Are Puzzles Good for the Brain?

Jigsaw puzzles are on the rise yet again, and the demand is astonishing. It’s a great way to spend quality time with your family, bond with your children or parents, while also keeping your brain in good shape.

But what other not so obvious benefits does doing a jigsaw puzzle have? Let’s find these benefits out!

Puzzles keep your brain and memory active

It may sound obvious, but it’s still true – by doing one puzzle a day you will reinforce connections between your brain cells, therefore training the brain cell connections to be stronger and last longer. As a result, one can improve their own memory or help their elderly parents’ brain health!

The most impact solving puzzles has on short-term memory, though. By remembering shapes and colours needed for the puzzle you’ll be able to remember your grocery lists or just anything, really, much easier. Jigsaw puzzles are a great exercise tool for your brain health.

Doing puzzles also includes such benefits as helping against Alzheimer’s: by regularly doing some sort of challenging activity the brain loses less cells due to the disease. Therefore, your memory, connections between brain cells, brain and just life in general improve. It’s a scientifically proven fact!

A puzzle a day keeps the stress at bay

Another thing that benefits from doing jigsaw puzzles regularly is the ability to handle stress and keep your mind relaxed.

First and foremost, puzzles will make you focus and think about your strategy. Are you going to sort puzzle pieces by colour, by shape? What are your steps? These questions require strategy skills and also problem-solving skills, especially if you’re doing puzzles with someone.

By training yourself to deal with stress and communicate with others you learn to cope better, you upgrade your problem-solving skills. This way, solving puzzles is a great way to learn to be calm, rational and communicative while working on a complicated task. Learning all that takes time, but it will make your life tremendously easier in the long run!

Doing jigsaw puzzles is also a great way to put one’s mind at ease by completely switching one’s attention from stress to something neutral.

Puzzle-induced productivity boost

Some of the benefits of doing puzzles include a boost of overall productivity. After completing a puzzle and seeing the puzzle before your eyes you usually get happiness and joy, your brain gets euphoria of completing a difficult task and seeing the results. Jigsaw puzzles, no matter how hard they are to do, are a great tool to boost your happiness and productivity.

A way to get closer

Yale university studies have shown that puzzles bring people together and are overall very good for building a strong relationship between people.

Jigsaw puzzles, be it some big jigsaw puzzles or small jigsaw puzzles, colourful or not, are always a challenge for your mind and brain. Being able to work with someone and cooperate with someone on that challenge helps build a reliable connection. You’re both in a situation, where you should continue working on the puzzle together, no matter how hard the puzzle is or how big the number of puzzle pieces is. Help each other! You’ll have to divide your tasks, talk your steps through, help each other by working together and cooperate to get the result faster.

Other benefits of doing jigsaw puzzles:

• The number of pieces you’re going to do affects your attention level. The more pieces, the more you’ll be focused.
• Each puzzle can potentially be a decoration for you house. All pieces put together create a beautiful pattern, and the image on the puzzle is going to complement the room.
• Doing a puzzle each day is great for kids: through these puzzles they learn to concentrate, they improve their memory skills and learn differences between colours and shapes of puzzle pieces. A jigsaw puzzle is a great educational tool.
• Of course, jigsaw puzzles help us kill time if we have nothing to do! Sometimes life is just not full of anything and nothing’s going on, and doing a jigsaw puzzle can really help you get the satisfaction of being busy while not changing you life and lifestyle. Puzzles take at least 2-5 hours to do, and if the jigsaw puzzle is big or complicated, double or triple the time you’ll need to do it!
• A not-so-obvious advantage: doing puzzles can actually raise your IQ level! But you’ll have to dedicate at least 25 minutes a day to solving puzzles in order to get this jigsaw puzzle-induced benefit. If you’re ready for it, grab a jigsaw puzzle and get started!