Every time there’s a Leap Year, I fantasize about the extra day.  I think, since it’s a bonus day, it should be a day to play!  But do I ever take the day off?  Not once.  Just like most responsible adults, I find it really challenging to give myself permission to do something just for the fun of it.  But, as children know, play is vitally important.  It not only feels good to do, but it can actually be a great tool to help us make changes in our life and develop beneficial skills.

Developmental psychologists lucky enough to study play for a living have learned about play’s important function in helping children learn and gain mastery in many areas.  Children will try out new behaviors, roles, and activities in a way that is generally stress free because there are few consequences.  If you get caught stealing a base in a backyard game of baseball, you can laugh it off without angry fans.  If you dress up like a King and demand everyone eat only pizza, you never have to face Parliament on Monday.  But soon enough, as children grow, their activities become more structured and stress comes along with it.  Taking the same risk and getting caught stealing a base in Little League, it’s not so fun (have you ever witnessed the adults!).    By the time we’re in high school, so little is left of our protected world of play, no wonder we are all so stressed and anxious.  Everything we do is evaluated and critiqued, measuring our performance in line with expectations.  Even our leisure time tends to be filled with purposeful activity, such as going to the gym to lose weight, reading a book to better our business knowledge, or going to a committee meeting for our kid’s school.

Just because we don’t have time to play anymore, doesn’t mean we don’t still need it.  Play allows us to experiment and expand our minds and ways of being.  It helps us do things we wouldn’t ordinarily do.  We take risks when we play, pushing the limits of our creativity and capacities.  In doing so, play can offer a safe place to try out some of the changes we want to make, but are reluctant to do in an environment more consequential.  Let me give you a few examples of people who have inspired me.  A man who was afraid to give public presentations at work signed up for an Improv class.  He told me he had never had so much fun making a complete fool of himself.  Compared to that, public speaking for work became much easier!  A woman who needed to start exercising for her health just dreaded the gym and found even walking around her neighborhood a chore.  She had the idea to buy a bright yellow Cruiser bike, complete with basket and bell, and rides it around town to get coffee and run all her errands.  She tells me she has so much fun with it, she never thinks of it as exercise, even now that she and a friend ride every Sunday to the next town over for brunch, a total of 14 miles!

We need play just as much as our children.  I work with so many people who drink or who spend hours on the internet because it’s the only way they can find a release from responsibilities.  They describe being able to be silly when they have a margarita or have a delightful distraction from work when they follow a link to a new shopping site or become voyeurs in other people’s lives.  Wouldn’t we feel better if we could just give ourselves the permission to have fun without the need for a drink or a link?  We don’t need an excuse to play, we just need our own permission.  So all of us hard working, take care of everything, responsible, mature adults, let’s get serious about being playful!  Who knows what we might discover, you just might feel great wearing that crown!