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. “You don’t have to worry too much about creating an elaborate mental picture with perfect detail. Just a mental snapshot is OK.” 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. “You might fall asleep mid-letter, you might make it through the whole word, you might lose track of where you are,” Pedreira says. “That’s actually fine. The point isn’t to complete the word perfectly.” If you do make it to the end of your word still wide awake, just pick another one and start again.
And if you find yourself getting stuck or looping back to the same words, the issue might be your starting pick. Try to avoid words with repeating letters, suggests Nina Kaiser, a psychologist in San Francisco who teaches cognitive shuffling to the kids and adults she treats. Once you’ve cycled through every word you can think of that starts with O, hitting another O later in the word means generating that same list all over again—and your mind is more likely to drift. That rules out “Google,” for example, with its two Gs and two Os, and makes a word like “planet,” with six distinct letters, a strong pick.
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