Six surprising health benefits of doing jigsaw puzzles

 Puzzles are often thought of as ‘toys’ and of course they are a lot of fun. But they also provide a range of health benefits!

From helping you relax with near-meditation, to improving your brain processing speed, to even preventing serious illnesses later in life, puzzles have a lot to offer. Check out these six ways that your love of custom jigsaw puzzles  can help improve your health!

Mindfulness and stress relief

Puzzles demand a level of thought, focus, and patience that is bound to challenge the mind. Concentrating while you sort through pieces or stare at the image for long periods of time is both meditative and satisfying. As we connect two puzzle pieces together (you know that lovely feeling!), our brains release dopamine, which positively affects our mood, memory, and motivation.

Time away from screens

We all know that too much time in front of our screens is bad for our health in a number of ways. Screen time affects your weight, sleeping patterns, eye and brain health, and even cognitive development. So the less time staring at your screens – whether that’s your phone, or whatever you’re reading this blog on – the better. Jigsaw puzzles aren’t just a nice alternative to Instagram – they’re actually giving you time to wind down!

Short-term memory improvement

As you scan through jigsaw puzzle pieces to find the exact colour shade you need, with the specific shape of the hole you’re looking to fill, you have to retain the details in your short-term memory.

Those skills reinforce the connections between brain cells and help to create new ones, which makes your thought processing faster. Boosting your short-term memory helps with those very important things in everyday life, like finding where you parked the car or… what were we talking about?

Better dexterity

A study from Princeton University confirms that jigsaw puzzles can improve motor skills like dexterity. When you pick through small pieces, flip them over, and fit them into small places, it exercises all those small muscles in the fingers and eyes.

As puzzles come in all sorts of different forms, with different size pieces and piece-counts, they can even be used in physical therapy, recovery and in day-to-day dexterity train. Start with smaller or easier puzzles and you can eventually work your way up to difficult 1000-piece puzzles like these.