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What sleep scientists recommend doing to fall asleep more easily Helping yourself get to sleep isn’t just about avoiding screens before bedtime. From cognitive shuffling to sleep-restriction therapy, columnist Helen Thomson finds out what actually works By Helen Thomson 26 June 2025 A restless mind is one of the most common barriers to sleep Andrii Lysenko/Getty Images 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. Your science-backed guide to the easy habits that will help you sleep well, stress less, eat smarter and age better. 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.

At 1:05 AM you are fast asleep after your normal BEDTIME ROUTINE FFS

Now, there is an old saying about the constipated mathematician's cure, he worked it out with pencil and paper.

A few years back I got monitored for sleep apnea. I frequently stop breathing during the night for up to 2 and a half minutes, then wake up briefly, gasping for breath. As I have had it most of my life, it was just normal (like the undiagnosed stomach ulcer I had for 40 years). This made me tired during the day, sometimes, in recent years. I tried the CPAP gimp mask, never slept a wink, so abandoned that, rapidly. Got myself a cheap sleep monitor, and tried a few things out i.e. supper times, bed times, exercise, reading, radio etc. Found that consistent bed times the most effective and sleep pretty well most nights. Now I am naturally an early riser, always have been, so for me, getting up at 3 or 4 AM is not an issue. I 'plod' in the morning, nothing strenuous before I start work. Very occasionally I have reoccurring nightmares. The usual one is a customer never getting served, this seems a common one in hospitality. The other main one is being a passenger on a bus that is sliding backwards, down a leafy lane (the lane is near Henley, went there recently and it has not changed in 50 years). The odd thing about the bus sliding to our demise is that I calmly open a tin of biscuits and hand them out to the other, faceless, passengers, as a final meal. Not going to say about the turkey dream, that is just (expletive deleted)ing weird. So basically, get a cheap step monitor that calculated sleep hours as well, see how far from normal you are, that takes a lot of anxiety out of it as there are hard numbers, not just feelings about it. An afternoon nap can help as well, culturally that was the norm for me growing up, but the (expletive deleted)ing British think it is idle, I miss them, but do them when off work (Archers and Afternoon Play time). I am also lucky that at my age, I don't have to get up to wee (can just do it in bed as I live alone). That must be a bummer, maybe something to look forward to in retirement. YouTube has The Sleepy Scientist channel. I like listening to that. The time between 2AM and 4AM is called the Witching Hour. It is normal for us to be awake, and active, then. Get up if needs be, have a look outside the cave, throw a log in the fire, and ponder life, it is what the Witching Hour is for.

I think one of the problems that many forget is that it is almost impossible to get more than 30% (on average) of the energy out of a combustion process. Domestic gas boilers are at the high end, vehicles are the low end.

As in a back up system, rather than an extra, unneeded system?

I wee into the box of wires.

Almost the same as production engineering. Then we sum it all up. Think those drug cheating cyclists did the same, they called it marginal gains.

Yes, and I call around every other evening to do the same. Thankfully @Pocster is paying for it though his livestream video channel.

May have to get back to you on this when I get home. But yes, the environment (as Einstein said 'it is everything but me') does have an effect, but one can change how one looks and deals with it. Today's Saturday Live had a bit about the power of doing nothing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qrb4

Does it do internal and external temperatures?

Yes. Biomass production, which is really just solar energy collection (as is wind power) has a very low efficiency, somewhere around 0.25%. PV is reliably over 10% for the finished product, electricity. To turn biomass into electricity, the efficiency would be even lower, around 0.12% overall. A slightly off tangent, but related example, came up at work the other day. We have a chef that always wants more, and better, equipment in the kitchen. The financial director (a very smart woman) suggested, because of the new rules about environment and safety, that an induction hob would be best. This was music to my ears. The chef, said they are 'not powerful enough'. So, just to show him that I am bright, and he is thick, I asked him how powerful the current gas hob was. He, predictable, had no idea. So I told him (7 kW per burner). I then asked him how much of that energy actually went into heating the food. Again, no idea, so I explained that to him (roughly 30% when up full on a small pan). I then asked him what experience, in a commercial environment, he had with induction hobs, none was answer. He had used a small, 2 kW, portable one once, at a friend's house, and could not 'control' it and it took ages to heat up some water. Asked if he had read the manual. I don't think he can read to be honest. So how is that related to the above. Simple, the end users often have no idea, and even less interest in, how things really work, but spout old memes as if they are gospel, and sadly, usually get away with it as they are preaching to the converted. Those of us that think that rapidly moving away from fossil fuels is a good idea have to keep banging on about it, those that don't, judging by the obfuscating, really know they are wrong.

