No matter your age, working on a puzzle can be extremely rewarding. From infancy until the elder years, puzzles can help build skills and prime our brains to keep functioning well. Solo or in collaboration with others, puzzles and games can bring you short bursts of happiness, calm, and a sense of accomplishment.
Benefits to Puzzles and Games
We introduce puzzles and games to children to develop cognitive and fine motor skills, but they also help build social, emotional, and language skills. As adults, we assume we already know it all, but spending 15 minutes a day working out your brain muscles will not only improve your memory and cognitive skills, it will also help with your self-esteem and overall mental health.
Puzzles and games build our gross and fine motor skills. Gross motor skills refers to large muscles like learning to sit or walk. Don’t disregard this as an adult, by actively working on this, the longer we can sustain it into our elder years. Fine motor skills refer to our smaller muscles that help grasp and manipulate objects. These skills are crucial for our independence and our participation in the world around us. Yes these skills are needed as children, but I will argue that it is even more important as we age. As soon as our independence withers, you see a significant decline in quality of life.
Puzzles and games help with our hand-eye coordination, also known as visual-spatial reasoning. This is our ability to process information from our eyes and send it to the brain, and in turn, our hands complete an action corresponding to what was perceived. This is important as it helps our reaction time, and it stimulates cognitive skills. In everyday life, this helps us pick up things, do sports, drive a vehicle, or eat a meal.
Problem solving skills help us identify problems, find solutions and implement the best option. Most of us need this skill to perform our jobs well. Difficult and unexpected situations can arise in the workplace at any time, and your boss is looking to you to fix it. Solving problems includes being an active listener, being able to research and analyze information, being creative to find out-of-the-box solutions and make a decision on the best one to implement, and communicate the options and solutions to others. Doing puzzles can help me with all of that? Yes! Puzzles help create new neural pathways in your brain that in day-to-day life help you see different solutions. It expands your ability to see the information from various points of view.
Working on puzzles helps to build short-term memory by making you remember shapes, colours, patterns, and positions of objects. In order to complete them, you need to recall all of these factors and come up with a strategy to implement the best outcome. How is this possible? As you progress through the puzzle, and once you complete it, your brain releases dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical that regulates mood, and it affects learning, memory, concentration, and motivation. Low levels affect several health conditions and impact your ability to control your emotions, so a little boost with a puzzle is welcome.
By focusing on the individual task the puzzle presents, it provides stress-relief, improves concentration, and teaches perseverance. The mind can enter a meditative state leading to calmness. Next time you are stuck and stressed because of a problem, try switching to a quick puzzle to switch gears. It is also a useful tool to ground yourself if you are prone to ruminate. Rumination is repetitive thinking or dwelling on negative feelings that you can’t stop. It is common in anxiety disorders and people dealing with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Additionally, completing puzzles helps to build self-esteem and self-confidence by achieving your goal. Small wins in the day can help boost your overall mood and can shift your focus towards positivity.
Puzzles & Other Games
Jigsaw puzzles strengthen your hand-eye coordination, and help your visual perception of patterns, colours, shapes, and the position within the bigger picture. Visual perception is critical to read, write, and movement in children. In adults, it is required to understand and remember information in order to select, organize, and interpret the world around us. Solving a jigsaw puzzle teaches you to break down a bigger problem into smaller pieces that you can tackle one-at-a-time, using different criteria to accomplish your goal.
Sudoku uses logic to problem solve and uses patterns to provide a framework for the solution. It comes with varying levels of difficulty, and speed can be added as another factor for completion. It helps to improve concentration, and reduces anxiety and stress.
Bingo is a social activity that helps stimulate different senses (hearing, touch, and sight) while mastering your hand-eye coordination.
Trivia encourages you to read more and remember facts. It’s competitive and social at the same time. This builds bonds with other trivia lovers, connecting you to a community of like-minded individuals and improving your happiness.
Chess is a game of strategy, it boosts planning skills, memory, and problem-solving. It also builds your ability to be patient and learn from failure. Etiquette is highly valued, and as such, players develop a heightened understanding of proper social interaction. Experienced players tend to have better brain function and can regulate their emotions better. This is a great tool to work on the cognitive triangle.
What’s your favourite puzzle?
There are plenty of puzzles and games out there that you can try, and apps you can download too. Puzzles help engage different parts of your brain and build new neural pathways. Regular play will increase your ability to deal with challenges, and will help combat mental decline as you age. It helps increase self-reflection and patience as you work through each step. It helps you build relationships when you collaborate with others. Solving puzzles will also help reduce daily stress, similarly to mindfulness meditation. Invest a little time having fun with puzzles, you deserve it!
IMAGE CREDIT: Unsplash | Hans Peter Gauster.