Cognitive Shuffling: Does the Random-Word Sleep Trick Actually Work?

Written by the Nuvirox Research Team

Short answer: plausible mechanism, thin evidence, essentially zero downside. Cognitive shuffling — formally, serial diverse imagining — is a bedtime technique in which you pick a word, take its letters one at a time, and briefly picture unrelated objects starting with each letter. Cat. Cloud. Canoe. The theory is that incoherent imagery is incompatible with the organised, narrative worrying that keeps people awake, and also mimics the loose associative thinking that naturally precedes sleep. The theory is well argued. The evidence behind it is one poster.

What is cognitive shuffling and how do you actually do it?

The technique was developed by Luc Beaudoin, a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University, and first described in a 2013 research paper. His argument is that the sleep-onset control system responds to features of mentation, not just to tiredness — and that certain kinds of thinking are actively somnolent while others are actively insomnolent. Coherent, self-referential, temporally organised thought (tomorrow's meeting, last week's argument) is the insomnolent kind.

The do-it-yourself version:

• Pick a neutral word with no personal charge. Blanket, orange, window.
• Take the first letter. Think of a word starting with it, picture the object briefly, then move to another word with the same letter.
• After a handful of images, move to the next letter of your seed word and repeat.
• Do not build a story. If two images connect into a narrative, that is the failure mode — drop them and start a new letter.

Beaudoin also built an app that supplies the words for you, on the reasoning that generating genuinely random imagery unaided is harder than it sounds, because human memory is relentlessly associative.

What human studies actually show

The direct evidence is a single conference presentation. Beaudoin and colleagues presented findings at SLEEP 2016, the joint meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society. In 154 university students reporting excessive cognitive pre-sleep arousal, participants were assigned to a serial diverse imagining task, to structured problem solving (an established technique done before bedtime), or to both. Repeated-measures analyses showed significant improvements in cognitive and somatic pre-sleep arousal, sleep effort and sleep quality relative to baseline, with large partial eta-squared values. The reported conclusion was that serial diverse imagining was about as effective as structured problem solving.

That study has important limitations, and they are not minor. It was a poster, not a peer-reviewed journal article with full methods. The design compared two active techniques against baseline rather than against a placebo or waitlist control, so regression to the mean and expectancy effects are not excluded. The sample was university students during an academic term, not a clinical insomnia population. No objective sleep measurement was involved.

The indirect evidence is stronger and older. Harvey and Payne randomised 41 people meeting criteria for insomnia to one of three instruction sets for a single experimental night: distract using an interesting and engaging imagery task, distract in any way you like, or no instructions at all. The imagery group reported falling asleep faster and rated their unwanted pre-sleep thoughts as less frequent and less distressing. The theoretical framing was ironic process theory — the finding that trying not to think about something reliably increases how often you think about it.

The honest counterweight: engaging is not the same as random. Harvey and Payne's successful condition used absorbing, pleasant, coherent scenes — a meadow, a waterfall, a holiday. Cognitive shuffling deliberately does the opposite by keeping images disconnected. The 2002 trial supports imagery over rumination; it does not establish that incoherent imagery outperforms coherent imagery. That specific comparison has not been run.

Does this mean counting sheep works?

No, and the distinction is instructive. Counting sheep is monotonous rather than absorbing; it demands too little attention to displace worry, so the mind wanders back. In the Harvey and Payne data, the generic distraction condition did not outperform no instructions at all. Cognitive shuffling is designed to sit in the middle of that range: interesting enough to occupy working memory, meaningless enough not to generate emotion or planning.

What cognitive shuffling will not do

It will not address the reasons your mind is racing in the first place. If your pre-sleep thinking is dominated by genuine unresolved problems, structured problem solving earlier in the evening — writing the worry and the next action down, hours before bed — is the better-established approach, and it was the comparator in Beaudoin's own study.

It will not fix a body clock problem. If you lie down at 10pm and your circadian system is not producing a sleep signal until midnight, no mental task will bridge that gap. That is a timing issue and belongs with the broader question of why you cannot fall asleep.

It will not resolve insomnia disorder. Persistent difficulty three or more nights a week for three months warrants a real treatment pathway. See a doctor if poor sleep is affecting your mood, memory, driving or work performance, particularly if the change came on suddenly.

How to give it a fair trial

• Use it after the get-out-of-bed rule, not instead of it. Awake and frustrated after 20 minutes still means get up.
• Keep the images boring. If an image sparks a feeling or a plan, that image is disqualified. Move on immediately.
• Do not evaluate whether it is working. Monitoring your own sleep onset is a reliable way to prevent it. This is the same trap as timing yourself with a breathing technique.
• Give it two weeks. Single-night verdicts on any sleep technique are close to meaningless given how much night-to-night variation exists.
• Pair it with a wind-down that lowers physical arousal. Mental and somatic arousal are separable; addressing only one leaves the other in place.

Frequently asked questions

Is cognitive shuffling the same as a body scan or meditation?

No. Meditation and body scans typically train sustained, single-pointed attention. Cognitive shuffling does the reverse — it deliberately fragments attention across unconnected images. Some people find one comfortable and the other agitating.

Does the app work better than doing it myself?

There is no trial comparing the two. The theoretical argument for an app is that people struggle to generate genuinely unrelated images without a prompt, since memory pulls toward association. The practical argument against is that using a phone in bed brings its own problems.

What if I keep making the images into a story?

That is normal and it is the whole difficulty of the technique. Shorten your dwell time on each image — a second or two, not five — and switch letters more often.

Is there any risk?

None that has been documented. It is a mental exercise with no physiological intervention. The realistic risk is opportunity cost: spending weeks on a lightly evidenced technique instead of pursuing treatment that has stronger support.

Why is there so little research on something this popular?

Behavioural sleep techniques with no commercial product attached are difficult to fund, and app-based interventions are often evaluated internally rather than published. Popularity and evidence are largely independent variables in this space.

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The bottom line

Cognitive shuffling deserves the benefit of the doubt and not much more than that. The underlying theory is coherent, the indirect evidence for imagery over rumination is real, and the technique costs nothing and carries no known risk. But the direct evidence is one unpublished poster in students, and the specific claim that incoherent imagery beats engaging imagery has never been tested. Try it, keep expectations proportionate to the evidence, and do not let it delay a proper insomnia treatment if that is what you actually need.

References

1. Beaudoin LP. The possibility of super-somnolent mentation: a new information-processing approach to sleep-onset acceleration and insomnia exemplified by serial diverse imagining. Cognitive Productivity Research Project, Simon Fraser University, 2013 (summit.sfu.ca item 12143).
2. Beaudoin LP, Digdon N, O'Neill K, Rachor GS. Serial diverse imagining task: a new remedy for bedtime complaints of worrying and other sleep-disruptive mental activity. Poster, SLEEP 2016 (AASM/SRS joint meeting), Denver, CO.
3. Harvey AG, Payne S. The management of unwanted pre-sleep thoughts in insomnia: distraction with imagery versus general distraction. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2002;40(3):267–277. PMID: 11863237.
4. Edinger JD, Arnedt JT, Bertisch SM, et al. Behavioral and psychological treatments for chronic insomnia disorder in adults: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine systematic review, meta-analysis, and GRADE assessment. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2021 (PMC7853211).
5. Jansson-Fröjmark M, et al. Stimulus control for insomnia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sleep Research, 2024. DOI: 10.1111/jsr.14002.

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice.