Social Work Corner – Mental Health Awareness – May 2025

/ Social Work Corner

Mental Health Awareness: Cognitive Shuffling

These are heavy times. As advocates you carry immense emotional weight, especially now, when both your work and the clients you serve are under increasing scrutiny and strain. In stressful times like these, it’s not uncommon for sleep to suffer. You might end the day mentally drained, yet find your mind still racing with worries, tasks, and unanswered questions. When your mind is constantly “on” sleep can feel out of reach, and your mental health may quietly take the hit. Amid your vital work supporting unaccompanied children and youth, it’s easy to put your mental health in the back seat, but you must prioritize your own well-being for the long game.

As we observe Mental Health Awareness Month this May, we want to take a moment to acknowledge your mental health and introduce a simple, but powerful sleep technique called cognitive shuffling. This tool can be used to help you get rest, recover, and keep going.

Cognitive Shuffling:

Cognitive Shuffling is a technique developed by Canadian cognitive scientist Luc Beaudion. It’s designed to help you fall asleep by gently distracting your mind with random and simple thoughts and images¹. Science shows that as we naturally drift toward sleep, our thinking becomes more disorganized and less logical. This technique involves thinking of random unrelated words to prevent your mind from fixating on stressful, anxiety-inducing thoughts, or worries about your unending to-do list. This technique trains your brain to decompress your thoughts to mimic the natural descent into sleep by deliberately introducing randomness.

Cognitive shuffling helps replicate the kind of mental activity your brain naturally goes through just before falling asleep, where your thoughts become fragmented and nonsensical. This shift reduces what's called cognitive arousal (the state of being mentally “on”) allowing your body and brain to relax into sleep mode.

How to Practice Cognitive Shuffling:

  1. Create a sleep environment that is calm and relaxing: Dim or turn-off the lights, adjust the temperature to your comfort, and eliminate distractions if you can.
  2. Pick a neutral word, something simple like “cloud.”
  3. Break the word into individual letters- “C-L-O-U-D.”
  4. For each letter think of as many unrelated words that start with that letter:

    C: candle, circle, castle
    L: lemon, ladder, lightbulb
    O: orange, octopus, oval…
    (Don’t worry if you run out—just move on to the next letter. This isn't about perfection.)

  5. Visualize each word briefly, like flipping through a deck of images. Keep going until you drift back to sleep. The randomness keeps your mind busy, but calm.

If you often find yourself overthinking at night or lying awake with a mind that just won’t quit, cognitive shuffling might help. This technique can be implemented as part of your sleep hygiene with other sleep strategies that you might already practice. For example,

  • Relaxation techniques like deep breathing
  • Relaxing the muscles in your body
  • Creating a relaxing bedtime environment like sleeping with a noise cancelling machine, turning off the lights, and/or adjusting your desired sleeping room- temperature
  • Limiting screen time before sleep

Your sleep hygiene can impact both your mental and physical well-being. Getting the rest, you need is more than self-care, it’s a key step towards long-term strength and sustainability. By nurturing your own well-being, you're not stepping away from the mission. You're strengthening your ability to stay in it for the long haul.

Resources:

¹Calm, How Cognitive Shuffling can quiet racing thoughts at bedtime, last visited April 18,2025, available at https://www.calm.com/blog/cognitive-shuffling

By CILA social work team

*Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with a licensed mental health provider for personalized support.