Old-school cool is back! Everyone’s cutting mullets, listening to Fleetwood Mac, whistling the Stranger Things theme tune and suddenly appreciating that David Hasselhoff is kind of a fox again, and we’re all about this retro revival.

At PNA, we understand that a little nostalgia never hurt anybody and in between digging through your parent’s old clothes to find the perfect vintage ski jacket and shuffling through vinyl records, we propose bringing back another blast-from-the-past fave: the jigsaw puzzle!

Jigsaw puzzles are a cost-effective, collaborative and creative way to spend your time, and can be a challenging project that comes with a significant feeling of triumph as you slot in the last piece. They’re beneficial for loads of areas of your life as an adult, too! Here’s why we think you should reconsider puzzles and why we’ve booked out all our foreseeable Friday nights to clear the dining room table and find those corner pieces.

1. Puzzles improve your memory

Do you struggle with short-term memory? Maybe you forget people’s names the moment you hear them? Do you even remember what this blog is actually about? If you find yourself going into rooms and forgetting why you’re there, puzzles might help you rectify that.

They act to reinforce the connections between your brain cells by repeatedly making visual connections and forming spatial relationships between individual pieces as you build. If you repeatedly exercise this process, your memory starts to improve and get better at forming these short-term relationships. By remembering shapes and colours with greater accuracy, we can better visualise the bigger picture, which helps us in day-to-day life.

2. Puzzles improve your problem-solving skills

Critical thinking and intuitive problem-solving are invaluable skills, both in the workplace and in your personal life. You know that friend you always turn to when things go off the rails, knowing they’re going to help solve the problem? You could BE that friend, with puzzles. There’s a whole bunch of trial and error involved in solving a puzzle, as you have to try many different approaches to solve the problem of assembling the final picture.

When you frequently practice active problem-solving, your ability to approach complex problems with patience and self-assurance develops. This is also great for when things don’t go according to plan. You can easily transfer these puzzle-based skills into aspects of your real life.

3. Puzzles can improve your visual-spatial reasoning

If you’ve ever done a jigsaw puzzle that contains a significant amount of sky, you know you really need to scrutinise every detail of every individual piece to see where and how it fits into the bigger picture. One millimetre of cloud can be the singular detail that makes a whole world of difference to your process.

By improving your ability to analyse details and use those to make informed placements within a space, you could make other elements of your life much easier. Improved visual-spatial reasoning could assist in jobs like parking a car, reading a map, packing boxes or even just moving your body with purpose and grace.

4. Puzzles can increase your IQ

Seriously. Puzzles can literally make you smarter. We’re not saying doing a jigsaw puzzle is going to help you immediately understand the minutia of complex quantum physics, but it might give you a little extra intellectual edge that may come in handy.

A researcher at the University of Michigan found that adults could boost their IQ by four points after spending 25 minutes a day playing puzzle games. This is because the process of solving puzzle problems contributes to our memory and overall reasoning, and these are the metrics that traditional IQ tests are designed to measure.

5. Puzzles can lower your stress levels

When you were a kid, you probably thought being an adult meant you could drive and eat ice cream whenever you want. This is true, certainly, but being an adult also means a degree of inherent stress that’s kind of unavoidable. Looking after yourself is scary, we know. Puzzles are a fantastic way to unwind productively, without switching on the passive entertainment of binging a series or packing yourself into a crowded pub to drink overpriced drinks.

Puzzles work to increase our brain’s production of dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that regulates mood and feelings of optimism. Dopamine also works to boost memory, concentration, and motivation. You’re getting a little kick of dopamine every time you place a puzzle piece in the correct spot!

6. Puzzles increase your attention to detail

The name of the game when it comes to solving puzzles is having an eagle eye for detail and swooping in on the finest hints on a puzzle piece to pick out where it belongs. Your skill level at puzzles goes up as you fine-tune your attention to detail and this skill translates positively into the rest of your life.

Precision and high levels of detail orientation allow us to pick up on the small things others might miss, and therefore perform at a higher level at work and socially. Do puzzles give you superpowers? No. Might doing regular puzzles help you become more aware of your surroundings in ways that make your life better? Definitely.

7. Puzzles make you better at working with others

At the core of successful collaboration lies communication. At the core of getting a puzzle done is letting your fellow puzzle partners know what you’re doing where and why. If you’re strategically assembling a particularly complex tree in your jigsaw’s left corner, and the person puzzling with you keeps stealing the pieces you’ve gathered because they think they’re DEFINITELY part of the horse on the bottom right, that puzzle is not getting completed any time soon.

In a research study conducted at Yale University, it was discovered that giving people the opportunity to work together on solving puzzles allowed them to improve relationships and their abilities to cooperate to finish a task. Go, team!

See? Puzzles are way cooler than you thought. They’re a fun way to unwind and they might even make you less stressed out, smarter, nicer to work with and way better at tackling the obstacles that life throws at you.

We bet you want to do a puzzle now, right? We sure do. If you’d like to get your hands on one, PNA has a wide range of puzzles suited to all ages and skill levels, so you can pick precisely the picture you think is perfect! Find your nearest PNA store using our store locator, and be sure to tag our Instagram profile (@pna_colouryourworld) in your snap of the finished product, so that we can take a look at your handiwork!