Have trouble falling or staying asleep? Try cognitive shuffling

When Luc Beaudoin was in college, he was having trouble falling asleep. Beaudoin was studying cognitive science and psychology, so he started exper...

When Luc Beaudoin was in college, he was having trouble falling asleep.

Beaudoin was studying cognitive science and psychology, so he started experimenting on himself, and he developed a method that consciously copies what the brain seems to do naturally as we doze off.

"If you wake people up as they’re falling asleep, they often report that they’re having these little micro-dreams,” said Beaudoin, who is a cognitive scientist and professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. These can be seemingly random images or scenes that you may not remember when you wake up, unless you’re interrupted in the process of falling asleep.

Beaudoin developed a technique to mimic this kind of "dream like” thinking - with the hope that he could trick his brain into falling asleep faster. He calls it a serial diverse imagining task or cognitive shuffling, because it’s almost like shuffling a mental deck of cards, each one with a different image or thought.

"I use it and it works for me,” Beaudoin said. In his research he has demonstrated that the technique works for other people, too, though he and other experts emphasized that more studies need to be done to better establish how well it works and why.