Playfulness: A Distraction or A Pillar of Wellbeing?

Photo by Rosalind Chang on Unsplash

Somewhere along our timeline, the meaning of ‘play’ changed. Now, it is childish, and maturity comes from being serious, and those things that look joyful probably aren’t important. This ideology weaves through our workplaces, in how we reward behaviour and praise exhaustion while mistrusting ease. What if play was actually fundamental to our wellbeing? What if it isn’t something that distracts us from responsibility but evokes our aliveness? It may be the case that what has been considered a threat may be the thing that helps us the most.

Recent research by Proyer studied ordinary adults and their life experiences. In this study, playful adults, those who approach situations with more amusement, engagement or exploration, reported higher life satisfaction, greater engagement in enjoyable activities and overall more active lifestyles. These people were not irresponsible pleasure chasers, but normal people who allow themselves to be nudged into participation.

Modern professional culture is one of seriousness; and it’s tiring. Seriousness appears as a moral virtue, in meetings, in strategies and even in burnout. Play, in contrast, is tolerated if it’s reframed as innovation or ‘team bonding’, and even then is limited and controlled. It may be appropriate to take a step back and realise how odd this hierarchy actually is; playful adults are not less functional, less disciplined and nor are they attempting to escape reality. They are more engaged, and active and satisfied in their lives.

Life satisfaction is not a jovial metric, it’s affiliated with resilience, health and motivation. For many, it’s a dream, something we may achieve ‘later’, after we’ve spent our lives working and being serious. But seriousness isn’t necessarily the price of adulthood, but instead the disease.

Play is misunderstood. Playfulness is not centred around games, jokes or leisure. In Proyer’s article, playfulness is described as a way to engage with the world, to see situations with more flexibility, and openness that they may be enjoyable. Play is then reframed; it is not something a person does, it’s something they are. Playful adults do not work less, they work differently. A playful adult will experiment, approach setbacks with a new lens, feed their competencies with curiosity. If it’s true that playful adults have more active lifestyles, perhaps this means that play is the catalyst in making people move, engage and participate more.

An interesting note is that there is a subtle link between higher levels of playfulness and one’s own perception of physical fitness. Not objective fitness but self-rated perceived fitness. Feeling healthier often precedes healthier behaviours; if movement feels like exploration rather than obligation, it is no longer a sticking point or a negotiation; it’s natural. Play opens a narrative that the route to wellness is not about discipline or willpower or negative views of the self, it’s about making things easier, or at least more enjoyable.

If playfulness contributes so much to wellbeing, both physically and psychologically, how many systems in place are hostile to this type of nourishment? Playfulness resists micromanagement, productivity as an identity and fear based motivation. It allows unpredictability, humour and perspective; incontrollable qualities. This may be the reason that play only occurs on the outskirts and never at the centre of decisions and power and identity.

This kind of research doesn’t favour being less serious, it just favours being less defended. Maturity is not synonymous with rigidity and joy does not require justification. It is not about adding play on top of an already exhausting life, but using it to release that exhaustion. Who decided that play was unprofessional and who benefits from restricting it?

From the depth psychology perspective, removing play is not neutral; it causes a problem. The things we repress never disappear, they just relocate to the shadow. In Jungian terms, playfulness often becomes one of the first qualities that gets split off as we construct the ‘socially acceptable’ adult persona. The adult persona is efficient, composed and respectable. The playful and spontaneous self is seemingly messy and pleasure oriented and, therefore, considered dangerous, so it gets banished. The shadow, however, does not stay quiet and this repression returns through cynicism, burnout, compulsive distraction or with a brittle seriousness that mistakes control for strength. The outcomes of Proyer’s research can be seen as an empirical glimpse into the result of a less tightly bound shadow. Playfulness reconnects the ego with the parts of the psyche that know how to experiment and fail and remain curious and from that, integration then has somatic consequences; the body moves more freely when the psyche is less constrained.

Play is not a regression, it’s psychic integration. It’s the capacity of the adult to be responsible without suffocation, to have structure without rigidity. With play, the psyche has elasticity; that which allows people to bend without breaking.

For the full research article published in the European Journal of Humour Research, Vol. 1, 2013, follow this link:

The well-being of playful adults: Adult playfulness, subjective well-being, physical well-being, and the pursuit of enjoyable activities | The European Journal of Humour Research

Follow The Heretic for more discussion on the applications of playfulness and how it can improve the professional lifestyle