Play is the highest form of research.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
WE PLAY MORE THAN ANY other species, and we are one of the few that does not cease to play once we reach adulthood. Or at least that is what our genes expect. At first blush, it appears frivolous—fun for its own sake. But upon closer inspection, we learn that play has served as an innate survival skill throughout our evolution. We don’t have fangs or claws or a hard shell—only our wits to help us maneuver through dicey situations. Play levels the field by providing an opportunity to experiment and process a variety of what-if scenarios. It helps us to test our limits and provides a wiring opportunity for the brain to plot strategies and escape routes. It also helps us blow off steam and reduce stress. We need play like we need sleep. Yet, like sleep, many of us deprive ourselves of it.
Indeed, play is an important part of the epigenetic influence on our genes in creating a lean, fit, happy, healthy, productive human body. But what is it exactly? By definition it is purposeless, all-consuming, and, most important, it’s fun. This is the definition psychiatrist Stuart Brown gives in his book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Brown is one of the few experts who have focused on studying the role of lifelong play. Over his career, he has studied how it has figured into a host of cultures and histories, and has compared the amusement patterns of various species. He calls play a “profound biological process” and presents evidence that play, across the span of our lifetime, literally designs our brains—forming new connections, creating new circuits, and organizing existing connections.
We know a deficiency of play can have dire consequences. Brown has done a lot of work in this area and compiled thousands of what he calls “play histories” on people. His studies reveal that children who were severely deprived of play demonstrated multiple dysfunctional symptoms, including lack of curiosity and social competency as well as uncontrollable emotions. What’s more, Brown asserts that people who stopped playing in adulthood demonstrated a narrowing in their social, emotional, and cognitive intelligence. Conversely, highly creative and successful people lead lives filled with play.
“Play levels the field by providing an opportunity to experiment and process different what-if scenarios.”
In 2011, The Wall Street Journal ran a story that supports Brown’s concept of play among successful individuals.1 A number of up-and-coming CEOs from companies such as Google and Amazon attended play-focused Montessori schools in their early years, from preschool through first grade.2 The difference in the educational method came down to what one CEO called “the joy of discovery” that instilled an interest in exploring, experimenting, and letting the imagination run wild.
We see this in the evolved workplaces of Silicon Valley—from whence some of the world’s most innovative technology emanates. Beyond the stereotype of Ping-Pong tables, lava lamps, ropes course retreats, and casual dress codes, innovative companies like Google encourage a free-spirited, playful atmosphere. The company’s technical employees are allocated one day a week to pursue creative projects unrelated to their core responsibilities. Not coincidentally, playing on the company clock has resulted in the development of some of Google’s most successful products, including Gmail and Google News.
Through play, we develop behavioral, intellectual, and emotional creativity and flexibility. Recall the discussion from Chapter 1 about the origination of the “cognitively fluid mind” sixty thousand years ago, which allowed us to invent culture and populate the globe. We’ve discussed at length how the pressures of adapting for survival shaped our genetic requirements for diet and exercise, but we cannot discount the contributions to progress that playtime has afforded. Play was and is the portal to refine our cognitively fluid minds, for it requires mental modeling, critical thinking, and creative innovation.
Children use play to experiment with the variety of feelings, experiences, and ideas they encounter in their development. We tend to discourage roughhousing and monkeying around, but these behaviors are important for children so they can learn boundaries and coping mechanisms. In the laboratory of play, they can even experience painful emotions and learn empathy, helping them to grow into more resilient adults. Experts use play therapy to help children process trauma, transition, and other difficult events. Research even shows that the physical manifestations of play help kids calibrate their appetite set point, protecting against childhood obesity.3 And parent-child playtime delivers feel-good hormones to both parties, and enhances a child’s sense of bonding and intimacy.
“By definition play is purposeless, all consuming, and, most important, it’s fun.”
Though play has a long-term purpose, in the short term it has no particular point. That is to say, when you play—truly play—you have no attachment to the outcome. Notice young children who are just starting out in a team sport. They are learning the skill sets, and they’re starting to move the ball around a little bit and starting to understand the concept of the game. They exhibit no attachment to the outcome. You might see the defense out in the field goofing around, maybe chasing butterflies. That’s play. That’s imagination and curiosity, that’s being in the moment. Children commit 100 percent to their imagination and the fantastical roles inhabited in them. They enjoy it because they create it—and feel it—as real.
