How to Use Jigsaw Puzzles to Actually Keep Your Sanity

Anyone who’s read my book, The Extremely Busy Woman’s Guide to Self-Care, knows that I adore jigsaw puzzles. I write about this in the chapter called “Essential #6: Honest to God Fun.”

In fact, I think they’re responsible for helping me keep my head on straight most of the time. I do a little jigsaw puzzling nearly every evening for a little while.

Here’s why. Dr. Stuart Brown, the head of the National Institute of Play (yes, you read that correctly) recommends we make fun more of a priority. By fun, he means brain-pleasing activities that could include games and puzzles that help us maintain memory and thinking skills, and relieve stress.

I just like doing these things because they’re relaxing. Some good music, a fun puzzle, a bottle of wine and a few good friends. That’s a nice night.

One of the things that happens when you work on jigsaw puzzles is that you lose yourself in the content of what you’re working on. If you’re putting together an image of a crystalline lake, sooner or later, you are in that water. You can’t help it. The process requires total focus, so this becomes what you think about.

Not work. Not your worries. Just …  a peaceful lake. For this reason, it’s a really good idea to choose puzzles of scenes you’d like to spend time with.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. There is an age-old problem about jigsaw puzzles—they tend to take over dining room tables. So pretty soon there’s no place to eat dinner. And suddenly, your soothing puzzle starts cranking up way more anxiety than it’s worth.

I’ve gotten around this with a puzzle storage system. (The one I use is the very cool Portapuzzle .) Here you make a 1000-piece puzzle on a piece of cardboard that fits into an easy to pack up little case. The whole thing is designed to fold up and go away when you need your table back. Then it can be pulled out once more, so you pick up where you left off.

Cool, huh?

Best part: I use the compartments in its case for sorting. Literally every guest we’ve had over when my storage system is out has asked for purchase info. So I decided to post it here. Hope you all find it useful.

Yours in puzzling,

 

 

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