How to bring more play into your life

Play isn't just for kids. Research shows it can help you adapt to difficult circumstances, collaborate better and problem-solve. In this episode, play researchers and enthusiasts share the benefits of playtime at any age and how you can bring more play into your life. This episode was originally published on July 27, 2023. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit https://www.instagram.com/nprlifekit/?hl=en Sign up for our newsletter here. https://www.npr.org/newsletter/life-kit Have an episode idea or feedback you want to share? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Support the show and listen to it sponsor-free by signing up for Life Kit+ at plus.npr.org/lifekit http://plus.npr.org/lifekit See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast.

• 0:15Marielle Segarra?

  You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

• 0:20Marielle Segarra?

  Hey, it's Marielle. When Whitney Bay was growing up in Illinois and her mom would tell her, "Go outside and play," she knew what that meant.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Play for us was going outside, climbing trees. It was making mud pies. It was, um, we used to like reenact a lot of like current events, like the Olympics, the 1996 Olympics, I believe.

• 0:49Marielle Segarra?

  The 1996 Olympics were an iconic moment for young girls. The dream team for us was made up of gymnasts, Dominique Mochiano, Carrie Strug. We little ones were obsessed.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  We'd set up like this little bench and I'd run and I'd like jump over it like it's a vault. And it's literally just like a sitting bench. So just like use our imagination and it was fun. It really felt, I mean, of course it wasn't real, but it just, it felt like I was somebody.

• 1:18Marielle Segarra?

  Like a lot of kids, Whitney was fluent in play. You probably have an idea of what play is, but here's a definition I think really rings true.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  I define play as any joyful act where you forget about time. It's where you're like fully immersed in the moment. It's when you're your you-est you.

• 1:37Marielle Segarra?

  That's Jeff Harry. He's a play coach. Companies hire him to get their employees to play more.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  I like to say I make work suck less because work sucks right now and it really doesn't have to.

• 1:49Marielle Segarra?

  And he says play looks different depending on who you are. It could be whitewater rafting or pickleball. It could be making a podcast. It could be cooking. As adults, we often stop playing. Sometimes we even forget how to do it. Dr. Stuart Brown, a play researcher and physician psychiatrist by training, says that is a problem because play- Play is a central part of our existence.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  It's as basic as sleep and nutrition. It just doesn't necessarily produce the same outcome as hunger or fatigue. But the need to play is there in all of us, and we all have deficits when we don't experience it sufficiently.

• 2:34Marielle Segarra?

  On this episode of Life Kit, why we should play as adults and how to do it. We'll help you figure out what feels like play to you using the concept of play personalities and how to work it into your life, even if you don't have a lot of free time.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast.

• 3:22Speaker 05

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• 3:46Speaker 06

  I'm Kevin Ruess. And I'm Casey Newton. And together, we've been tech journalists for decades. Now, we're your hosts of Machine Gods, a new podcast from NPR that makes sense of what AI means for your work, your life, and all of our futures. Twice a week, we'll be exploring the biggest moves in tech and give you unmatched access to the real titans of industry. Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:11Marielle Segarra?

  Before we get into the how of play, let's talk about the why. First off, you should know that humans are not the only animals that play. Obviously, domesticated animals like dogs and cats do it, but so do bears, and leopards, and bison, and ravens, and dolphins, and the list goes on. And from an evolutionary perspective, play might not make sense at first. It often seems to have no purpose, and it can come at a cost. You know, it uses up energy, and it can even be dangerous. But animal play scholars and biologists argue that play does serve a number of purposes, that it can help us adapt to difficult circumstances, to practice skills that we need to survive, to problem solve, and to collaborate.

• 4:55Marielle Segarra?

  Stuart Brown, whose voice you heard just before the break, says there's a lot of research on how animals play, and also on how humans play when we're kids. But there aren't as many studies on play in adult humans, for now at least. We have learned a lot, though, from watching other social animals. For example, there's research on rats, who are highly playful creatures. The researcher prevented them from playing, and then after, watched them run a maze and also socialize with other rats.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  The play deficient rats have the inability to socialize as well as those who have played. So the play itself is seen as a necessity for rat health and rat pack socialization.

• 5:41Marielle Segarra?

  He says the same seems to be true for humans and other social animals. As you can see, there are a lot of reasons you might want to incorporate more play into your life. Also, come on, feels good, right? So let's move on to the how portion of this episode and get back to Whitney Bay, our make-believe Olympic gymnast. Classic story. She grew up, and she learned from the world that her playfulness was inappropriate.