Like the French Revolution, it is still too early to say what is happening. As I know you keep good data records, what data are you actually collecting?

Is it the term 'net zero' that some people have a problem with? Do people understand what the 'net' actually means in this context? Have people also forgotten what the end products are that the consumers use?

When I visited, I thought of asking to see it. But decided you and your family were too nice and kind to hear me laughing. Would have been rude.

The English people are an ethnic group and nation native to England, who speak the English language, a West Germanic language, and share a common ancestry, history, and culture.[8] The English identity began with the Anglo-Saxons, when they were known as the Angelcynn, meaning "Angle kin" or "English people".[9] Their ethnonym is derived from the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain around the 5th century AD Or German. What the (expletive deleted), has reducing CO2 emissions become an ancestor issue.

Greatest Of All Time em "There are more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it." Good job the M6 bypasses it now.

@SimonD Well done, and not just on the MCS stuff. I come from an engineering background, but moved over to education 3 decades ago. Public funded education services have totally lost their appeal to me so ended up in hospitality. May seem a strange 'career' but they all have a lot of similarities. The main ones is dealing with people, attention to detail and cost. I find dealing with people terrifying, but put some self created strategies in place, these help me cope. Building anything, be it a skyscraper or lasagna, is about detail at all stages, usually it is the early stages that make the difference. Cost, as opposed to price, is really about value, while those words are often used interchangeably, they need to be used correctly, with the interactions between them understood. Now none of that is of any help when you are down in the dumps, with the holes filling up with shit, so be careful about digging another hole, it may cause a bigger problem later on. Essence of most building is to keep it simple, that does not mean a basic, just that the processes has to be broken down into achievable tasks. If the task requires an extra pair of hand, ask for that help. Also, when undertaking just about any task, make sure you have room to work. This is usually an area of easily clearable space that you put your tools on, or your tea: your mind needs a similar space. If you feel there is no space left, stop. Making a bit more room is not waste, it is part of the efficiency process. The weather. You can't control that, but you can manage the effects. I do not claim to have any SAD (I actually think, with no knowledge, that it is a combination of things), but I know I hate the cold and getting wet (I grew up in the tropics). it is the rain that causes the biggest problems in my opinion. Hammering in a nail becomes hard work when you are dressed up like fisherman, with hammer that is slippy wet and a nail that has fallen into the mud. Sometimes it is just best to stop. So what are the solutions. For me it is to go out to a cafe and read (usually on the phone these days). It is amazing, if you do it on a regular basis, the people you meet. I now know an electrician, a retired book shop owner, a dog trainer (security not pets), a recent graduate mechanical engineer, a highly intelligent young mother, and a couple that look after their grand children. We are all in the cafe for the same reasons, it gives us a space that has noting to do with our everyday work. There are twats there as well, but we all just tut tut about them. So in conclusion, make things simpler, ask for help, occasionally accept you have to stop for a while and accept that you need a bit of clear space (physical or emotional). Oh, and drink tea.

Not quite. You have to take the thermal conductivity into account as well. And the thermally exposed areas where potential differences are. A tonne of concrete will store the same amount of energy as an identical tonne of concrete, but if one is a sphere and another spread over 50m2, they perform very differently.

@Omnibuswoman Anytime.

Yes, and it is why there are, sometimes, no solutions. Though you can put a time element into the mix, which you, in effect, be enthalpy. But as you are working within limits, and tight limits as well, it is probably close enough.

WC uses partial differential equations (PDE). These show a possible solution to a position on a complex curve. In heat equations, complex curves can be though of as rugby ball. If you place a rugby ball on a table, and assume it rests level, then you can easily measure the heights along the length from the table. This will give you a curve. Now imagine that for every 5mm you move, either left or right, towards the pointy end of the ball, that you measure the circumference. This will reduce as you move left or right. So you can see that you have two variables. Positions on the X and Y axis. Now imagine that you throw in a third dimension, Z, and you can see that you could recreate the shape of the rugby ball. This can be written as a PDE with the form: δ2u/δx2 + δ2u/δy2 + δ2u/δz2 = 0 All that is really showing is that if you know two positions you can deduce the third i.e. Flow dT, OAT. This is because of the Laws of Energy Conservation. Easy really.

You could have bought a different home.

Out of interest, who decided to change the specification, and for what reasons.