Board games and fun activities you can do at home with your friends and family come in many shapes and sizes. There are some truly special things you can do to pass the time, get a bit competitive, or work together towards a common goal. If you like doing things like this with your loved ones you have probably completed a jigsaw puzzle or two during your life.
Jigsaw puzzles are among the world’s most popular ways of relaxing, having fun, and challenging oneself. They have been around for a long time and despite the technological advancements and new things that can become hobbies, people still find time and have love for the trusty old puzzles.
Children become familiar with them during their formative years, either at home or at preschool, when they get the first few puzzles with simple images they know. They are usually cartoon and movie characters they know and animals or objects they have seen before.
All in all, they have simplicity and small amount of pieces as their universal traits. However, adult puzzles with hundreds or even thousands of intricate pieces that all look the same exist too and they could be extremely difficult to finish. New trends like 3D puzzles are also popular nowadays that look more like 3D models than puzzles.
In any case, one thing is sure for all of them. They have a lot of benefits on our health, more precisely on the brain. The cognitive functions needed for a puzzle to be solved are many and all of them are trained and developed whenever we take a puzzle to work out.
If you wish to know what these cognitive benefits are, make sure you continue reading the article. We will mention the biggest pros of solving them that make our brain functions better, faster, and more responsive. If you are a fan of puzzles in search for a new challenge or even a beginner who wants to become better, you should definitely check out what artandfablepuzzlecompany.co.uk have to offer.
1. Mental Workout
There are limited things you can do on your own and especially as a solo activity that qualifies as a legitimate exercise for your brain. Doing puzzles is among the best of them because it is essentially a complete workout for your brain. Both hemispheres have to come together to solve it, and since they are responsible for different things, there is hardly a better thing to make them work together.
The right side is about creativeness, emotions, and intuition, while the left is logical, methodical, objective-focused, and more sciency. For a puzzle you need all of this, so it makes sense to think of it as a challenging exercise for most cognitive processes.
2. Visual and Spatial Reasoning
Being able to locate and visualize different pieces both separately and together and plan out the finished project before you even begin is not something everyone is born with. Improving one’s visual perception and the sense of space while strategizing how to use small pieces that do not make sense on their own to assemble a larger meaningful thing that represents something is valuable for so many reasons.
If children become good at puzzles early on they will have an advantage for intricate jobs in a large number of careers where putting things together and finishing projects that depend on visual elements.
3. Attention to Detail
One of the more obvious cognitive benefits of doing jigsaws is the effect it has on the person’s ability to catch details and see them without even trying. Being able to spot all the small elements in a field of view is so crucial and it is something that has made mankind strive and achieve great things.
Small differences in shapes and colors are the bread and butter of complex puzzles for adults. On the other hand, learning about the different things in life by putting parts of them together and getting a clear picture of something is a great way for kids to expand their knowledge.
If a person manages to become more detailed with everything they do during the day, the quality and effectiveness of it all will improve greatly. Attention to detail is also what separates good and above average workers from professionals and experts.
4. Improving the Memory
The speed of mental and thought processes we use while solving even the easiest of puzzles greatly improve our ability to remember things. Improving one’s memory is always prevalent because we simply cannot remember nearly as much as we would like.
Short-term memory and long-term memory are both elevated with frequent solving of jigsaws because the activity itself implies a lot of trial and error, repeated attempts, and guessing. Storing the info of what goes where and what needs to fit somewhere else is a great memory workout and something you cannot do with many other things in life.
5. Problem Solving
To develop your skills of solving difficult, challenging, and complex problems in life, you should definitely start by doing puzzles. A puzzle is a problem itself, a purposefully deconstructed image of something that you have to put back together.
A perfect example of a problem with a straightforward yet tricky solution. The only way to solve it and come out on top is to sit down, work hard, and not give up. Eventually, you will finish it and the problem will no longer exist.
Each puzzle you solve will increase your skill and you will finish the next one quicker. The skill of tackling problems and finishing them without a sweat will also increase your overall productivity in life.
6. Sense of Accomplishment and Winning
Once you finally complete a puzzle, no matter how difficult or how long it took you, you will get that special feeling of accomplishment, achievement, and winning. It is good to feel good, and solving puzzles definitely qualifies.
Such a feeling in our body makes us feel content, relaxed, and at ease, all of which are feelings and emotions that help us beat depression, anxiety, and stress. Therefore, try a puzzle every once in a while if you are struggling with sudden issues with these modern problems to simply feel good.
