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When you can’t fall asleep because you’re too stressed, counting sheep might not be enough. Instead, experts suggest a simple mental trick that can quiet even the busiest thoughts.

The technique is called cognitive shuffling, and it’s a mental exercise that gives your brain something neutral and mildly engaging to focus on, so it can drift toward sleep instead of churning. Here’s what to know — and how to tell if it might work for you.

HOW TO DO COGNITIVE SHUFFLING

Once you go to bed, pick a word that doesn’t carry much meaning to you and is five to 12 letters long. “The word should be emotionally neutral, so not something tied to stress or strong feelings,” says Patricia B. Pedreira, a health psychologist and postdoctoral associate at Duke University Medical Center who specializes in behavioral sleep medicine. “We want to avoid words like money or deadline or anything that might trigger worry chains.” Some of her favorites: blanket, garden, bedtime and kitchen.

With your word in mind, work through it letter by letter, generating as many unrelated words as you can think of for each one. For example, if you chose bedtime, your shuffling might look like this: B: butterfly, basket, bagel. E: envelope, Egypt, emerald (In practice, you’d keep going until your ran out of ideas.) “The key is keeping them unrelated,” Pedreira says. “If your brain starts making connections or building a story, it defeats the purpose.”

Each time you name a new word, spend a few moments visualizing it. “If you landed on the word goat for G, for example, “you’d briefly visualize the goat,” Pedreira says. Hold the image for a few seconds, and then move on to the next letter.

Ideally, you won’t finish the whole word — you’ll have drifted off to dreamland. If you do make it to the end of your word still wide awake, just pick another one and start again.

WHY IT WORKS

When your brain is busy reliving or processing what happened during the day, those thoughts can keep you stuck in an alert, problem-solving mode. “Your job is to change the channel and refocus on something that’s more likely to help you fall asleep,” says Nina Kaiser, a psychologist in San Francisco who teaches cognitive shuffling on the kids and adults she treats.

The technique also gives you something to do besides tossing and turning. “It provides an alternative to lying in bed ruminating,” Pedreira says.

There’s a neurological reason it works too. Your waking brain is dominated by faster brain waves associated with focused, alternative thinking; as you fall asleep, those give way to slower, more meandering ones. “It’s a gentle shifting into a more loose, gentle, kind of random-flowing state,” says Sarah Gray, a psychologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School who specializes for insomnia. Cognitive shuffling helps your brain make that downshift.

That’s also why the technique tends to work better than counting sheep, Gray says. Counting is so monotonous that the mind quickly loses interest, leaving room for the day’s stressors to come rushing back. Cognitive shuffling, by contrast, gives the brain just enough to do without revving it up.

WHO WILL BENEFIT MOST

Cognitive shuffling works best for people who are having trouble falling asleep because of rumination and racing thoughts. “I see this a lot in people who are otherwise healthy sleepers, but they bring stress to bed with them,” Pedreira says.

It’s not a fix for everything that disrupts sleep. Cognitive shuffling won’t address underlying sleep disorders, which need medical management. It also tends not to work as well for people who find visualization more alerting rather than relaxing, Pedreira says.

If you don’t drift off in the first few minutes, don’t panic or start watching the clock. “It’s actually very normal to be awake and have a bit of a active brain for 10 to 15 minutes,” Gray says. The trouble starts when people fixate on not falling asleep instantly, because the worry itself keeps them up. That’s exactly the window cognitive shuffling is built for: something low-key to do while your brain settles, instead of one more thing to stress about.

– Angela Haupt