• 6:07Marielle Segarra?

  Whitney studied engineering in college. And when she graduated, she went to work for an engineering firm in Seoul.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  They were like, kind of pushing me, hey, you need to be more serious. Like, don't be so funny, goofy. Like, this is a serious workplace. Be more serious.

• 6:21Marielle Segarra?

  So you would get that feedback, like, at the office?

• 6:24Speaker 02

  All the time, every day. My boss would be like, you're laughing too loud.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  And I was like, it's funny, I can't help it. Or they'd be like, oh, your clothes are too bright. You know, these kinds of things. And I was like, I feel like I'm losing myself.

• 6:42Marielle Segarra?

  Whitney's talking about a concept that psychologists call the inner child.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  There is an aspect of you that knows what you want, that has always known what you want. Your kid self knows what makes you happy. Your kid self knows what makes you fulfilled and satisfied.

• 7:01Marielle Segarra?

  So takeaway one, figure out your play style by getting in touch with your inner child. Let's start with a question that Jeff shared. What were your favorite ways to play as a kid? Were you super into Legos or erector sets? Finger painting? Make believe? Catching fireflies? Seeing how far you could catapult yourself off the swing set? For me, it was Barbies.

• 7:25Marielle Segarra?

  I loved to dress them up in the coolest fashions and also create storylines for them. They'd be in love triangles, filled with passion and betrayal.

• 7:37Marielle Segarra?

  Okay, so then you're going to think about what kind of play that is. What's at the center of it? One framework that can help you is called play personalities. Stuart Brown lays these out in his book. In his decades as a psychiatrist, he would ask patients about their early experiences with play. He and his colleagues would review the notes, and they noticed some archetypes.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  So that there is a kind of a play fingerprint that I would call the play personality that emerges. It's not scientific. This is not something that we're measuring with a series of neurotransmitters. But it's a clustering of what really gives you a sense of joy. And engagement and sustained motivation.

• 8:20Marielle Segarra?

  Here are a few examples, and you can be more than one of these. There's the joker, who loves to laugh and make other people laugh, whether that's through practical jokes, wordplay, physical comedy. There's the artist creator. The point for this person is to make something. Could be something beautiful, something functional, something goofy. As Barbie's personal stylist, my inner child definitely fell into this category. You've got the kinesthete, who finds joy in movement. You know, swimming, running, stretching. You've got the director. They love to call the shots, to plan the parties.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  One of the people that we picked out that's a celebrity director is Oprah.

• 8:59Marielle Segarra?

  Also, the storyteller. Hi, hello. Those relational dramas between my Barbies? Classic storyteller behavior. Once you have a sense of your play personality as a kid, you can start to think of ways you might like to play now. For my artist creator side, I put together a gallery wall of art behind my couch. For the storyteller, I watch shows with storylines filled with love and betrayal, like Grey's Anatomy. Another way to find out what kind of play is for you is to listen to the whispers. And this is takeaway two. Jeff Harry says, "Think for a moment about what we started doing when we were stuck at home during the pandemic with nothing to do. We picked up hobbies. Baking sourdough bread, doing embroidery, woodworking.

• 9:43Marielle Segarra?

  And that was in part because we were bored." His challenge for you? For five or 10 minutes a day, put down your phone and your laptop and do nothing.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  When you get bored, all of a sudden, that inner child starts to whisper all these nerve-sided ideas, these ideas that make you nervous and excited. You know, ideas like, "Hey, you know, why don't you start writing that book or that blog post? Why don't you make a video on TikTok?"

• 10:10Marielle Segarra?

  Whitney heard the whispers when she was working at that engineering job in Seoul. They were telling her to travel and to start her own YouTube channel.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Hi, everyone.

• 10:21Speaker 07

  Good morning. Good morning.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  And those videos got a lot of good feedback. And so I just like kept going. On to the next adventure.

• 10:33Marielle Segarra?

  She started doing improv in Korea. And then in 2019, she moved to New York to pursue a career in comedy. And she loves it.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  So like, I'm on the stage and then someone sets me up to be a rat that can do karate. So I'm on the stage and I'm doing karate as a rat, just like very imaginative, just things I would probably never really do on my own. So yeah, I find like now I go in these wacky worlds and I just follow the fun.

