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- For the Overthinkers: A Sleeping Trick
For the Overthinkers: A Sleeping Trick
team aadam
October 06, 2025
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Hey everyone, hope your mind's been kind to you lately 😄
Here’s some useful reads to keep you sharp!
For the Overthinkers: A Sleeping Trick
Lagom Picks ☕
For the Overthinkers: A Sleeping Trick
One of the most common barriers to sleep is racing thoughts.
You’re exhausted, ready for sleep, but your mind refuses to slow down. Thoughts start looping — replaying the day, planning tomorrow, or fixating on something trivial.
To tackle this, cognitive scientist Dr. Luc Beaudoin developed a technique he calls cognitive shuffling:
You think of a random, neutral word… say, piano.
Then you imagine other words that begin with each letter: pear, parachute, pillow… then igloo, idea, island… and so on.
Each word should be unrelated to the last and emotionally neutral.
In studies, participants who practiced cognitive shuffling before bed reported shorter sleep onset times and reduced mental restlessness.
There’s solid reasoning behind it: when you focus on thinking up random words, your brain’s working memory becomes just busy enough to stop it from wandering into stressful or repetitive thoughts.
In other words, it blocks the mental overactivity that keeps you awake. By filling your head with gentle mental noise, you leave no room for rumination.
Researchers also describe this as mimicking the brain’s natural pre-sleep state; you know that feeling, when thoughts begin to lose structure and drift into dreamlike fragments.
Lagom Picks ☕
📵 Tired of constant pings and scrolling? A growing number of people are switching to “dumbphones” — sleek, minimalist devices built for just calls and texts. Brands like Light, Punkt, and Nokia’s maker HMD are leading the shift.
👦 Educator Christopher Pepper feels most parents wait too long to have difficult talks with their sons. He explains that today’s teens are growing up unsure about masculinity and guided by online influencers. The fix isn’t one “big talk” but many small ones about things like consent, emotions, and online behavior. Boys might feel distant, but research shows they crave honest conversations with adults who keep showing up.
📱 Feeling unmotivated or joyless? You might have a “dopamine deficit,” says Dr. Anna Lembke of Stanford. Too much scrolling, snacking, and stimulation can dull your brain’s reward system. Her fix: a 30-day break from your biggest habit to help your brain reset.
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