5 Reasons Puzzles are Good for Your Mental Health 

Doing puzzles can be lots of fun, however, it also has the potential to be good for your mental health. By focusing your mind and actively engaging in problem solving, you can ensure that you’re always exercising your brain and reaping the rewards. Here are 5 reasons puzzles are good for your mental health.  

1. Mental Exercise

It’s common knowledge that simply using your brain is good for your mental health – however, this is often in reference to mentally strenuous activities such as playing sudoku or solving riddles. Puzzles, however, have a similar effect. By forcing you to think, analyse and solve problems, you’ll be giving your brain an excellent workout. 

2. Practice Your Problem Solving Ability

Doing puzzles is all about constant analysis of what’s in front of you, making assumptions of what you’re looking for, making decisions about what to put where and solving issues that arise as you go. Practising these things while doing puzzles is sure to help you get better at problem solving in real life too. Whether it’s for deciding what to do next when playing at Big Dollar or making more strategic business decisions, your problem solving prowess will improve. 

3. Increased Attention to Detail

While puzzles differ in style and type, they mostly show pictures and require you to really analyse the way in which it all comes together. By forcing you focus on specific details of the picture on the box and match them with details on the puzzle pieces, you’re bound to get good at noticing the little things. This can be a great skill to have in everyday life, especially when driving or in your professional capacity. 

4. Decreases Stress Levels

There are lots of things you can do to try and relax and decrease your stress levels when you’re feeling a bit uptight, but doing puzzles is one of the best. It forces you to sit down, think about something other than that which is causing you stress and just zone out for a little while. 

5. Improves Your Memory

Completing a puzzle requires that you remember not only what the final product looks like, but the details from each different piece and the corresponding details on the bits of the puzzle you’ve already put together. The better you get at this, the quicker you’ll be able to finish your puzzles. As for real life benefits, improving your memory will help you be more productive and aware of your surroundings in general. 

6. Better Visual-Spatial Awareness

When you’re puzzle building, you’re given the task of reconstructing the image on the box. This requires you to use your visual-spatial awareness by figuring out what sorts of pieces you’ll need in which places – this is particularly relevant when it comes to puzzles with more complex images, ones including things like the sky, forests and so on. 

However, putting together a puzzle isn’t just about completing the image on the box, it’s also about conceptualising space – this includes having to analyse things like estimating how many additional pieces are needed in certain areas and so on and so forth.