How puzzling can help you get your edge back

I’ve completed 17 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles in the past 14 weeks. Mostly by myself.

Over that same time, I also cut way back on booze, halved my phone screen time (okay, it’s maybe 30% less), and gone on a dozen hikes. All without losing a single cardboard piece.

I never really saw myself as a puzzler, but it’s become a nice way to put aside the problems of the world and focus on something else for five or 10 minutes, or for a couple of hours. It helps with my sometimes short attention span, and puzzles are extremely satisfying to finish.

And while 17 puzzles might sound like a lot, it’s nothing when you consider that Northglenn’s Erin Leidy had so many puzzles in her house at one point – “a couple hundred at least,” she says – that she had to start a business just to get rid of them.

“They take up so much room. And I didn’t have any more room,” she said.

But the business only made things more crowded. Shortly after founding The Missing Piece Puzzle Exchange in October 2020, selling mail-order puzzles out of her garage, Leidy had to evict her car to make space for them … then her wife Denise’s car. Finally, last September, Leidy opened a retail store at 7188 Lowell Blvd. in Westminster where there are an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 puzzles on the shelves, ranging in size from 300 pieces to 3,000, and of all skill levels.

New puzzles are expensive, though: good ones typically start at $20-$25 each and go up from there. So, the Missing Piece rents puzzles, too. It costs $25 per month for locals to rent an unlimited number of puzzles; out-of-state residents can sign up for monthly or yearly options.

“Most people buy a puzzle and then they don’t do them again,” Leidy explained about the one-and-done nature of puzzling. “It’s kind of like books, or just like books.”

She’s also got hundreds of used puzzles – all checked for missing pieces – for sale, some as low as $1 each. Others cost $5 to $10, which is a fraction of what you would pay new.

Leidy, who was an Allstate insurance agent before starting The Missing Piece, did her first puzzle in 2008 while renting a cabin in the mountains that had one. From there, the hobby grew, and she now competes in, and organizes, speed-puzzling events around Denver.

Puzzling exploded as a popular pastime during the COVID-19 pandemic – just as Leidy was getting her business off the ground – as people searched for things to do in the seclusion of their own homes. Manufacturers and retailers had trouble keeping up with the demand as sales rose by 300 to 370%, according to reported numbers at the time. As an example, Boulder’s high-end Liberty Puzzles, which makes $150 art pieces, received 10,000 orders in the days after the pandemic began, something that almost destroyed the small business.

Once society began approaching normalcy in 2021, however, interest slowed down. But it didn’t stop – and Leidy believes that a lot of people who enjoyed puzzling have stuck with it since then, the 29- to 45-year-old age group, in particular. “It was a surprising demographic to me,” she said. “I thought 45-55, but it was the whole demographic below that.

“I think it’s something that people can do that isn’t on your phone, a way to step back and enjoy something without technology,” she added.

Puzzling has also been shown to relieve stress, improve one’s mood and improve short-term memory, attention to detail and other brain functions. Some therapists even recommend it to people as a tool to help with addiction recovery. Leidy has customers who said it helped them stop smoking, especially in the first few weeks.