Beginner's Guide To Mind-Stimulating Games That Sharpen Your Brain

Keeping your brain alive and kicking is a challenging yet necessary activity. Given recent changes in lifestyle, it can be quite easy to skip out on hobbies that challenge you in any way and simply rely on binge-watching as a means to pass time. Opening up your schedule to incorporate fun yet challenging hobbies that involve decoding various sorts of puzzles can help pass time in a productive manner.

Apart from the obvious fun they invite, solving puzzles presents a host of proven health benefits as well. Research reveals that indulging in mental challenges of this sort can help boost memory, enhance concentration, improve collaborative problem solving, develop logical thinking, help with stress management, increase mental agility, stimulate social interaction, and reduce the risk of dementia. 

Here are a few brain-trainers that you can opt to sharpen your mind and its abilities:

Sudoku

A play on logic and numbers, solving Sudokus is an age-old hobby that presents a well-posed puzzle with a single solution. A 9x9 grid contains six 3x3 grids within it and the challenge is for the doer to place all digits from 1 to 9 in such a way that each column, row, and sub-grid contains each digit only once. For those who find it hard to take out the time or will to do such activities, Arrsheea Shorewala, an avid Sudoku player presents a novel solution to the conundrum. “The key is to begin small. Set aside just 20 – 30 minutes a day to try different types of puzzles. Once something clicks, tie it to a fixed part of your routine. I, for example, do Sudoku right after breakfast, since breakfast is non-negotiable, sudoku became equally regular. Once it becomes a habit, it’s no longer a task but a satisfying part of your day,” she says.

Crosswords

Solving crosswords, on the other hand, takes the challenge a step ahead of just placing numbers in boxes. “The key difference lies in the structure – Sudokus have a finite set of possible answers and can often be solved through logic and elimination. Crosswords, on the other hand, involve language, general knowledge, and wordplay, making them less predictable. There are countless possible answers for any clue depending on how it’s phrased. That unpredictability is what makes crosswords more mentally demanding for me,” shares Arrsheea. If you feel you have a great command over good language and new words, a crossword might just be the way to challenge that assumption.

An oft favourite pastime of many, it is a completely blank grid of interconnected upwards and downwards columns. Reference numbers and a list of clues at the side are all that’s provided to the reader to place out words in a way so as to not overspill or skip out common boxes.

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Word searches

We’ve all purchased a word search book from our nearest store at least once during childhood and had a crack at trying to make sense out of a chaotic mess. Word searches place a bunch of jumbled alphabets in a closely knit grid and present a list of hidden words that the person must locate. The catch? Words may be located in any direction be it horizontally, vertically, diagonally or sometimes even backwards. So, keep an eye out if you wish to pick on this as your hobby.

Brain teasers

“Binge-watching can definitely be relaxing and mentally engaging, especially when you're invested in plot twists or trying to predict outcomes. For me, though, challenging hobbies like solving puzzles offer a different kind of stimulation,” adds Arrsheea.

If you’re looking for a new kind of mental stimulation then the range of options available under the brain teasers category might just be your saving grace. Be it situational riddles or logical puzzles, brain teasers usually involve a rigorous combination of basic logic and creative thinking to crack which makes them one of the most engaging hobbies to exist.

Hangman

If you manage to find a friend to do all these hobbies with, then Hangman may help you expand the pool considering it's designed for two to do at a time. The hobby starts with one player thinking of a word, phrase or sentence and writing the same on a piece of paper by jumbling up the letters. Besides this clue is the image of a man literally hanging from a pole. The other person must now attempt to guess this mystery word with a limited number of guesses. Each wrong guess ends up in the hanging man losing a new limb. If the man runs out of guesses before the word is guessed, the player trying to break the code automatically loses.

What’s even more interesting? These hobbies require absolutely no monetary investment on your end and can easily be found in the leaves of your daily newspaper.

Put down that remote and grab a pen and paper to get cracking at these fun, stimulating and challenging hobbies.