• 11:01Marielle Segarra?

  Sometimes smaller, less world shifting opportunities for play will present themselves. I was at this event one time and I was deciding what to do. Did I want to drink? Did I want to go to another panel? Was I ready to leave? And then I saw that someone was selling coconuts. They'd chop off the top and stick a straw in. And I was like, that, that's what I want. So I got one. I told Jeff this story.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  I love that story so much because what you did in the moment, you were like, what will bring me joy right now? And you just walked on over to that.

• 11:33Marielle Segarra?

  But then I'm walking around, happy as a coconut, and people started talking to me. One woman with the cool silver boots complimented my drink. We chatted and exchanged info. And she even held my coconut when I went to the bathroom. And that's the thing, doing what's calling you in a given moment can lead to connection because people think, ooh.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  She looks so happy, I want to be around that type of energy.

• 11:56Marielle Segarra?

  So the advice here, do the things that you find interesting and watch what adventure shows up.

• 12:04Marielle Segarra?

  We'll have more Life Kit after the break.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 12:17Speaker 00

  This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  This week on Up First, we're in the final days before the midterm elections. And this is one of the wonderful things about politics, one of the wonderful things about humanity. We have all this data, we have all this information, and nobody really knows what's gonna happen. We're gonna follow it day by day, through Election Day and beyond. And you can listen to Up First every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 12:57Marielle Segarra?

  OK, so we're listening to our inner child. We're following the whispers. We're starting to play. At this point, we may hear from our inner critic. Takeaway three: Talk to it. Jeff Harry says your inner critic is that voice inside you telling you why you shouldn't do that thing and saying that you look ridiculous when you play.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  You're like feeling crappy, you're binge watching Netflix. You got popcorn on, you're just dribbling down. And you're just like, oh, I'm the worst person in the world. And then you were like, oh, my goodness, there's my inner critic.

• 13:29Marielle Segarra?

  One exercise that can help: Write down what your inner critic is saying. Or visualize what it looks like and sounds like.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Does it sound like that bully from third grade? Like, who's that inner critic? So get a visual and then name it, you know? And mine is Gargamel from Smurfs. Gargamel would always love to suck all the joy and play out of everything, right? And literally, when Gargamel shows up, I write down what it's saying.

• 13:55Marielle Segarra?

  And then, once you write the insults down, cross them out and write the opposite.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  So it's like, I'm never gonna be enough. And then I write, you are gonna be enough. Oh, I'm never gonna be successful. Actually, you're already successful, and you're gonna even be more successful. And you cross those out and put the positive of that. And you start reading those back to yourself. And this is a positive psychology technique. It's just pattern recognition in many ways.

• 14:19Marielle Segarra?

  You can do this in the middle of play. Your inner critic pops up and says, this is such a waste of time. And you're like, OK, thank you, inner critic. I appreciate you, but I'm playing with my inner child right now. And actually, this is a great use of my time.

• 14:37Marielle Segarra?

  Okay, takeaway four, liberate yourself. Stuart Brown poses a question in his book. When have you felt free to do and be what you choose?

• 14:47Speaker 04

  Was there a moment, was there a circumstance, was there a situation that allowed you to really feel like you were yourself, whether you were four years old or 40?

• 14:58Marielle Segarra?

  Why are we talking about freedom? Because play and freedom are interwoven. When you're doing something simply for the end result, like to achieve, you lose a part of the joy of being alive.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  It's easy to lose a sense of an experience which is in itself wondrous by demanding that the experience produce outcome.

• 15:23Marielle Segarra?

  When you're playing and you're not so attached to the outcome, that gives you the freedom to wonder, to be in awe, to learn for the sake of learning. So in addition to that question above about when you felt free, also ask yourself, what stands in the way of you feeling free now? Is your environment unsafe? Is your job constantly in jeopardy? Is your partner always critical of you? That is all legitimate.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  And for many, many people, living in a violent neighborhood, being impoverished, having a physical illness, this is not to make life just a fun and games and play. It's not. Life is challenging for all of us. But the play nature that we have usually allows us to find within our lives, even in very difficult lives, moments of joyfulness.

• 16:21Marielle Segarra?

  And that's takeaway five, find your moments. Look, I get it. You may feel like you barely have time in the day to sit down, let alone play. But playtime doesn't have to mean spending hours every day making sandcastles. Though, I'm kind of into that idea. You can inject play throughout the day. Whitney Bay was at a restaurant with her parents this one time.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  And my rule is, at a restaurant, everybody puts away their phones.

