THE POWER OF PLAY
August is a great month to consider this topic. Regardless of your situation, I hope you have found a way to unplug from work and usual daily schedules and plug into your own innate rhythms that include play.
By nature, humans are born to play. Playing is instinctive and fundamental to our existence. Playing helps us survive and thrive by connecting us to other human beings and to sources of energy and excitement within ourselves. Play is simultaneously a source of calmness and relaxation, as well as a source of stimulation for the brain and body. Playfulness helps us be more inventive, smart, happy, flexible, and resilient. A sure (and fun) way to develop your imagination, creativity, problem-solving abilities, and mental health is to play with your romantic partner, office mates, children, grandchildren, and friends.
Play is Not Just for Kids
Play is often described as a time when we feel most alive, yet we often take it for granted and may completely forget about it. Yest play isn't a luxury, as we often imagine -- it's a necessity. Play is as important to our physical and mental health as getting enough sleep, eating well, and exercising. Play teaches us how to manage and transform our "negative" emotions and experiences. It supercharges learning, helps us relieve stress, and connects us to others and the world around us. Play can also help make work more productive and pleasurable.
Despite the power of play, however, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, many of us stop playing. We exchange play for work and other "grown up" responsibilities. When we do have some leisure time, we're more likely to zone out in front of the TV or computer than to engage in creative, brain-stimulating play. By giving ourselves permission to play with the joyful abandon of childhood, we can continue to reap its benefits throughout life.
Some of the Lifelong Benefits of Play
Play connects us to others
Sharing joy, laughter and fun with others promotes bonding and strengthens a sense of community. We develop empathy, compassion, trust, and the capacity for intimacy through regular play.
Play fosters creativity, flexibility, and learning
Play stimulates our imaginations, helping us adapt and solve problems. Play arouses curiosity, which leads to discovery and creativity. The components of play -- curiosity, discovery, novelty, risk-taking, trial and error, pretense, games, social etiquette and other increasingly complex adaptive activities -- are the same as the components of learning.
Play is an antidote to loneliness, isolation, anxiety, and depression
When we play vigorously, we trigger a mix of endorphins that lift our spirits and distractions that distance us from pain, fear and other burdens. And when we play with other people, with friends and strangers, we are reminded that we are not alone in this world. We can connect to others in delightful and meaningful ways that banish loneliness.
Play teaches us perseverance
The rewards of learning or mastering a new game teach us that perseverance is worthwhile. Perseverance is a trait necessary to healthy adulthood, and it is learned largely through play. In terms of research, perseverance and violence are rarely found together.
Play makes us happy
Beyond all these excellent reasons for playing, there is the sheer joy of it. Play is a state of being that is happy and joyous. Jumping into and out of the world of play on a daily basis can preserve and nourish our own hearts, and the hearts of our families and communities.
Play Enhances Relationships
Play is one of the most effective tools for keeping relationships fresh and exciting. Playing together for the fun of it brings joy, vitality, and resilience to relationships. Play can also heal resentments, disagreements, and hurts. Through regular play, we learn to trust one another and feel safe. Trust enables us to work together, open ourselves to intimacy, and try new things.
Play helps us develop and improve our social skills
Social skills are learned in the give and take of play. Verbal communication and body language, safety and danger, freedom and boundaries, cooperation and teamwork: all are discovered and practiced repeatedly during infant and childhood play. We continue to refine these skills in adulthood through play and playful communication.
Play teaches us how to cooperate with others
Play is a powerful catalyst for positive socialization. Through play, children learn how to "play nicely" with others - to work together, follow mutually agreed upon rules, and socialize in groups. As adults, play continues to confer these benefits. Evidence even shows that play may be an antidote to violence. In fact, those who avoid or have never learned to play may become lost in the world of fear, rage, and obsessive worry.
Mutual play can heal emotional wounds
When adults play together, they are engaging in exactly the same patterns of behavior that predict emotional health in children also lead to positive change in adults. Studies show that an emotionally insecure individual can replace negative beliefs and behaviors with positive assumptions and actions by living with a secure partner. Close, positive, and emotionally fulfilling relationships heal and create emotional resiliency. Play provides a safe and joyous context for the development of such relationships.
Playfulness in Relationships
Mutual laughter and play are an essential component of strong, healthy relationships. By making a conscious effort to incorporate more humor and play into your daily interactions, you can improve the quality of your love relationships- as well as your connections with co-workers, family members, and friends.
Playing at Work: The Key to Productivity and Innovation
Many people are working longer and harder, thinking that this will solve the problem of diminishing free time and an ever-increasing workload. But they are still falling behind, becoming chronically overwhelmed, and burning out.
Work is where we spend much of our time. That is why it is especially important for us to play during work. Without some recreation, our work suffers. Success at work doesn't depend on the amount of time you work. It depends upon the quality of your work. And the quality of your work is highly dependent on your well-being.
Taking the time to replenish yourself through play is one of the best things you can do for your career. When the project you're working on hits a serious glitch (as they frequently do), heading out to the basketball court with your colleagues or playing a few rounds of golf or tennis does a lot more for you than take your mind off the problem.
Work or play: It's all in your attitude
When researchers studied preteen children's attitudes about play, they discovered that some children called almost everything they did "play" while others called almost everything they did "work". Reconnecting with the children at the end of adolescence, the children who thought of more activities as play were more successful and happier in school and were more content socially than the people who saw more things as "work".
Playing at work:
- Keeps you functional when under stress
- Refreshes your mind and body
- Encourages teamwork
- Helps you see problems in new ways
- Triggers creativity and innovation
- Increases energy and prevents burnout
Play, Creativity, and Flow
Psychiatrist and writer Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has studied play extensively. He describes play as a flow state that requires just the right balance of challenge and opportunity. If the game is too hard or too easy, it loses its sense of pleasure and fun. Maintaining a flow state in games with others requires all participants, regardless of age or ability, to feel challenged, but not overwhelmed.
