Coffee and Puzzzles by Sanation - Adaiyalam'26 Chennai Mental Health Fest

Coffee and Puzzles brought together exactly what its name promises: unwinding, cognitive challenges, and a little personal reflection, all inside a relaxed, café-style setting. The event wove together coffee, puzzles, games, personality activities, psychological assessments, a reading corner, and a book showcase, all pointed toward the same goal: helping participants slow down and get a little more self-aware.

The event set out to:

·    Promote mental wellbeing through engaging, low-pressure activities

·    Encourage self-reflection and self-awareness

·    Give participants a chance to explore different aspects of their own personality

Here's how the space unfolded.

1. The Willpower Scale: Participants kicked things off by rating their willpower on a scale of 1 to 10, then returned to that same rating after working through the event's activities. It was a small but effective way to make an otherwise invisible shift in mood, energy, focus visible to participants themselves.

2. "15 to 9": A Game of Hard Choices: This one asked participants to sit with an uncomfortable moral dilemma together: fifteen people, a boat with room for only nine, and the task of deciding which six had to be left behind. The choices people made and more importantly, how they justified them ended up saying a lot about their values, priorities, and instinctive decision-making style.

3. The Personality Card Game: Participants exchanged cards with friends, and the cards they ended up collecting sorted them into different personality categories: Personality A, B, or C. The real value of the activity wasn't the sorting itself, but the conversations it sparked about how others perceive us versus how we see ourselves.

4. The Puzzle Challenge Station: For the more hands-on crowd, the puzzle station offered a set of genuinely tricky cognitive challenges:

·    Reassembling mechanical puzzles

·    Solving magnetic bead cube puzzles

·    Balancing twelve nails on a wooden support structure

Each one leaned on a different mix of logic, patience, and sheer stubbornness — a satisfying test of problem-solving under a bit of pressure.

5. The Book Corner: Tucked away from the noise of the puzzle station was a quiet reading corner, stocked with books free for anyone to browse. It doubled as a small stress-relief space acting as proof that sometimes wellbeing looks less like an activity and more like permission to sit still for a while.

6. Psychological Assessments: Participants could also take a couple of formal assessments, including a Big Five personality assessment and a social evaluation assessment — both designed to offer real insight into behavioural patterns rather than just surface-level personality labels.

7. Personality Reflection Cards: This activity paired closely with the book showcase. Participants picked out cards that felt personally relatable, and the colour on the back of each card were tallied across their choices pointed to a corresponding personality profile. From there, participants were guided to a specific section of the featured book, where they could read descriptions built to resonate with their own experience.

8. Book Showcase: I'm Overthinking It: Rounding out the event was a showcase of I'm Overthinking It, a book that digs into the mechanics of overthinking and pushes readers to actually examine their thought patterns rather than avoid them. Its core message is that confronting difficult thoughts, rather than sidestepping them, is what actually drives growth.