“When you play—truly play—you have no attachment to the outcome.”
Left to their own devices, children exhibit an immense capacity for creative play, even with something as mundane as a cardboard box. It becomes an imaginary house, a fort, a ship. They can take something as simple as a mud puddle and turn it into an ocean, a lake, a crocodile-infested moat to the castle. Whatever it is, children exert a natural tendency to be creative and make something out of anything and amuse themselves freely for hours, simply for the sake of fun and exercising Habit #4, being in the moment. But once we see play becoming overly supervised and regimented, it becomes something else.
Consider the overly zealous high school soccer coach who steps in to coach a team and sees the raw talent and wants to mold and shape the players into champions. As the activity becomes more and more about winning (attaching an expectation to the outcome), the sense of play moves away. The game becomes more regimented and we soon see roster cuts, overtraining, burnout, and hurt feelings. The lesson here is we need to nurture our kids and encourage them to maintain their playful, youthful exuberance. And we need to maintain it in ourselves, too.
As we have learned, neglecting the play impulse doesn’t bode well for us. Without play, Brown suggests, we become creatively rigid. We continually narrow the terrain of our cognitive musings, our social interactions, and physical life. The choice has inevitable consequences for our emotional wellbeing, our practical resilience, and our creative potential. In exalting the discipline of labor, we ignore how our original (and continuing) cognitive growth comes from play. Play isn’t a distraction. It’s the source of our personal and cerebral development— our potential for growth throughout life.
In adults, playfulness enhances intimate relationships by encouraging humor, lightheartedness, vulnerability, imagination, and ultimately a sense of connection. You may recall a romantic relationship that fizzled due to nuance rather than major, tangible rifts. Even with ample time, attention, material contributions, healthy communication, and respect, relationship magic can easily vanish when play—and the laughter and free-spirited perspective it brings—is compromised.
I think that’s the heart of what we lose as adults: the freedom of play, the pure release of it. We can coax ourselves to go play Frisbee in the backyard, get roped into dressing our kids’ dolls for their latest tea party soiree, or even make ourselves join a summer baseball league or pottery class. In these cases, it isn’t the action but the spirit that’s lacking. Most of the time we’re likely just faking it for the sake of the kids or our own sense of “healthy” obligation. (Obligation to play … how depressing is that?) We can be conscientious and simultaneously miss the point—and benefit—entirely.
It’s dark when you leave for work, and it’s dark when you get home. You say playing sounds all well and good, but you can’t seem to figure out how to actually fit it into your busy life. As we build our careers and earn paychecks, many of us are asked to do things that are counterintuitive, that go against our hunter-gatherer genes that expect space, latitude, movement, and play.
As with any other life essential, we need to carve out the time to move our bodies, to get out of our linear brains, off of that spreadsheet and on to a much more expansive and open-minded approach to life. Play offers us an opportunity to do that. Do you have a weekend, an evening, a single hour? Can you multitask the Grok way, and include other members of your family so that you are playing, building your tribe, and creating quality time and memories all at the same time? If your schedule is so jam-packed that you can’t even fit in an hour a week for play, you are probably taking on too many things and not practicing enough of Habit #2: Be selfish.
When we embrace play, we claim a better quality of life for ourselves. We decrease stress. We connect better with those around us. We get out more and get more out of what we do. We find more fun and meaning in our lives. And, later in life, it can even ward off cognitive decline and neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s.5
Reclaiming play can at first seem intense and challenging, particularly if the muscle of your imagination has gone unused for a long time. We have more layers of stress, rationalism, and distraction to peel back than children, who can migrate effortlessly back and forth between the imaginative and the real, the instinctual and the rational—their connections between these worlds being more translucent and dynamic. We need to make that portal more accessible and clear out the mental space between concrete “reality” and fluid, open-ended play. Like a path in the woods, the more we travel it the more navigable it becomes, and the more instinctual our experience of it is. Play and humor gradually infiltrate life in a free-flowing way again. We rediscover our own orientation toward play—whatever form it most naturally and enjoyably takes in our personalities and circumstances.