The cognitive shuffle works like this: once you are in bed, you pick an emotionally neutral word such as BEDTIME, then use its letters as prompts to imagine a stream of unrelated things — one brief, hazy image at a time. The technique was designed by Luc Beaudoin, a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University in Canada; its formal name is serial diverse imagining. It needs no equipment and runs entirely in your head.
This article is the full walkthrough of this one method — the steps, a complete example, and the adjustments. For the broader playbook on sleepless nights, see When You Cannot Fall Asleep.
Here is the whole method at a glance. Until it becomes automatic, these five lines are all you need to remember.
- Pick an emotionally neutral word (for example, BEDTIME)
- Take its first letter, B, and think of words that start with it (boat, bouquet...)
- Picture each one hazily for a few seconds, then let it go
- When you get bored, move to the next letter, E
- When the word runs out, start again with a new word
What is the cognitive shuffle?
The cognitive shuffle is a sleep-onset technique designed by Dr. Luc Beaudoin, a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University, based on his theory of how the mind behaves around sleep onset. He also built mySleepButton, an app that runs the technique for you, and his official site publishes do-it-yourself instructions for doing it with no app at all. "Cognitive shuffling," "the cognitive shuffle," and "serial diverse imagining" all refer to the same method.
The idea rests on an observation: in the moments before sleep, thinking naturally loses its thread and dissolves into disconnected fragments and images. While your thoughts run in straight, logical lines — planning, rehearsing, problem-solving — sleep stays at a distance. So instead of waiting for your thoughts to scatter on their own, you scatter them on purpose.
It is not a technique for forcing your mind to go blank. It is a procedure for handing your attention, piece by piece, to harmless miscellaneous images until the worried thread has nothing left to hold.
How to do the cognitive shuffle (4 steps)
Darken the room, get into bed, and close your eyes before you start. Everything happens silently, in your head.
1. Pick an emotionally neutral word
Choose one word as the night's starting point. Two conditions:
- It should stir no feelings. Avoid anything connected to work, people, worries, or things you care strongly about
- It should have few repeating letters, so the prompts stay varied
Beaudoin's instructions recommend a word of at least five letters — BEDTIME is the standard example. Concrete, boring nouns work best. A word like DEADLINE fails the first condition: it points straight back at real life.
2. Generate words from the first letter
Take the first letter and let words that start with it surface on their own. For BEDTIME, the letter B: boat, bouquet, bread, beach, button. A pace of one word every five to ten seconds is plenty. If nothing comes, do not hunt — just take whatever drifts up.
3. Picture each one hazily, then let it go
Turn each word into a brief, low-effort image. For boat: a small boat sitting on calm water, nothing more. You do not need vivid detail. And when you move to the next word, drop the previous image completely.
This is the heart of the method: do not let the images connect into a story. If the boat starts sailing toward the beach where someone is waiting, your thinking has found its thread again. Keep each image separate — summon, hold briefly, release.
4. Move to the next letter; start a new word when one runs out
When a letter gets boring or stops producing words, move on — from B to E, then D, then T. If you finish the whole word and are still awake, pick a new seed word and begin again.
Finishing is not the goal. Falling asleep partway through, with no memory of where you stopped, is what success looks like here.
A full round, word by word
Here is one pass starting from BEDTIME. Feel free to copy it as is.
- B — boat (resting on calm water) → bouquet (wrapped in paper) → bread (a loaf on a wooden board) → button (a spare button in a jar)
- E — elephant (walking slowly) → engine (an old train engine) → envelope (unopened on a desk) → eagle (circling far up)
- D — duck (gliding across a pond) → doorway (an open blue door) → dune (sand shifting in wind) → drum (resting in a corner)
A few seconds per word, a few minutes for the whole round. If you drift off in the middle, that is the end; if you reach the end, move to a new word.
Some neutral seed words to keep on hand, so you are not deciding at the pillow — pick one before you turn the lights off:
blanket / harbor / pencil / lantern / meadow / kettle / marble / willow / canyon / piano
Why scattering your thoughts brings sleep closer
In Beaudoin's theory, after lights-out the mind can run in two broad modes. Structured thinking — planning, reviewing, solving — keeps the brain in a state that holds sleep off. Disconnected, fragmentary imagery, on the other hand, is the kind of mental activity that naturally accompanies the slide into sleep. A racing mind, in this view, keeps signaling "there is still work to do."
The shuffle is designed to starve that structured thinking of a foothold. Fed a stream of unrelated words and images, rumination loses its thread; at the same time, you are recreating, ahead of schedule, something like the natural pre-sleep scatter of thought.
One honest caveat: this explanation is the designer's own theory, not an established account of how the brain works. Beaudoin's site itself describes the understanding as speculative. Take the mechanism as a design philosophy, and let your own nights tell you whether the method fits.
Does it work? The state of the research
To set expectations honestly, it helps to separate what is known from what is not.
The evidence is still small-scale, mostly from the designer
The technique was tested with university students in work presented as a conference abstract at SLEEP 2016, the joint annual meeting of the main U.S. sleep societies, by Beaudoin and colleagues. A further abstract on the theory and proposed testing appeared at World Sleep 2019. Both are preliminary, small-scale reports involving the designer himself; independent, large, peer-reviewed randomized trials are still essentially absent. The official site explicitly makes no promise that it will work for any particular person.
The direction fits existing knowledge
That said, the broader move — steering attention away from rumination to ease sleep onset — overlaps with approaches long used in cognitive behavioral strategies for insomnia. But overlap in direction is not evidence for this specific procedure. What can fairly be said: it is a low-risk, zero-cost technique worth a try, not a verified treatment.
