Enhancing your lifestyle might include committing to small positive changes like solving puzzles daily or at least on a regular basis. Your daily Solve puzzle ritual is a pleasant activity that helps build a positive attitude for successful habit change.
It is said that every morning Benjamin Franklin asked himself “What good will I do today?” and in the evening he asked, “What good did I do today?” That is an admirable intention and if we all did that, our focus and perspective would likely be enhanced.
Making small positive changes in your life can benefit your mind and your body. You may be surprised by how much positive impact one small change can have on your life. Besides starting or maintaining your daily Solve puzzle ritual here are some other ideas to get you thinking about the power of small positive changes:
Maintain uninterrupted sleep for 8 hours each night
Eat 2-3 well-balanced meals each day
Engage in physical activity for 30...
It is natural for us to develop rituals around our daily activities – getting ready for the morning, regular exercise, grocery shopping, starting the work week and so on. The problem is we’re not always aware that we have created a ritual. When you experience that thrill of accomplishment when you solve a word puzzle, it can give you a good feeling for the rest of the day. That’s a ritual worth having!
A worldwide sports psychology study found that “a function of rituals might be preparing mentally for each performance. In that sense, rituals seem to serve a rational and useful purpose.”
Team Solve thinks that is true across many areas of life.
Once we’re aware that we’ve created a ritual, we can optimize them and take advantage of the benefits. Here are some benefits you might experience when you start or maintain your Solve puzzle ritual:
Your Solve puzzle ritual helps put you in a mental and physical groove for high performance...
Healthy eating, regular exercise and brain training – the experts tell us these are three factors to consider for a healthy lifestyle. Another way to help stay active, youthful and mentally agile is by adopting a daily ritual of solving puzzles. Team Solve supports a daily puzzle ritual as a convenient and economical way to support a healthy lifestyle.
Following is an excerpt from Prevention magazine, April 2016 edition (www.prevention.com) about an extraordinary Canadian woman who accomplished extraordinary things – and one of her daily rituals was completing a word puzzle!
Aga Burzynska is rock climbing on a bluff outside Fort Collins, CO, as she often does. While she reaches for craggy finger holds in the veined surface, Burzynska, a neuro-scientist, calculates and recalculates, her brain and body working together to scale the vertical. Burzynska loves the outdoors and the way exercise makes her feel.
But the challenging physicality of climbing is doing more than just...
Team Solve has been talking about the value of rituals. We support and encourage you to build a daily ritual of solving puzzles. Helpful rituals give us purpose and validate that we successfully accomplished something in the midst of a quiet day or even a busy day.
Solving puzzles fuels an active brain. A brain that is active is a brain that is stimulated. And that helps it to function better. When your brain is working well in one area, then it’s likely to work well in other areas too. A small triumph, such as solving a puzzle, can boost happy and positive emotions.
In 2005, a new puzzle craze swept the globe: Sudoku.
This puzzle had, and still does have, wide appeal because its structure is simple – a grid of cells in rows and columns and blocks with some numbers filled in. Even though the rules are simple – just use logic (no math required ) to place numbers in the cells, Solve Sudoku can still be challenging.
Often there are no easy solutions to the challenges...
Can you remember a day where things just seemed to come together? You woke up feeling good, your activities all went to plan, and you felt like you were really “in the flow”. We all love days like that.
An activity that helps you flow -- to be in a state of mind so focussed that you are actually immersed in what you are doing and the rest of the world falls away – is a flow activity and it’s good for you.
For Janice of Team Solve a flow activity is when she’s looking at photos of a favourite trip and she gets lost in reliving memorable travel. For Ric of Team Solve it’s when he’s sailing. Other flow activities, like running, writing, meditating, baking, sketching, or gardening, are so good for your mind because it gives it a chance to have a break from worry or boredom or anxiety or pain. You can see that, compared to a bad habit like procrastinating or automatic eating, a habit of flow activities is actively doing you good. Often our...
Take a moment. Let’s accept that we don’t have to be busy all the time. While many rave about the benefits of multi-tasking, just as many encourage the calming effects of single tasking, which means focussing on one thing, one person, one task, one goal – at a time. Single-tasking can be applied to many areas of our lives and can help make us happier.
Your Solve puzzle ritual is one of the best examples that reveals the benefits of single tasking. There are often times throughout the day when we do not have the time to sit quietly for an hour, but a ten minute time out could be the solution. Utilize your Solve puzzle ritual -- and simply take a moment to close your eyes and breath deeply for one minute. Tuning in helps to stop your racing thoughts and give your inner voice (often softer than your mental voice) a chance to be heard. Start your Solve puzzle ritual with this focussed approach. Even if you don’t get the solution right away you will have allowed...
It is said that a lot of our beliefs and expectations about daily life are encoded into habits that we integrate into our regular commitments and tasks – like your Solve puzzle ritual.
From Gilbert Ross, in his article entitled “7 Morning Rituals to Empower your Day and Change your Life”,
“The most common trait of highly successful people is the recognition of the power they have in co-creating their reality through changing the way they think, believe or expect their reality to be. One of the most effective ways of changing our belief patterns is through practicing and maintaining daily rituals.
Ancient traditions had clearly understood the power of rituals in reinforcing habits and changing the way we see and create our reality a long, long time ago. Once again, if you look into the life history of any highly successful individual, you will find some form of ritual in his or her daily routine. Some of these rituals may seem banal or eccentric but...
Team Solve believes that setting time aside to concentrate on your daily puzzle ritual has many benefits. Our brains consume more energy than any other part of our body. When we engage in our daily Solve puzzle ritual and single-task – all of our attention is directed at that one thing – solving the puzzle.
On the other hand, multi-tasking (performing two or more tasks at the same time or switching back and forth between tasks), is much more taxing on our brain’s energy reserves, mostly because we are switching our attention back and forth or trying to be efficient while performing several tasks one after another.
Focussing on the Solve puzzle collection, and not doing other things at the same time, benefits our short term memory because we’re not continuously using brain power to remember where we left off, which tasks we’re on and when to switch tasks again!
Focussing and “single tasking” saves energy so it helps keep our energy levels...
Many simple daily rituals can positively impact your life.
Professional athlete, Gretchen Bleiler said, “I learned a few years ago that balance is the key to a happy and successful life and a huge part of achieving that balance is to instill rituals into your everyday life – a nutritious and balanced diet, daily exercise, time for yourself through meditation, reading, journaling, yoga, daily reflection and setting goals.” Team Solve would certainly add “a daily puzzle ritual” to that list!
How much time do you take for yourself each day? If you are like most, then it’s likely too little. A valuable part of a healthy lifestyle is to plan for 15-20 minutes both morning and evening – just for yourself. Hey, that’s the ideal time for your Solve puzzle ritual!
Here’s a quotation about rituals from Chuck Norris, artist, actor and film producer, “Exercise, prayer and meditation are...
We’ve all heard about multi-tasking. Most of us do it out of habit because we lead busy lives.
We are multi-tasking when we are:
Our lifestyles sometimes place a huge emphasis on doing many things at once – in the name of efficiency and productivity – but Team Solve is here to say that we support the benefits of “single tasking”. Building a daily puzzle ritual is an ideal way to bring single-tasking into your day. Choose a comfortable space, at home or away, and settle into your Solve puzzle collection – and nothing else. This is single tasking – focused and concentrated – relaxed and enjoyable.
Let’s consider a quote from author Christopher Westra --- “The quickest way to do many things is to do one thing at a time.” Your brain is under stress if you are multi-tasking. Well into the 21st century,...
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