The Importance of Play

For wellness and vitality

It’s a feeling that’s hard to beat – the simultaneous eruption of incredible joy and undeniable pain in our stomach muscles as we laugh to the point of bittersweet cramp. There’s nothing quite like being in a moment that evokes true and authentic happiness – a moment of play which takes us out of time and all that weighs us down. There’s an incredible power in being playful, a power that strengthens us as people on so many levels. It’s something we mustn’t lose sight of or dismiss as being childish – being playful at every age connects us to our relationships and ourselves better. It stimulates our brains, and helps us unwind, recoup and refocus on the priorities we choose in life.

Play, the word, is defined as engaging in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose. Play can be both social and solitary, and will mean something different for every individual. For one person, play means working up a sweat in a team sport, while to another it’s tending the garden, completing a sudoku puzzle, wine tasting with girlfriends, or just generally being silly and letting your hair down with close companions. Some consider daydreaming play too, adds Scott Eberle, editor of the

American Journal of Play.

For Rachel Grunwell, wellness expert, health educator and director of Inspired Health, play means teaching yoga and hanging out with her children. “When you have kids, there’s nothing like hopping on a swing next to them and giggling your heads off over who can swing the highest. My kids also love nothing more than when I grab their hands and spin them round in circles outside. I’m not sure who squeals the loudest. It’s like we shake any negativity from our skin and reawaken with silly play.”

Play is about being so engrossed in something that everything else falls to one side, says New Zealand designer Kris Ericksen, who was recently named an honoree at the 2016 NYCxDesign Awards in New York for his Plato Lighting design. “It’s about exploring, creating and not having any pressures or goals while engaging in play.” It was with this philosophy that Ericksen’s Plato Lighting kitset lightshades were born.

“I started playing around with a whole range of shapes: triangles, squares, strips, and I realised that one potential use of these could be as lampshades. I discovered I could create what I call ‘two-dimensional Lego’ and very much like Lego you are only limited by your imagination by how you can put them together and what shapes you can create. I described the whole process as an evolutionary process of discovery through play.”

Play is a fundamental human right, adds Ericksen. “It’s a basic necessity for ongoing mental, spiritual and social health, that you have an opportunity to play on a regular basis and that, ideally, should be daily. To allow yourself to not have any pressures, obligation, expectations or outcomes, instead to enjoy the moments and be – just be,” he says.

Play forms

Pioneer in research on play, Dr Stuart Brown, says play is born by curiosity and exploration, and comes in many forms: from object play to body and movement play; rough and tumble play; spectator play; ritual play and imaginative play (the ability to story-tell and spin yarns). He adds that humour, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun, and plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults. Keeping up play can make us smarter at any age, he adds; a notion Joseph Chilton Pearce, a famous American author on human development would agree with. Chilton Pearce once said, “Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold."

The benefits

Brown is the founder of the National Institute for Play (NIFP), an organisation in the United States that’s committed to bringing the unrealised knowledge, practices and benefits of play to the wider public. NIFP credits the power of play as being able to dramatically transform our overall health and suggests play is the gateway to vitality. “[Play] generates optimism, seeks out novelty, makes perseverance fun, leads to mastery, gives the immune system a bounce, fosters empathy and promotes a sense of belonging and community. Each of these play by-products are indices of personal health, and their shortage predicts impending health problems and personal fragility.”

Think about that famous saying, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." When we engage in play our imaginations soar, our creative senses heighten and we produce higher levels of seratonin, also known as ‘the happy hormone’. In fact, the opposite of play is not work, it’s depression, suggests Brown. “If you think about life without play, no humour, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy, try and imagine a culture or a life – adult or otherwise.”

Age limitation – there’s no such thing

Play is often pigeon-holed as a child’s activity – but Brown suggests, “The thing that is so unique about our species is that we are really designed to play through our whole lifetime.”

Play shouldn’t be an activity we feel like we have to diarise in order to tick off or get our ‘fix’ of. It should naturally be at the forefront of our subconscious. “It’s essential that we don’t lose the power of play in our lives. We should all feel the freedom to goof around sometimes, laugh, smile, feel delight and escape our serious selves,” says Grunwell. In fact, as famous Irish playwright, critic and polemicist George Bernard Shaw put it, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

Play in the workforce

An article published in The Guardian called ‘ Why Play is Important to Us All’ explains that play isn’t slothful, it’s useful. “It is recreation with the emphasis on the last three syllables.” Nothing quite sparks up the brain like play, Brown says, and science is already providing data that adding play into the workforce leads to more creative, adaptable workers and teams. Adds the NIFP: “One researcher, Marian Diamond, in her 'Response of the Brain to Enrichment' work describes how ‘enriched’ (i.e. playful) environments powerfully shape the cerebral cortex – the area of the brain where the highest cognitive processing takes place. She concludes, 'There are measurable benefits to enriching [making playful] an individual’s environment in whatever terms that individual perceives his immediate environment as enriched.'”

Adding play to your workday needn’t be hard, suggests psychology expert, Dr Alice Boyes. It can be as simple as decorating your space with a funny cartoon or photos of yourself laughing with friends. For more of her tips, see page 36.

How to play every day

Brown encourages exploring backwards as far as you can go to the most clear, joyful image that you have, whether it’s with a toy, on a birthday, on holiday… and begin to build from the motion of that into how that connects with your life now. “You’ll be able to enrich your life by prioritising and paying more attention to it,” he says.

Grunwell encourages her yoga students to explore play within their movements and poses. “It’s so hard for people to ‘let go’ – it’s like we lose the art of tapping into that inner child. I usually give some tips on how to be playful in a pose so they know where to begin…. and they end up having some belly laughs.” Grunwell also encourages practicing ‘body play’ in your garden - try a handstand against a wall or dance in the dark and the corners of your mouth will turn upwards.

And lastly, if you’re having a bad day try this, adds Brown. “Jump up and down, wriggle around, and you’re going to feel better. It doesn’t have a particular purpose and that’s what is great about play. If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it then it’s probably not play.

“I would encourage you all to engage, not in the work play differential, where you set aside time to play,” he says, “but where your life becomes infused minute by minute, hour by hour, with body, object, social, fantasy, transformational kinds of play and I’ll think you’ll have a better, more empowered life.”