Mental strength exercises at the kitchen table: how puzzles train your brain
29/1/2026
Translation: Patrik Stainbrook
Solving puzzles isn’t just mindlessly sorting pieces. You strengthen your mind through spatial thinking, focus, changing plans. Your brain celebrates a small success with every correctly placed puzzle piece. It’s precisely this mix of brain workout and winding down that improves concentration, lowers stress levels and keeps you mentally fit.
Know that frustrating feeling when a piece of a puzzle just doesn’t fit? You turn it to the left, right, turn it once, twice – and suddenly, it fits. Now your brain’s celebrating a mini-success, dopamine included. Instead of «Finally, I’m done!», you think, «Where’s the next piece?».
And you can confidently give in to this impulse. Solving puzzles is more than just a hobby – it’s a health boost for your brain. Science has confirmed this in recent years. Solving puzzles intensely challenges your brain, while simultaneously calming you.
Solving puzzles trains your spatial thinking
A puzzle is like mental strength workout that allows you to train an amazing number of skills at the same time.
You use your spatial perception to match shapes into empty spots. To do this, you rotate parts in your head before grabbing them. You memorise the characteristics of a piece you’re looking for while you continue searching. Simultaneously, you block out distractions and focus on patterns, edges and colours. And you stay flexible, since you switch strategies on the fly. First the edges, then colour areas, then details. Several processes run in parallel and interlock. Your brain working as a network.
A study conducted by the University of Ulm in 2018, for example, showed that gifted puzzlers often perform better in tests that track spatial vision and imagination. This makes sense, as they have first-hand experience. People who can find matching pieces quicker usually also have a trained eye for patterns and spaces.
This isn’t a result you can expect immediately after two evenings of solving puzzles. Rather, the study shows that a short testing period primarily improves your puzzle skill. Measurable changes, if any, depend on how much time you spend playing with puzzles. Given this, the researchers described a sort of dose-response relationship. What counts are regularity and volume.
Source: Fabian Kuhne/Unsplash
Puzzles as stress relief: coping instead of panic
Puzzles are also a wonderful way to combat stress. After all, your brain can’t be in panic mode and place a puzzle piece with millimetre precision at the same time. When you concentrate, your stress system inevitably shuts down. And your body reacts with calmness. Researchers were also able to measure this in a study by analysing typical stress markers such as cortisol and alpha-amylase in the saliva of test subjects. After 20 minutes of solving puzzles, these stress values were lower on average than before. An indication that this type of concentrated, calm mental work can reduce stress levels in the short term.
What we perceive as relaxation is what science calls «emotion-focused coping». In other words, you give your mind a challenging but controllable task. And this is exactly what can interrupt cycles of brooding and constant tension.
Puzzles against dementia?
Brain teasers apparently even prevent neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia. Really, can puzzles help against dementia? The short answer: maybe. A longer one: so far, no studies have been able to provide reliable data. But there are two hypotheses that at least give hope for a certain effect.
Once again, emotion-focused coping comes into play, i.e. the mental time-out that interrupts brooding cycles and reduces stress. Since chronic stress (via cortisol, among other things) worsens cognitive health, solving puzzles in this way could slow down or even reduce cognitive decline.
You can also make your brain more resilient by doing puzzles. This is referred to as «cognitive reserve». The brain can deal with things for longer, since it’s more flexibly organised and can use alternative routes.
Ready, set, solve!
Got the urge now? Well, the next time you feel like boosting your health, go straight for your puzzle pieces. Not as something on your to-do list, but rather as a little date with yourself. Clear the table, tip out the pieces, take a deep breath and bring order to the chaos piece by piece. And give your brain lots of little victories in the process.
Jigsaw puzzles
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Header image: Nathalia Segato/Unsplash
Anna Sandner
Senior Editor
Anna.Sandner@galaxus.deScience editor and biologist. I love animals and am fascinated by plants, their abilities and everything you can do with them. That's why my favourite place is always the outdoors - somewhere in nature, preferably in my wild garden.
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