• 16:46Marielle Segarra?

  She taught them how to play this game, where the first person says who they are, the second person says where they are, and the third person says what they're doing.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Like if I say, "Oh, we are farmers." Then you have to say where we are. And so my mom would be thinking like, "Okay, I'm a farmer. Where am I?" And just kind of using her imagination. "We are farmers and we are at Walmart." You could say anything.

• 17:06Marielle Segarra?

  And then maybe the third person is like, "Okay, we're farmers at Walmart, and we are shopping for bikinis." And you do a little scene.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Like if you're like, "Hey, Farmer Joe, that's a nice, hot, pink bikini you got on."

• 17:18Marielle Segarra?

  And so on.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  It was only like 10 minutes and our food came out, and that was the end of that. But to this day, we still talk about that. We're like, "Well, remember when my dad did this? And my mom did that?" Like, we still talk about that fun moment that we had.

• 17:31Marielle Segarra?

  You can also find moments of play by just letting yourself be playful, even for 30 seconds. Pet a puppy on the street, with permission. Pick up a pine cone at the park and ask your friend to name it. Watch people flirting on your subway car. Stuart said that on the morning of our interview, he walked out of his house to get his copy of The New York Times.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  And there, on the step in front of me, was a little Oregon jungle. And that little Oregon jungle was looking up at me and jumping up and down, and jumping up and down. And I thought, "That little bird is really glad to be alive." "Okay, so am I. I'm an old guy, but I'm still glad to be alive." So I got, from the immediate surroundings, a sense from nature that, you know, at least that moment was a joyful one.

• 18:32Marielle Segarra?

  Okay, it's time for a recap. Figure out your play style or personality. You can start by asking, "How did I like to play as a kid? And how can I incorporate that form of play into my life now?" Also, follow the whispers. Whether you're at a job you hate or at an event unsure of what to do next, listen to that voice that's saying, "Go get a coconut." Engage with your inner critic. Give it a name. Mine's called Doreen. She is the worst. And when she starts yapping and telling me that I look ridiculous, I tell her, she's wrong. Think about what makes you feel free. And by that, we mean, think of a time when you felt free to do and be as you choose.

• 19:15Marielle Segarra?

  What stands in the way of that now? Lastly, find moments of play whenever you can. I'm sorry. I was just thinking of something else silly that I did this morning, but it's too silly to tell you.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Good for you. But don't hesitate to share it.

• 19:31Marielle Segarra?

  OK, so like, I don't know if you'll know this song. I think it's like a song from the 80s, but it's like, we got the beats. You know that one?

• 19:41Speaker 04

  No, I don't, but I'm a couple of generations older than you.

• 19:46Marielle Segarra?

  I got food groceries delivered and I got beats. And so as soon as I took out the bag of beats, I just started singing, we got the beats. And I was alone in my house. But I was like, I was like, we got the beats.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Well, you felt better when you sung it.

• 20:06Marielle Segarra?

  I really did. I really did.

• 20:08Speaker 04

  See, that's part of the magic of play itself. All of a sudden, you feel better. Why? Why does play do that? Why do we have that in us? And since it's in us, why don't we use it more?

• 20:24Marielle Segarra?

  Good question. Hey, by the way, did you know that Life Kit has its own newsletter? We sure do, and I think you're going to like it. We have so many smart, supportive listeners that send us amazing tips of their own, and those are often featured in the newsletter. So if you want to be part of that community, subscribe at npr.org/lifekitnewsletter. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Margaret Serino. Our digital editor is Malika Gharib, and our visuals editor is CJ Riechelmann. Megan Kane is our senior supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagel, Claire Marie Schneider, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Simon Laszlo Jansen.

• 21:09Marielle Segarra?

  I'm Mariel Segarra. Thanks for listening.

• 21:19Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, the midterm elections are wrapping up, and millions of people have already voted. We're taking one final check of the electoral pulse with a new NPR PBS News Marist Poll. It shows Democrats still poised to make gains, but also with some warning signs for just how many. We'll explain on the NPR Politics Podcast. Midlife brings a lot of changes. Your Turn with Alison Aubrey is a new podcast to help you navigate the twists and turns. From health and relationships to creativity and purpose, we can help steer your next chapter with Your Turn with Alison Aubrey.

• 22:02Speaker 05

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