The benefits of playing Solitaire may not be obvious. Yet the reason why it is so popular worldwide may lie precisely in their subtlety. While killing time with this patience game, the players are collecting psychological benefits that not only support a healthy mind, but that can also be very useful in everyday life.
1. Soothes the mind
One of the most relevant benefits of playing solitaire is the way it helps the mind enter into a light meditative state.
Unlike other games that demand a high level of attention or logical thinking, Solitaire triggers a soft mental activity that works to relax the brain and dilute stress without shutting it off completely.
2. It’s entertaining
As a low-risk game, Solitaire can be entertaining and chase away boredom without ever creating a sense of frustration or failure. This can be explained by the fact that making a mistake is not necessarily a synonym withlosing the game.
A mistake may condition the transfer of a card without affecting the display on the tableau completely. The player may simply have to rethink the sequences in place or to begin a new one to create an opening for the card retained by the wrong move.
3. It provides the perfect alone time
Solitaire provides a great opportunity to enjoy some alone time. Its simplicity combined with the low mental activity it requires creates the right atmosphere for players to be able to disconnect from the world and their problems.
4. It helps to improve memory
Unlike with other games, the benefits of playing Solitaire are subtle and often unconscious. Memory improvement is a good example of this case.
Having a good memory is not a requirement to play Solitaire. In fact, players do not need any memory skills to be able to win the game.
Nevertheless, it is possible to discern improvement in the players’ memory skills as they keep playing frequently. This improvement is particularly notorious in the ability to unconsciously memorize the colors, suits, numbers, and even the order of the cards in the Stock, after going through it only once.
5. Improves mental skills
Playing Solitaire is a soft mental activity that can nonetheless produce benefits for the brain. Despite the light meditative state the players enter when playing, they still need to analyze all the cards while taking into consideration several factors such as their suits, their number, which ones are available on the Stock pile, and which are hidden in the tableau. Then they need to create and plan future sequences to guide them to victory.
By performing these simple tasks simultaneously and repeatedly, the players can experience a clear improvement in their mental skills as they can perform them quicker and quicker each time.
6. It teaches important life lessons
Solitaire is often associated with procrastination thanks to pop culture. However, this game is also educational as it teaches valuable lessons that can be transposed to everyday life.
For instance, Solitaire teaches about delayed gratification or “return on investment”. That is, sometimes it is best to hold your ground and wait instead of acting on the moment to be able to collect more gains later.
In the game as in life, it can be useful to control the impulse of acting right away and instead pause to analyze the situation, understand the changes that may come, and predict if better outcomes are possible than the one the person is facing at the moment.
Likewise, Solitaire also teaches how it is important to sometimes take a step back to move two forward. It is hard to make such a decision in real life, but as a low-risk game Solitaire provides the perfect training ground to practice this type of decision-making skill.
7. It promotes a positive sense of competitiveness
Despite being a single-player game, Solitaire has a note of competitiveness that also helps to explain why it is so entertaining.
In this competition, players challenge themselves by trying to achieve a better score or time at each game. In practice, however, they are reinforcing other benefits of playing Solitaire such as the improvement of mental skills or memory. It is a passive and positive competition against themselves to increase their capacities.
The benefits of playing Solitaire are not as obvious when compared to many other single-player games out there. Nevertheless, they exist and help to explain why a game as simple as this has reached such a high degree of popularity all over the world since it first appeared in the 19th century.
