At some point during lockdown, perhaps in week four or week eight – I’m not entirely sure as I’ve lost all sense of time – I started doing a 1,000-piece puzzle each day. In the morning, I’d clear the dining room table, turn the TV on to something inane and get to work sorting through a mosaic of cardboard pieces until well into the evening.

I’ve always enjoyed puzzles: in preschool, I’d choose puzzles over dolls or the jungle gym, and there have been more than one New Year’s Eve spent with loved ones, tucking into bottles of wine and a puzzle as fireworks crackled overhead. But since the pandemic, I’ve completed more puzzles than ever before. And I’m not alone. In households across the country, in locked-down regions, Australians are sat on the floor or at a table, rummaging through puzzle pieces, attempting to make something whole out of something disordered.

It turns out Scott Morrison may have gotten one thing right about the pandemic when he said in March of last year: “I can assure you over the next few months we will consider those jigsaw puzzles absolutely essential.” After all, if we’re allowed to leave our homes to maintain our physical health, activities that contribute to our mental wellness should get a look in too.

Georgia Patch, founder of the Australian jigsaw puzzle business Ponder Designs, believes puzzles “help people switch off in an analogue way”. Designed by emerging artists, Ponder’s puzzles speak to social issues and themes such as body diversity, consumption culture and social media fatigue. Patch says they aim to “act as a spring board” for “healthy conversations” in an age where divisiveness and defensiveness often reign.

A lifelong puzzle fan, Patch saw merging mindfulness with puzzles as a no-brainer even before Covid-19, particularly in a culture that often lauds busyness and productivity above all else. “I found that I was suffering burnout [at my job], but when I did have spare time on my hands I was scrolling Instagram and not spending my time in meaningful ways to replenish my mind.”

Inspiration struck while Patch was making trips home to England. “I found myself with horrific jetlag,” she says. She found puzzles to be “the most therapeutic thing to do to keep me awake when experiencing mental drain and exhaustion”.

That sense of unmoored timelessness caused by jet lag is something that many have been comparing with lockdowns. Recently, Melbourne comedian Luka Muller tweeted: “Every day feels like hour 17 of an international flight.”

For Sydney-based actors Michelle Lim Davidson and Josh Price, puzzles have afforded a healthy and fulfilling outlet during a period of economic precarity. “I quite enjoy the aesthetic of looking at a [completed puzzle]. It’s like building a piece of art,” Price says.

Davidson enjoys the certainty and structure provided by puzzles. “When everything feels out of your control – piece A fits with piece B,” she says. “There’s no room for error. I’m not really working at the moment so [doing puzzles is] a late afternoon and evening activity. It helps set my routine.”

Both actors are part of a puzzle club, in which trusted friends (and only the trusted – there is no greater slight than receiving a box with missing or damaged pieces) trade puzzles and share jigsaw commentary. “We like to talk about when our deliveries come and get excited for each other,” says Davidson. “It’s a real communal activity. I feel connected to others doing puzzles at the same time – you know the journey and you have a sense of pride for each other.”

Mike Wall, the managing director of Hobbyco, one of Sydney’s oldest toy and hobby stores (the company celebrated its 85th year in 2020), has seen firsthand the cohesion puzzles can bring to families and, more widely, communities. Beyond having a dedicated section for the 800 types of puzzles stocked at Hobbyco, the store also supports the Australian Jigsaw Puzzle Association, which has begun holding state and nationwide jigsaw puzzle competitions.

While modern puzzles have been popular since they first appeared around 1908 in the United States, they also act in a similar way to the lipstick index – surging in popularity in times of struggle. During the Great Depression, 10m puzzles were made each week in the US as households sought more homely forms of escapism. And now lockdowns have led to a meteoric rise in puzzle sales, in Australia and around the world. “When Covid started last year, we sold as many in April as for the whole of the previous year,” Wall says.

The bestsellers? A 3D puzzle of the World Cup soccer ball, and anything Disney. Wall attributes the popularity of puzzles to their indiscriminate appeal, as they fall into a niche which is both gender and age neutral – something very few toys can boast.

Indeed, lockdown has exposed that there are passionate puzzlers everywhere you look. We may be your friends, your employees, your baristas, your personal trainers. And you will likely find us congregated at one of the State Jigsaw Puzzle competitions planned for 2022. (With a few months left of 2021, it’s what I’ll be training for.)

In the meantime, this puzzler will be starting on her newest project: a 1,000-piece Ravensburger puzzle depicting something I’ve been dreaming of for the past three months, and especially now with spring bringing warmer weather: the beach.