Feelings We Experience in the Flow State
Involvement: Complete focus and concentration, either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training.
Delight: A sense of bliss and positive detachment from everyday reality.
Clarity: Great inner clarity and a built-in understanding about the state of affairs.
Confidence: An innate sense that the activity is doable and that your skills are adequate to the task. Additionally, you don't feel anxious or bored.
Serenity: A sense of peace and an absence of worries about self.
Timeliness: Thorough focus on the present and a lack of attention to the passing of time.
Motivation: Intrinsic understanding about what needs to be done and a desire to keep the moment of play moving.
Learning How to Play Again
Bernie DeKoven, one of the originators of the New Games movement, has devoted his life to developing games that bring people together emotionally in the context of playing for fun. For those who have forgotten how to play and don't know how to get started again, Bernie offers the following advice:
"You don't have to have rules or goals or a board or even anything to play with except each other. But whatever it is that you're playing, there are two things you have to take seriously: being together, and the sheer fun of it all. No game is more important than the experience of being together, being joined, being equal - governed by the same rules, playing for the same purpose. And no purpose is more uniting and freeing than the purpose of being fun with each other."
DeKoven makes important points about winning and losing:
- It's OK for you to lose. This may be hard to remember at the time. But getting beaten, fair and square, by your own grandkid, is one of life's great events.
- Nobody has to lose. For some reason, both adults and children tend to take games more seriously than anyone needs to. That's why it is not unusual for a trivial game to end up as a contest of wills and for children to wind up in tears because they've "lost."
- Competition separates, rather than unites. Despite your best efforts to keep the competition friendly and fun, the very existence of winners and losers shifts the focus of the game away from fun and playfulness. It separates rather than unites, alienates rather than embraces.
- Yes, the competitive separation can be overcome. Whenever it happens that opponents embrace each other, it is a victory and a triumph of the human spirit. But it is a rare occurrence.
Suggestions for playing games where no one has to lose:
- Instead of stopping a game when someone wins, just continue playing until everyone wins. There's the first winner, then the second winner, and then the third.
- When playing a two-person game, like checkers or ping-pong, try playing with three players, and rotate turns.
- If there are only two of you, in checkers, for example, just trade sides every third or fifth turn so that you have to play the other's person's position.
"At no time in life should we allow ourselves to give up play, because it allows us to maintain the human spirit," Stuart Brown, M.D., Founder and President of The National Institute for Play in Carmel Valley, Calif., said.
Dr. Brown has made it his life's work to play. He says adults don't do enough of it. "The opposite of play is not work," Dr. Brown said. "The opposite of play is depression. Think about a life without play. No humor, no movies, no books, no pub stories, no dirty jokes ... it's a different world."
Depression, declining creativity and lost productivity ... a new study reveals these are the consequences of play deprivation. Play is exercise for our brains. It helps to renew neural connections and keeps us sharp.
"In a world requiring newness and the ability to face change, such as we're facing now with the time of economic downturns, it's really important to make new patterns in order to adapt," Dr. Brown said.
There's also evidence that playtime can add years to your life. A Swedish study of 300,000 golfers found that playing golf could increase life expectancy by five years.
Knitting, crochet and needlework have also been found effective ways to manage stress and chronic pain. The action of knitting actually changes brain chemistry, decreases stress hormones and increases feel-good hormones serotonin and dopamine. The repetitive movements stimulate the same areas of the brain as meditation and yoga, which have been shown to prevent pain and depression. Dr. Brown says from animals to humans, play is a critical part of life.
The Power of Play and Trauma
"Through play," contends psychiatrist Lenore Terr, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, "we get control over the world. We get to manipulate symbols, control the outcome of events." Terr's own now-classic work with children traumatized by physical and sexual abuse demonstrates how clearly play is necessary to mental health.
In the aftermath of trauma children lose their flexibility. They play, but their play is obsessive; they stay stuck, repeating the traumatic episode endlessly. "Post-traumatic play demonstrates that if we don't find a way out of difficult situations, we will play much of our lives over and over again."
"Play is an opening to our very being," Terr observes in Beyond Love and Work: Why Adults Need to Play (Scribner, 1999). "It permits us emotional discharge, but in a way that carries little risk. In fact, she says, play is not just an activity -- it's a state of mind, and "all the mental activity of play comes at you sideways."
Therein lies its value: the mental activity is never the direct goal. Terr uses play therapy as a way to allow children-and adults, who often remain frozen in patterns of play originating in fearful experiences in childhood-to create new endings for their experience.
Perhaps for that reason, adults who play appear to live longer than those who don't. Terr cites as evidence the most recent findings of the long-standing Terman study. Begun by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman in the 1920s to examine the lives of gifted children, the study has allowed other researchers to track the consequences of high intelligence and other psychological factors to health and longevity. In the Terman group, those still surviving are those who have played the most throughout their lives, Terr told Psychology Today.
During the rest of August, make sure that you have some good moments of play. Laugh out loud at yourself and with someone else at least once a day. Make sure you play with a child under the age of 5 as much as you can, whether or not you have one. Play with your spouse or partner in at least one way that you never have before. And at least once, turn a competitive game into a collaborative one.
And, just to encourage you on your path to more play, we encourage you to share your favorite stories about playful moments. If we publish your anecdote on our blog, we'll gift you with one of our teleseminar series listed above as part of the August sale (your choice). Come on -- it's easy! Just email your story to mphillips@lmi.net.
Have a great end of summer and thanks so much for reading.
My best,
Maggie
