A doctor has gone viral – which sounds like the beginning of a dad joke, but isn’t – with a hack for getting back to sleep if you wake at 3am. Cognitive shuffling is apparently the remedy for a spinning mind in the middle of the night. “Work, money, kids, planning, scheduling, problem solving. Your brain is too active to let you sleep – in fact the stress of all these thoughts tells the brain that it’s not safe to sleep, you have to stay on high alert,” says Bradford GP Amir Khan.
Cognitive shuffling interrupts this process, and invites your brain to go into sleep mode. Khan says to do it, choose a random word – like “bed”, or “dream” – then think of objects starting with each letter of it, while picturing them in your head. “Bed begins with b, so maybe bat, binoculars, baseball, banana,” he adds, helpfully, “Once I’ve exhausted the letter b I move on to e – emu, elephant, eyes. And so on.”
Great. Apart from when I happened to mention to my husband that I planned to try cognitive shuffling. We had such a row over suitable starting words, we were awake long past 3am. Without being dramatic, his suggestion made me wonder if I’d married the right person.
The stipulation was something neutral you have no emotional connection to. The examples supplied were “bed” and “dream”. You can clearly see where Dr Khan was going with this, so my word was cloud, and I have to admit, I was pretty happy with that. My husband’s word? Mound.
Obviously he fell at the first hurdle – spot the odd one out: bed, dream, cloud, MOUND. But it’s more than a genre issue. This is what’s going on in his head. Mound.
Imagine discovering this when you have already procreated with the person. Mound is less a word, more a noise, like bleurgh or ugh. It’s a state of mind. A mound mind. Have you met my husband? Forget your Tech Bros and Finance Guys – he’s a Mound Man.
Thanks, Dr Khan. I’ll probably never sleep again.
• Polly Hudson is a freelance writer
