Play - seriously good for your health

2 mins to read

We often view play as a kids-only activity but there’s increasing interest in promoting the value of play to kids of all ages.

Stress relief & sleep support

We often view play as a kids-only activity but there’s increasing interest in promoting the value of play to kids of all ages.

The Oxford Dictionary defines play “as engaging in activity for enjoyment and recreation, rather than a serious or practical purpose”.

Anthropologist, John Huizinga, says an activity qualifies as play if it’s “fully absorbing, includes elements of uncertainty, involves a sense of illusion or exaggeration, but most importantly, true play has to exist outside of ordinary life”.

The paradox is that one can be utterly absorbed by play yet also conscious that the activity isn’t real and has no impacts outside the boundaries of play.

According to author and scholar Stuart Brown MD, who gave a remarkable TED talk on play in 2008, play has several defining qualities:

it is purposeless, all-consuming, and fun
it has its own place, separate from the rest of life
it is about exuberance, license, and abandon
it requires freedom from obligation and threats
it involves fantasy
it is enjoyed for its own sake

State of play: research

The importance of play for human emotional, social and cognitive development has been much studied since the 1950s but its nature and benefits are still poorly understood.

Modern findings suggest that play in childhood is critical for the development of happiness, experimentation, socialisation, creativity, flexibility and spontaneity.

What’s curious is that most books, articles and research on the topic are heavily skewed towards play among children, not adults, although this is changing.

For instance, in 2008 The New York Times Magazine devoted a substantial cover story to the topic yet the article failed to make mention of play among adults.

Scholars agree that when humans don’t play they’re more likely to become moderately depressed, inflexible and more likely to act violently in situations of stress.

Stuart Brown, who has done more than 6,000 play studies on a wide range of people says play is a critical form of stress relief in down times. He argues that play is a biological drive as critical to health as sleep and food.

The bottom line? Play isn’t a trivial matter, and all of us – children and adults – could benefit from more play in our lives.

Promoting play

Gwen Gordon has spent her adult life researching the benefits of play and coaching adults to reclaim its potentialities.

Starting out as a Muppet maker for Sesame Street she has taught ‘artful play’ at the MIT Media Lab, Xerox PARC, IDEO and San Quentin Prison.

More recently she has been the driving force and creative director of Seriously! – a documentary about “the power of play to generate and restore health and sanity to the world”.

Tim Jahnigan, Founder of the One World Futbol Project says, “the most important part of all of this is not why we need to play – the most important thing is to just make it possible.”

In 2010 Jahnigen set out to design a soccer ball that would never wear out, never go flat, and never need a pump. He was inspired to start the project after watching news footage of children in Darfur playing a soccer game using a ball of trash tied up with twine.

In an effort to promote play in disadvantaged communities the project sells the One World Futbol directly to institutions and individuals worldwide. For every ball bought by individuals at retail, the company donates a second ball to organisations working with disadvantaged communities around the world.

Reason to be playful

The capacity for play is a symbol of childhood but somewhere on the journey to adulthood many of us abandon one of life’s most vital and pleasurable activities.

We now know there are good reasons to be playful at all ages of life: