#101 Brain. Stress. Solitaire.
You might be getting this twice - apologies in advance. About half my mailing list was never delivered yesterday so I'm trying again!
Yes, I play solitaire on my phone.
I play a LOT of solitaire on my phone.
There are reasons for this, some of which we’ll get into in a minute.
But first, let’s examine that bit about keeping our brains young.
I can’t remember when I first heard about the theory that doing puzzles, of almost any type, would help keep our brains “plastic” and stave off Alzheimer’s and other scary forms of dementia.
I thought perhaps I couldn’t remember because, well, my gray matter is aging.
But it turns out the A.I. behind Google doesn’t know either.
When I searched “First article linking puzzles to dementia prevention”, Google unhelpfully came up with stuff from 2023.
Trust me - we’ve been talking about this since waaaaay before 2023.
(I tried a lot of variations on this theme in case my choice of words was to blame but the best the algorithm could come up with was “It’s very hard to know exactly when puzzles were first linked to brain health.” To which I say, if artificial brains don’t know when this craze started, I should probably be forgiven for any shortcomings in MY memory.)
Anyway, I got curious about it because, as we live longer and longer, we have become obsessed, not only with what our aging quality of life will be, but how much of our future health we can control.
Especially the possibly losing our marbles bit.
While watching one of my British murder shows last night these two phrases caught my attention:
“Some of your pages are stuck together.”
and
“You know what? You are three tomatoes short of a salad!”
Honestly, who wants to be three tomatoes short of a salad?
None of us.
So we grab onto any little ray of hope we can find that there are things we can do to prevent it.
Including, apparently, ingesting something made from jellyfish.
I’ve never heard that jellyfish had particularly good memories – or any memories at all for that matter - but it must be true because it’s in all those ads for that miracle drug that is going to keep you from becoming, in another charming British phrase, “a few sandwiches short of a picnic”.
I, personally, am pretty much a fatalist.
I figure that genetics are a much better indicator of whether my future “elevator” will go “all the way to the top” than any reliable data I can find on puzzle working.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to give it my all.
Excuse me, I need to take a break and go keep my brain young.
Copyright© 2025 Anne Morse Hambrock All rights reserved.
Coping
OK,
Let’s get into those other reasons.
Am I addicted to video games?
No. I am not.
But I have to admit that I have logged a lot of hours moving playing cards around a little screen.
When:
I am standing in line at the checkout.
And person number one needs a price check, and person number two has a credit card that isn’t working and person number three is counting out pennies (yes, people still do this) and person number four has only just realized he could have been putting his items on the belt three minutes ago.
And the self-checkout is broken.
Standing there glued to my phone, in what might look like a zombielike trance, is keeping me from wanting to murder all of them.
While writing.
You might think it would be counterproductive to play games while trying to write poems or commentary but I have done so much of this particular kind of puzzle solving that a weird thing happens where the analytical half my brain focuses on the puzzle at hand and the creative side wanders around and free associates. Sometimes I get my best stuff this way. (And sometimes I just waste time. One can’t have everything.)
Just before I go to sleep.
Yes, yes, yes, I know. This is supposed to be the absolute worst thing you can do before trying to sleep. We are all supposed to be turning off our screens and avoiding blue light and reading actual paper books or drinking hot milk or using lavender pillows or blah blah blah to get that much desired, and apparently elusive, good night’s sleep.
First of all, I work with computer screens for hours at a time so I don’t think avoiding thirty minutes of blue light at the end of my day is going to do much for me. Second, I sleep next to someone who can hear a fly cough so reading actual paper books with actual paper page turning sounds is only going to work out if we get separate bedrooms. Third, milk, hot or cold, makes me gag. Fourth, lavender smells like soap to me. Which is going to remind me of all that laundry sitting in the basement and taunting me. Far from drifting off into slumber, I’m more likely to go down and put the filthy pile out of its misery.
I need two things at the end of the day – quiet time to myself and to reset my brain from alpha to beta. Regardless of what those fancy scientists say, solitaire helps me do both. If I don’t get this opportunity, I not only can’t sleep, I’m not too much fun to be around after the following sunrise.
Hiding from life.
Here’s the big one. There’s a lot going on in the world that I just have no power to fix and I need to find ways to think about it all as little as possible. Losing myself in a series of puzzles – whether digital or jigsaw – keeps me from escaping into a bottle of wine or those donuts I really really really don’t need.
What it really all comes down to is that those dumb little cards help me be calmer.
So the next time you see me glued to my phone please don’t judge me.
Especially if you are the person counting out all those pennies.
First Blooms
Spring is trying.
Unlike last year when everything bloomed early and got zapped for its troubles, this year we seem to be a little late. I can usually count on these little guys to show up in February.
Regardless of timing - they do my heart good.
Books
If you like my work there are two book collections for sale.
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