Expect it to fit some people and not others
The official instructions themselves list the limits: it tends to fail on nights when you are too exhausted to generate words, or for people who find the word-hunting itself a chore. If a week of trying leaves your sleep onset unchanged — or leaves you more awake — switch to something else without guilt.
Who it suits, and when to skip it
It suits the person whose mind starts up the moment the lights go off — tomorrow's schedule, today's replay, worries with no answer. The shuffle gives that attention somewhere harmless to sit. Being comfortable with hazy mental images is the other requirement.
There are also signs it is not your method:
- The word search turns into a quiz and your brain wakes up to play
- Forming mental images is genuinely difficult for you
- You are too drained to produce words at all
On those nights, working from the body instead of the mind tends to fit better. The military sleep method leads with muscle release — face, shoulders, chest, legs, in order — making it the body-first counterpart to the thought-scattering shuffle. The steps are in The Military Sleep Method.
Whichever you use, do not turn it into an effort to sleep. The moment you start trying hard, arousal wins.
Tonight's example (for a 23:00 bedtime)
The natural slot for this method is right after lights out. For a 23:00 bedtime, the evening can look like this:
- 22:30 — dim the lights, put the phone on its charger
- 22:45 — finish the small tasks: teeth, tomorrow's glass of water
- 22:50 — pick tonight's seed word (say, harbor)
- 22:55 — get into bed, lights off
- 22:56 — close your eyes and start with the first letter
That is a minimal static plan you can copy onto paper as is. If you want a fuller last half hour, A 30-Minute Wind-Down Routine walks through one.
To rebuild the timing around your own bedtime, the Evening Routine Builder takes your bedtime and the time you have, and lays out the steps to lights-out with clock times attached. After its final slow-breathing slot, continue into the shuffle once the lights are off. It is free, runs in the browser, and needs no login. For the thinking behind a whole evening, see How to Build an Evening Routine.
When it does not work
Words will not come, or the search feels like a chore
Slow down — there is no required pace. You can return to an earlier word and picture a different scene for it, or loosen the rules and simply watch whatever images drift up, letters aside. Beaudoin's own instructions note that some people find spelling through a word tedious. On nights when generating anything feels like work, a counting-based breath is a lighter alternative; the counts and rounds are in How to Do 4-7-8 Breathing.
The images keep connecting back into worries
You notice the pictures have become a story, and the story has drifted into today's meeting or tomorrow's list. This is the most common sticking point. The fix is simply to notice and move to the next letter, without scolding yourself — catching the drift and returning is the method working as designed.
If the same worry interrupts every night, write it down before getting into bed so your head no longer has to hold it. Writing happens before bed; shuffling happens after lights out — split by time, the two never collide. Journaling Before Bed covers a simple way to do it.
Still awake after that
Even good sleepers normally take 10 to 20 minutes to fall asleep — see How Long Should It Take to Fall Asleep? for the numbers. If the shuffle has run long with no drowsiness in sight, getting up briefly for a quiet activity is one reasonable option; When You Cannot Fall Asleep walks through that. Do not clock-watch — measuring the time is itself arousing.
And on a night that has already run very late, If I Sleep Now shows what waking up would look like if you slept now, which makes it easier to cut your losses and switch off.
FAQ
How is this different from counting sheep?
Counting sheep repeats one monotonous image, and boredom leaves gaps for worries to flood back in. The shuffle switches to a new word and a new scene every few seconds, so your attention has less downtime — that is the design difference.
Cognitive shuffle or the military sleep method — which should I pick?
When the problem is a racing mind, scatter thoughts with the shuffle; when the problem is a tense, wound-up body, release it with the military method. They pair well too: run the military steps first to loosen the body, then move into the shuffle.
Can I use the same word every night?
You can, but a repeated word produces the same associations and gets stale. Keeping five to ten neutral words and rotating nightly is easier to sustain. The list in this article works as is.
Do I need the app?
No. The mySleepButton app speaks prompts aloud, but the official site publishes do-it-yourself instructions, and the four steps here follow them. Since a lit screen and notifications work against you in bed, check the steps, then put the screen away before you start. Phone Before Bed covers keeping that distance.
Does it help when I wake up in the middle of the night?
Yes. Beaudoin presents it as useful both for falling asleep initially and for getting back to sleep after waking during the night. Skip the clock and simply start with a fresh word.
A note
This article is general guidance, not medical advice. The cognitive shuffle is a sleep-onset technique, not a validated treatment. If sleeplessness persists for weeks, or comes with strong daytime sleepiness or low mood, consider talking to a sleep clinic or another qualified professional.
Sources
- Luc P. Beaudoin, mySleepButton, "The Cognitive Shuffle Do-It-Yourself Instructions" — https://mysleepbutton.com/en/support/do-it-yourself-cognitive-shuffle-sdi/
- Luc P. Beaudoin, mySleepButton, "The Cognitive Science" — https://mysleepbutton.com/en/support/the-cognitive-science/
- Beaudoin LP, Digdon N, O'Neill K, et al. (2016) — conference abstract presented at SLEEP 2016 (APSS joint annual meeting), testing the technique with university students
- Beaudoin L, Lemyre A, Pudlo M, Bastien C, Sleep Medicine 2019;64(Suppl 1):S29 — abstract from World Sleep 2019
- Time, "The Sleep Trick That Actually Quiets a Racing Mind" (2026) — https://time.com/article/2026/05/05/cognitive-shuffling-how-to-sleep/