Jigsaw Zen: Life Skills & Coping by Ruth Ross Saucier

I do jigsaw puzzles.* Here’s why you should, too: creativity, love, patience, calm, and observation.

Writing block. When I need to solve my latest writing challenge, I play Jigsaw World.* My brain free associates when I work on a jigsaw; as a result, I have outlined and written entire blogs while assembling jigsaws. The visual comparisons necessary to complete a jigsaw don’t impinge on my writing brain. I’m free to drift and create without pressure, solving plots and creating characters freely.   And several studies have suggested that doing jigsaws can help enhance cognitive function as you age.

                Aunt Mildred.  She calls every week to share a play-by-play of her latest pinochle triumph and you love her, so you listen and make appropriate noises and ask questions through the hour or so it takes her to run down. But you need to listen, so you can’t just play a wild and wooly shoot-‘em-up arcade game, you might get asked a question and you need to respond. Playing an electronic jigsaw puzzle doesn’t require you use the same part of your brain as listening…so when she tells you something that requires a coherent response, you can drop the game instantly and you’ll still remember she just told you her seventy-six-year-old next door neighbor just got busted for running down the street nekkid. Although that one might understandably warrant a “say that again?” response.

Life on Hold.  Cable techs. Repair techs. Whether it’s for your adjustable bed, your robot vacuum, or your Skynet refrigerator, you don’t love these people, but you do need to listen anyway—when they are on the line, at least. The third set of recorded messages encouraging you to just leave a message or hearing the sixth iteration of that annoying, scratchy music will drive you nuts. Sure you probably have various things you do while on hold, but jigsaws don’t distract you, don’t cause you to forget why you’re waiting. I think it’s because they are solely engaging your visual brain, but that’s just my crackpot theory. 

 

Zen. Peace. Composure. There’s something very zen-like about reconstructing a picture, putting things to rights, making the broken whole again. The calm induced by this low-key activity is seductive. And the marketers of videogames have recognized that players of certain games want that tranquility. Some advertisements for games like Merge Dragons feature taglines like, “Goodbye Anxiety.” I have even read comments from players of Jigsaw World who credit it with helping to suppress their chronic pain.

                Training your eye.  Jigsaw puzzles sharpen my identification and awareness of color and pattern.  I think they help train you to see—something that is a fundamental concept in art appreciation and creation. If the puzzle is a painting, it can also provide you with a close study of technique.  If this is something you’re interested in, though, you really want monster-sized monitors like mine…not the mobile  versions that run on phones or laptops.

*I play a wonderful electronic version of jigsaw puzzles called Jigsaw World (the version on Facebook, because I don’t like the mobile version; I’d rather play on my two monster screens attached to my desktop). And no, they aren’t paying me a thin dime to plug their product.