What sleep scientists recommend doing to fall asleep more easily

Perhaps it’s age or the hot weather, but sleep is becoming a rare commodity in my household. Between my husband’s insomnia, my children’s high spirits and my racing mind, it feels as if our nights are often as lively as our days. As my social media feed started serving up videos of people recommending a technique called “cognitive shuffling” for drifting off to sleep, I wondered if it really worked and, if not, whether there were any other cognitive tricks I could use instead.

One of the most common barriers to good sleep is a restless mind, and this is what cognitive shuffling tries to help with. Luc Beaudoin at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, developed the technique as a way of steering your attention away from spiralling thoughts and worries before bed.

How to do cognitive shuffling

The idea is simple: choose a random word, let’s say “plonk”, then try to think of all the words you can conjure using each of its letters. Plimsol, puma, prize… lion, lemon, levitate… and so on. As each word comes to mind, spend time picturing it – a process that mimics the spontaneous images characteristic of the “hypnogogic state”, that transient period between wakefulness and sleep.

Good sleepers often report imagery in the form of hallucinations before sleep, whereas bad sleepers report planning and problem solving, says Sophie Bostock, a doctor and sleep consultant. “It’s not that we need to make the mind blank (and in fact, that can be counter-productive), but we do want to steer it away from anything too logical,” she says.

Cognitive shuffling seems to promote this more fluid way of thinking. In a small study of 154 students who reported problems with “pre-sleep arousal”, it did indeed help them reduce the time it took to get to sleep.

That said, there is no gold-standard research on cognitive shuffling – or, for that matter, any direct comparisons of bedtime cognitive techniques discussed in the scientific literature, something Beaudoin himself acknowledged to me.

So instead, I turned to some of the world’s best sleep scientists to ask what they would recommend to someone hoping to quieten their mind at night.

What works for insomnia

Kevin Morgan, who established the Clinical Sleep Research Unit at Loughborough University, UK, pointed me straight in the direction of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBTI). “CBTI is the internationally recommended, evidence-based first line treatment for insomnia disorder,” he says.

This therapy works by teaching you how to control intrusive thoughts, which would otherwise elevate cognitive arousal (mental alertness) and increase levels of hormones like adrenaline, interfering with the normal process of sleep. CBTI also tackles other aspects of insomnia from a variety of angles, such as helping people conquer their nerves around their lack of sleep or teaching them meditation techniques.

While effective, CBTI takes around six to eight weeks to learn, so it has a high dropout rate.

Nevertheless, elements of CBTI may be useful on their own. For instance, a 2021 randomised controlled trial showed that a popular meditation app can improve depression and anxiety in people with sleep disturbance, with the effects driven by improvements in pre-sleep arousal.

Morgan says the component of CBTI that appears to have the largest effect is sleep-restriction therapy. This counterintuitive-sounding technique, which involves trying to get the number of hours spent in bed as close to the number of hours spent asleep as possible, “has proved very effective”, he says.

This was similar to the advice I received from Colin Espie, professor of sleep medicine at the University of Oxford. The thing to remember, he tells me, is that you can’t get to sleep. “No one can or ever has,” he says. “You can only fall asleep. It’s an involuntary behaviour that happens to us, and for us, but not by us. So go to bed when you feel ‘sleepy tired’ and not before. Let sleep come to you.”

Create a sleep sanctuary

Another easy tip to enact is something several people advised: make sure your room is a sleep sanctuary. “A sleep-friendly space is critical,” says Joseph Dzierzewski, senior vice president of research and scientific affairs at the US National Sleep Foundation. Others concurred. “The single most important recommendation is to develop a bedroom that is conducive to sleep – cool, dark, quiet and uncluttered,” says Emerson Wickwire, head of sleep medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Of course, several people pointed out that you should avoid screens before bed – the blue light from them can suppress melatonin production and mess with our circadian rhythms, making it harder to sleep and giving your mind more time to start thinking. But Dzierzewski points out that consuming stimulating content, like the news or social media, before bedtime is also emotionally arousing, which could stimulate an anxious mind. “Unfortunately, more than half of Americans say they look at screens within an hour of bedtime or in bed before sleep,” he says.

Something I might try with my kids is the practice of gratitude, recommended by Bostock, who points to research showing its effectiveness for helping improve pre-sleep worries. “It’s very difficult to feel grateful and stressed at the same time,” she says.

Perhaps the best advice I received wasn’t a tip or trick to silence our collective thoughts at night, but a simple reminder to take the problem seriously. Many experts, including Aparajitha Verma, a neurologist specialising in sleep medicine at UTHealth Houston in Texas, emphasised the importance of prioritising sleep. Morgan also made it clear that anyone with insomnia “should seek professional help and engage with a recommended programme of treatment ASAP”.

Chronic poor sleep is linked with increased risk of dementia, type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease and even some cancers. That itself is enough to keep you awake at night. As is the thought of “uncluttering” my kids’ room. But it’s something I’ll be putting to the top of my to-do list as a matter of urgency – hopefully it’s a good first step towards a quiet night’s rest for all of us.