How Sudoku Reduces Stress and Calms the Mind
It's not meditation. But it does give your brain one job. That can be enough.
The rules of Sudoku are very easy to learn. All you have to do is fill in all the numbers from 1 to 9 in each row, each column and each 3x3 square. There's not much to consider. Sudoku is a simple numbers and rules game.
NO GRADING. YOU CAN SPEND AS LONG AS YOU WANT ON ONE CELL. YOU CAN START OVER. YOU CAN TAKE NOTES ANYWHERE. I used to do puzzles all the time. I'd often get halfway through and set the puzzle aside, returning the next day to pick up where I left off. The grid wouldn't mind if I took a break.
Finishing one gives you a feeling of accomplishment. It is small, but it is a feeling that is real. There are days when my to-do list is so long that there is no way to even attempt to do it all. Nothing gets marked off and I feel so incompetent that I refuse to do anything at all rather than experience that feeling. But when I finish a Sudoku, I actually finished something. And the act of filling it in doesn't feel silly, it feels very legitimate.
This is a break, not a test. Can you spare ten minutes? Ten minutes of doing a puzzle probably won't change the world but it might just help make your world a bit easier to cope with. If your day is feeling unmanageably stressful then perhaps a break is in order. A break might not fix everything but it may help to calm things down a notch.