The Powerful Effect of Bringing Play Into Your Life

Our hard work can feel dull or stressful, but incorporating more play into our lives can help.

Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock

How much of your day is spent either 1) trying to make yourself do something you really don’t want to do, or 2) avoiding doing that thing you don’t want to force yourself to do (and feeling guilty about it)?

In truth, much of the day for many of us is spent trying to coerce ourselves to do stuff.

So a few things to say about coercing ourselves:

1. It doesn’t work really well. We’ll put up a lot of resistance.
2. Even if you can do it, it’s not very fun.
3. And then when you’re done forcing yourself, you have to do it again.

OK, so let’s say you’re convinced that coercing yourself to do things doesn’t work. Then what? Do we just avoid and never do the hard and boring things?

That’s not what we want either, because doing things that matter and have a positive effect on our world is often hard and sometimes frightening. So how do we do that without coercion?

Play might just be the answer.

The Powerful Effects of Play

Here’s what happens when you make play a part of your difficult but meaningful tasks:

• Instead of dreading a task, you start to get excited about playing with the task.
• Instead of looking for the possibilities of failure, you start looking for the opportunities for fun, for exploration, for adventure.
• Your day becomes less of a slog and more of a playground.
• You focus less on doing things the “right” way and more on trying new things out and seeing what works. You become less of a perfectionist and give yourself more permission to make messes.
• You feel more alive. Instead of just churning through endless tasks, you’re trying new things and seeing what works. It can feel thrilling.
• You learn more. Because you have given yourself the opportunity to explore and experiment, you gain more experience and insight.

These are the powerful effects of play. Let’s look at how you might start to incorporate play into your day.

How to Bring Play Into Your Life

At this point, you might start to ask, “OK, so how do I play? Just give me the answers!” But knowing the answer is the safe way, not the play way. Play is inherently spontaneous and inventive, though there are some helpful guidelines and games do have rules for a reason.

Here are some ideas to start you out:

• When you do a task, ask, “How can I turn this into play?” Maybe add some music and try a different way of completing a familiar task.
• Tell yourself you’re going to make a mess of it, and have fun doing the task in as short a time as possible. You might have to fix your effort, but that’s often easier than getting going in the first place.
• Make a decision to play with your free time. Have something you enjoy doing, such as drawing or clearing out an old box, ready to go so you can play with that instead of scrolling or watching something.
• Invite others to play with you. Young kids are always down to play, or you can invite your partner, your family, or your friends. How can you invite people you work with to play?
• Explore and get inventive! Instead of walking home the usual way, try a randomly selected path. Instead of just getting through your email, make a goal to respond to everyone with a nice compliment about what you like about them.

Play doesn’t have consequences or expectations. Some of our more meaningful tasks do, and that weight can make it difficult for us to do them. So when you have something important to do, something difficult you have been putting off, one way to turn it into play is to tell yourself that it doesn’t matter how it goes, it doesn’t matter how far you get, and the only real goal is just to try having a little fun with it. If you can do that, you might find there are pleasures in your work just waiting to be discovered.

What would you like to play today?