Highlight Kids’ Puzzles And Mindfulness for Positive Health Behaviors

Can you find all the hidden objects in this image? Hint: There are 10 of them! (Answers are below!)

Image source: highlightskids.com

🤓 My Childhood Highlights Kids’ Puzzles

One of my greatest post-bedtime childhood pleasures was solving Highlights Kids’ puzzles. Often presented as colorful digital cartoon paintings, these puzzles sneakily hide familiar objects, like sock, pencil, or ice cream cone, in the background, requiring players to either stare at the photo for a long time, or think creatively about their other possible locations.

Over the years, coming back to these puzzles during stressful moments, I realize that they taught me more than the ability to spot a musical note among tree branches, or identify a red pizza slice in a bucket full of soap. To me, solving a Highlights Kids’ puzzle is similar to practicing mindfulness.

🎋A simple definition of mindfulness

Mindfulness prevents rigidifying objects and events into categories, like how Highlights Kids’ puzzles place items in absolutely unconventional locations. In the ordinary world, we are often surrounded by many things that have long been defined by social constructs, or rational categories (Langer, 1989; Taylor, 1986). For a typical human being, pizza slices are topping-full dough hot from the oven; socks are worn by the feet, or radishes are grown underground. These beliefs rigidify our reception of new information, and lock us into a world full of pre-constructed categories.

On the other hand, being mindful allows one to break out of that constrained world, circumvent the constructs set forth by others, and embrace the uncertainty that opens up new avenues and ways of thinking (Langer, 1989). For a mindful person, a pizza slice might be thicker or thinner, topped with roasted pineapples or hot sauce; socks might be worn as a shirt sleeve; or radishes might be spotted on a tree, just like objects in Highlights Kids’ puzzles (pictured). Though these images are uncertain, as implied by the word “might,” they allow the perceiver to pay more attention and become receptive to a surprise result.

🧘🏻‍♀️ Highlights Kids Puzzles and Mindfulness

Together with these surprise results come some therapeutic effects: personally, the object-finding activity allows my subconscious to analyze the photo and notice the newness that is hidden beneath the paint. As a result, mindfully finding these objects give me so much more ground for excitement and reflection - I’m simply just living in the moment and free from outside distractions.

The process of fitting each object in different locations through trial and error is quite enjoyable; yet, it also surprises me at how mindless we can be even though the answers seem to be quite obvious. For example, I failed to spot a feather right in the center of the photo above, even after staring back and forth at the scene for 10 minutes – I bet you did as well.

I’ve realized that objects in Highlights Kids’ puzzles represent how my life, and perhaps that of you, my friends, operates. There are things presented in front of our eyes that we often fail to notice. The current remote environment proves a prominent example of how mindlessness is an imminent issue for students like myself. We categorize online learning as tedious and non-interactive. As a result, we pay less attention to the professor's words, stare aimlessly at the talking screen, and forget the assigned breakout room number, even though they are right in front of our eyes. Though justifications for these mindless behaviors are boredom or fatigue, I believe they can be addressed if we approach these situations expecting to find new information and perspectives, just like how people approach finding objects in Highlights Kids’ cartoons.

🎯 Key takeaways

Real-world situations do not always have a clearly-defined or predictable process. Like these unclear situations, objects in Highlights Kids’ puzzles are embedded in an overwhelmingly chaotic context that requires players to pay more attention to identify them. If people can successfully concentrate their minds and solve these puzzles in their pastime, I believe we should practice translating these behaviors into real-life situations. As undergrads, we all have problems to solve, goals to reach, and expectations to meet. We might as well treat these situations similar to the process of solving Highlights Kids’ puzzles, and make the most of these moments while we still can.

Reference:

(1)     Langer, E. (1989). Mindfulness. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub.

(2)     Highlights Kids. (n.d). Bears Camping. Retrieved September 28, 2020, from https://www.highlightskids.com/games/hidden-pictures/bears-camping

(3)     Taylor, S. (1986). Health psychology (1st ed.). New York: Random House.