By assembling a jigsaw puzzle, you are getting the same benefits as if you meditated. The stress of everyday life evaporates and is replaced by a sense of peace and tranquility that lowers both your blood pressure and heart rate.

Mindfulness can often help steady the mind and body but it doesn’t offer the elegant solutions that puzzles often do.

Studies have shown that doing jigsaw puzzles improve cognition (thinking and awareness) and visual-spatial reasoning (the ability to tell where objects are in space). Assembling a jigsaw puzzle requires you to examine individual pieces and imagine how they'll connect to the overall image. You will develop your visual-spatial reasoning, which we use when we read a map, drive a vehicle, pack boxes, and replicate dance moves, among many other common activities.

The act of putting the pieces of a puzzle together requires concentration and improves short-term memory and problem solving. Using the puzzle as an exercise of the mind can spark imagination and increase both your creativity and productivity.

Puzzles reduce stress because they distract our brain with finding patterns, which then triggers a hormone response and lowers cortisol. Puzzles also help us get into a state of flow where we are hyper-focused on the task in front of us and the rest of the world melts away.

People who do jigsaw puzzles have longer life spans with less chances of developing Alzheimer's disease, memory loss or dementia. Puzzling stimulates the brain and actually wards off the plaque that is the marker of Alzheimer's, according to a recent study published in the Archives of Neurology. The study compared brain scans of 75-year-olds to 25-year-olds. The elderly people who did puzzles regularly had brain scans comparable to the 25-year-olds!