to "somnolent thoughts" that are more neutral and dreamlike.
The technique involves thinking of a word and then taking each letter of the word and coming up with other words that begin with that letter. When you tire of the first letter of the original word, you move to the next letter and think of other words starting with that letter, and so on, until you run through the whole word.
For instance, with cat, you would think of words that start with C, such as cap, cup, climb, catacomb. Then you would move to A: apple, airplane, astronomer, until you tire of that and then begin thinking of words that start with T.
When you've gone through the whole original word, you can start over with the same one or move onto another word. Visualizing experiences or movements related to the words, like petting a cat, can help, Beaudoin said.
"These images don't create a clear story line and may help your brain to disengage from problem solving or worry loops," Beaudoin told the New York Times earlier this year.
A small study of cognitive shuffling that Beaudoin conducted in 2016 found the technique was as effective as writing worries and thoughts down before going to bed – though the participants asked to do both techniques preferred cognitive shuffling. Beaudoin also developed an app to help people with cognitive shuffling.
Not enough research is available to recommend cognitive shuffling as a main treatment for insomnia, but it can be very helpful to some people, sleep experts told the New York Times.
Another hack that has become popular on social media involves closing your eyes, rolling your eyeballs side to side, up and down, and round and round — first clockwise and then counterclockwise, Bustle reported.
Slowly rolling the eyes this way and that may mimic natural eye movements during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, or it may just distract the mind from worries, sleep experts told the Huffington Post. This approach has not been studied specifically for sleep, so the evidence is currently anecdotal.
Perhaps the easiest hack you can try — though it may not put your wakefulness entirely to bed — is to wear socks at night.
Sleeping in a cool environment, somewhere between 60 and 67 degrees, is best, sleep experts say. Surprisingly, wearing clean, breathable, loose-fitting socks to warm your feet at night helps lower the body's core temperature, signaling the brain to "get ready for sleep," Dr. Indira Gurubhagavatula, a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, told the Washington Post earlier this year.
"When we warm up our feet by wearing socks, the blood vessels under the skin dilate not just in the feet but everywhere," said Gurubhagavatula, also a professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "This vasodilation allows warm blood to come to the surface, and as it keeps circulating and coming to the skin, body heat is shed, and core body temperature eventually drops."
