As COVID numbers spike, you’re finding your holiday traditions turned upside-down. Traditional gatherings are canceled, a family member is in the hospital, and you’re self-quarantining in the relative safety of your home. You’d like to work outdoors, but now it’s cold and dark by 6 p.m. and the flowers are dead, anyway.
So, what to do with the extra indoor time during winter evenings? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an activity you could do alone or with family, something that would exercise your brain but not feel like work, something that would relieve the anxiety of COVID and holiday stress?
Well there is – jigsaw puzzles! Putting together a jigsaw puzzle works your brain’s pattern-seeking muscles, but it’s so fun you’d never guess it’s a mental exercise. Puzzles work both the right (creative and intuitive) and left (logical and linear) sides of your brain at the same time, and they build your problem-solving skills as well as your attention span. Give a distracted child a puzzle and watch their focus muscle build. Puzzles also require you to fit smaller pieces inside a known big picture, which improves your visual-spatial reasoning – the skills you need to navigate a map, reorganize a closet, pack a suitcase or even learn music and dance steps. As a final benefit, puzzles improve your short-term memory and appear to ward off Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Despite being a rigorous mental exercise, putting together puzzles is simply fun. It’s something you can do alone, feeling so absorbed and “in the zone” that your loneliness disappears and time flies in a pleasurable way. You can easily listen to music, audiobooks, podcasts or the radio while you work. If you have people living with you, puzzles are just as fun to do together, building teamwork and relationships. It’s a highly adaptable activity!
At Botetourt County Libraries, we loan jigsaw puzzles for anyone to enjoy. No due dates, no library card required – just ask. Our current checkout limit is three at a time. Our puzzles come in all sizes, from kid-level to over 1,000 pieces. Choose from many different designs – animals, old-fashioned scenes, beautiful scenery and even holiday designs.
If you’d like a puzzle, visit during our curbside hours. You can let a librarian select for you, or flip through a binder full of photos to find the puzzle that suits your fancy.
All puzzles have been quarantined for seven days after return, so you can check them out knowing that they should be COVID-free. While there are rarely any pieces missing, be aware that we don’t count them (that would take forever!), so if you do find a puzzle with a piece missing, please leave a note on the puzzle when you return it so we can stop loaning it.
One word of warning: cats and dogs also like puzzles, but they’re better at scattering pieces than putting them together. Plan ahead so you won’t have to work too hard to find those puzzle pieces!
