Face-washing seems to work as acupuncture is said to: the sudden signals of warmth flooding your brain from the nerves of the face, especially the eyelids, unmoor your thinking for an instant, dislodging your attention from any thoughts that had been in progress and causing it to slide back randomly to the first fixed spot in memory that it finds—often a subject that you had left unresolved earlier in the day which returns now as an image magnified against the grainy blackness of your closed eyelids.
