Sponsor: mySleepButton
I’m honored to be sponsored by mySleepButton this week. It’s an iPhone app that helps you fall asleep using some cutting-edge techniques. Check it out!
What keeps you from falling asleep in bed? Being preoccupied with important concerns. This effectively tells your brain’s sleep switch, “Back off! Keep me awake!”
My preferred anti-insomnia iOS app, mySleepButton, is designed to trigger your internal “sleep switch” by getting you to do the cognitive shuffle. That is to imagine a series of unrelated persons, places, things and scenes, as if you were falling asleep.
All you need to do is press the app’s “Put Me to Sleep” button and imagine each disparate, carefully selected item spoken to you. For example: Pluto, lake, mountain biking, painting a portrait, vegetables…
As you entertain these sundry images, you simply can’t be thinking about your concerns. This stress-free, imaginative state of mind can fool your sleep switch into putting you to sleep, because micro-dreams and loose thinking are potent sleep signals.
Other sleep apps are comparatively unimaginative. They encourage you to be passive, with white noise, music, relaxation, or meditation. But then your mind comes back to its concerns.
mySleepButton even has a fun drawing mode that streams items for you to draw in your head as you doze off.
mySleepButton is the brain child of Dr. Luc Beaudoin, cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University (Canada) and head of CogSci Apps. Sleep researchers at three different universities will conduct independent studies on this over the next several months.
Shuffle Your Thoughts to Sleep…