The Importance of Play for Wellbeing

Many of us have been taught (either directly or indirectly) that being an adult means living a life filled with responsibility, hard work, seriousness, and in many cases a high level of stress and/or misery. What we are not taught nearly as often is that as humans, play is an important part of our mammalian existence. At minimum play helps us to learn, to grow, to practice skills, to regulate emotions, to generate motivation, and to improve relationships and strengthen communal ties. It shouldn’t be surprising then to learn that play serves as an important part of our wellbeing and resilience. Unfortunately, it is a part that many of us have written out of our definition of what it means to be a responsible grown-up. Instead, we may think of play as irresponsible or juvenile and treat moments of play as guilty pleasures that we must make up for later, feel guilty for taking, or worse yet, that prove we are incapable or immature. As a mental health counselor who works with occupational/academic burnout and neurodiversity, much of the work I do with clients revolves around exploring and rethinking their relationships with fun and play. I work with clients on setting down frameworks that do not serve them and instead building strategies that work with their brains rather than against them, so that they can make their lives and their work - especially the challenging parts - not just rewarding, but also FUN. 

As the spring finally begins to roll into summer, here are a few strategies for injecting more fun and play into your life:

• Gamification – Find little ways to turn boring or grindy tasks into a game or to make them more fun. This might mean racing a timer or a friend/colleague to see who can finish a work assignment or task first. It might mean breaking a project into achievable steps and then structuring them like a video game-inspired questline with a reward at the end. Perhaps it just means cranking up the music and singing at the top of your lungs while you do the dishes or cook dinner. The what is not really important. What matters is finding ways to make the things you have to do more enjoyable.
• Full Presence Fun – Play can help us to recharge and bring balance into our lives, but to reap its rewards we have to actually let ourselves be present and enjoy the experience. Trying to have fun and relax for an hour with friends or family while part of your brain is stressing about a work project or the chores you still have to complete before tomorrow is a bit like trying to charge your phone on a trickle charger while you have 15 apps running. It’s not going to be very efficient or very effective. Work and responsibilities matter, but so does taking the time to recharge so that you can keep ‘adulting’ in a sustainable way. Recharging activities give us the energy we need to be able to keep going, but only when we actually allow ourselves to be present and soak them in. Next time you decide to take a break and have fun, try checking in with yourself and giving yourself permission to be fully present. Connect with the people around you and/or with yourself. Allow yourself to fully enjoy what you are doing and push back on the anxious inner critic that says you shouldn’t be taking a break or having fun. Remind yourself that recharging through play, fun, and connection are all important parts of being able to work hard.
• Accommodate Yourself – Check in with yourself and figure out what makes working and engaging in tasks you need to complete more enjoyable and easier for you, and don’t be afraid to experiment with different strategies and have fun! Maybe you will find that grocery shopping is far less taxing with an earphone in one ear, listening to a podcast, or that it’s easier to answer emails when you take your laptop to a local coffee shop and sip on a cappuccino. Perhaps you will discover that you focus best when you are body doubling with a colleague (a productivity strategy where you perform a task in the presence of another person to increase your focus and motivation) or listening to binaural beats (an illusion created by your brain when you listen to two tones with slightly different frequencies at the same time, one in each ear) in your headphones. 

Whatever you learn about yourself, you can use that info to make working and/or completing the important but monotonous daily living tasks easier and more enjoyable. Because it turns out that when we allow ourselves the space to play we build a different, more collaborative and supportive relationship with ourselves that makes being an adult a joy, rather than a drag!