Search results
Sep 8, 2024 · Chess is much more than just a game—it’s a tool for personal growth that improves the skills we use in everyday life. Whether you aim to become a better strategist, more efficient problem-solver, or simply want to strengthen your mental abilities, chess can be an essential part of that journey.
- How Chess Can Change Your Life: Simple Lessons for Everyone
Chess can take a long time to play. It teaches us to be...
- How Chess Can Change Your Life: Simple Lessons for Everyone
- Overview
- Chess develops the ability to see from someone else’s perspective
- Chess improves memory
- Chess enables you to enter a flow state
- Chess elevates your creativity
- Chess leads to better planning skills
- Chess can make therapy more effective
- Chess may offer protection against the development of dementia
- Chess can improve the symptoms of ADHD
- Electronic chess may help stave off a panic attack
Playing chess can improve cognitive skills like memory, planning, and problem-solving. It may also help reduce symptoms of certain brain conditions.
The game of chess is loved all over the world. From Amsterdam to Zhengzhou, people gather in living rooms, pubs, plazas, and libraries to match wits over the cherished checkered board.
Why is it that people are willing to devote such time to the game? It’s undoubtedly the fact that chess involves an intense intellectual challenge that’s very good for the health of your mind.
Keep reading to learn what we know about the benefits of playing chess.
Skilled chess players learn to anticipate an opponent’s next moves. To predict what another person will do next, a player must develop the ability to adopt another person’s perspective and infer what action they are likely to take.
Behavioral scientists call this this ability to see from another viewpoint the “theory of mind.” It’s an ability that is essential to exercising empathy and building healthy social relationships. A 2019 study found that chess develops this perspective-taking ability in children who practice the game.
It might not be surprising to learn that expert chess players have strong memory skills. After all, the game involves memorizing numerous combinations of moves and their potential outcomes.
It’s also interesting to note that experienced chess players show higher performance related to a particular kind of recollection: auditory memory. This is the ability to remember what you’ve learned through hearing.
In one experiment, researchers compared the recall ability of expert chess players to that of people with no chess-playing experience. They found that the chess players were significantly better at recalling lists of words they’d heard than people who had never played chess.
Skilled chess players also have a better than average ability to remember and quickly recognize visual patterns, which researchers think comes from memorizing complex chess positions.
Flow is a deeply rewarding sense of total involvement, in which you’re operating at a peak performance level in a challenging task. Athletes, artists, and performers often describe entering a kind of time warp, where they are so wholly focused on the task at hand that their awareness of anything beyond the performance seems to disappear.
Researchers who study brain activity noted that theta waves are heightened in electroencephalograms (EEGs) taken when people are in a state of flow. Studies have shown the same high levels of theta waves in brain scans of experienced chess players during increasingly difficult chess matches.
Researchers at a school in India tested the creative thinking skills of two groups of students. One group was trained in chess playing, and the other was not.
The tests asked students to come up with alternate uses for common items and to interpret patterns and meaning in abstract forms. Students who played chess scored higher on tests. Researchers concluded that chess increased the students’ ability to exercise divergent and creative thinking.
Chess games are known for long periods of silent contemplation, during which players consider each move. Players spend time anticipating their opponents’ responses and attempting to predict every eventuality.
That habit of mind — careful contemplation and planning — is one of the cognitive health benefits of playing chess.
Some counselors and therapists play chess with clients as a means of increasing self-awareness and building more effective therapeutic relationships.
Considered a creative therapy strategy, chess allows you to see your reactions to stress and to challenges as they arise in the course of a match. Your therapist is present to help you evaluate your responses and learn more about why you respond to problems the way you do.
In a 2019 research review, scientists found that the complex mental flexibility chess demands could help protect older people from dementia.
Researchers found evidence that the game, which challenges memory, calculation, visual-spatial skills, and critical thinking abilities, may help reduce cognitive decline and postpone the effects of dementia as you age.
In a 2016 study involving 100 school-age children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, researchers included regular chess playing in a multi-faceted treatment approach.
Students who participated in this treatment method experienced a 41 percent decrease in both inattentiveness and over-activity following the course of treatment.
There haven’t been any large-scale studies to support the use of chess apps to help reduce panic attack symptoms. In one 2017 case study, an individual who experienced panic attacks was able to use a chess app on a phone to increase the sense of calm and keep a panic attack from progressing.
The key to success was in finding just the right level of challenge to occupy his attention and distract from unpleasant feelings. For this user, difficulty levels 2 to 4 provided just the right amount of engagement.
- Chess teaches you to have a strategy. Learning the rules of chess is simple but that alone won’t help you win matches. For that you need strategy, and life is pretty much the same.
- Chess teaches you to have a plan B and a plan C. In chess, you can have a brilliant strategy to beat your opponent but if they make moves you don’t want them to, it can all come crashing down to nothing.
- You have to see the big picture. In chess, it’s called seeing the whole board; in life, it’s seeing the big picture. When you’re inexperienced you can be fixated on that one set of moves you’re making to win the game.
- Chess teaches you to think well ahead. in life the most successful people are two steps ahead or well ahead of the game. They are organized, anticipate problems and have an idea of how to deal with them well before they occur.
Nov 9, 2023 · Chess can take a long time to play. It teaches us to be patient and keep trying, even when things get tough. In real life, things may not always go our way, but if we stay patient and persistent, we can overcome challenges and reach our goals.
- Chess improves key thinking skills. As a game based on logic and processing of numerous potential combinations of moves at once, it is tailor-made for engaging your brain functions.
- Chess can improve your memory. Chess is an excellent memory exercise because it encourages remembering moves for various strategical purposes. The better players fill their memories with possible combinations.
- Chess players are successful. The 2012 YouGov poll also found a clear relationship between being a regular chess player and various measures of achievement and success.
- Chess can make your kids smarter. Several studies have been done to show that playing chess (in one case for 18 weeks) increased the IQs of the children involved.
Apr 1, 2022 · People who play chess regularly learn to pause and think before reacting, thus avoiding panic attacks. People with ADHD learn how to focus for longer periods by playing chess. Chess also helps prevent the problems associated with dementia, as it forces elderly people to exercise their brains.
People also ask
Why does chess take a long time to play?
What life lessons can you learn from chess?
How does chess impact real life?
Why do people play chess?
Does playing chess improve brain health?
Are there drawbacks to playing chess?
Jan 6, 2020 · I believe concentration is a defining feature of a fulfilling life, a necessary habit of mind for a viable civilisation, and that chess can teach us more about what concentration really means.
