Play in our lives

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Dr. Roger Hall and this is Rogers 2 Cents. In this video blog, I answer questions that people have sent me in sealed envelopes. I don’t know what’s in them until I open them on camera and you can find out my ideas, my 2 cents on their question. If it’s really good, you’ll see this unedited and uncensored. If it’s really awful, this’ll never make the light of day. All right, here I am opening the envelope.

“I’d Like Roger’s 2 cents on this question. ‘How do we as busy adults add play back into our lives?'”

Well, how convenient for you to have asked that? Since the time somebody asked me this question wrote it on paper. I have done research on play for a financial services company and spent a lot of time thinking about play.

And part of it is figuring out what you like that’s fun. And I don’t mean provides you meaning that’s important. I don’t mean provides you purpose, but things that are fun and usually it’s usually outdoors. It’s usually physical. It’s usually as it relates to a game and playing a game. Usually a physical game and it doesn’t have to be sports, but some sort of physical game are the kinds of things that add, play back into our lives. So it’s very often elicited by hanging out with children because children are especially good at play and we as adults tend to decide that play isn’t good for us. There’s just a ton, a ton of research on how regular play in adulthood helps us to live longer. It helps us to be happier people. It helps us to recover from difficulty more. And it appears that it has health benefits that we tend not to get sick as much. We tend to recover from illness more quickly.

So how do you get play back in your life? Part of it is going to do things that are physical, that are fun games of all sorts that you can do and very often outside. You can do them with kids. Lots of people love to play with their animals, playing, playing, chase with your dog or playing hide and seek with children. All of those things tend to give us the benefits of play. If you don’t have things in your life that you enjoy doing with other people in a social setting that are physical that are fun, I encourage you to find those things in your life and they need to be things that you enjoy, not things that you obsess over.

So, if you’re a golfer, you can say, well that’s, you know, that’s my play. But if you approach golf like you approach the Bataan Death March that you are going to knock out the best, you know, 18 holes that you ever have, then you’re not going to be having fun. Laughter shouting, jumping, dancing. All of those things are part of play. Those should be happening in fun and no shouts of anger, no jumping in anger, no breaking of the golf clubs, but the kinds of things that give you that light experience, that experience of freedom and joy. That transient in-the-moment state where you feel like you can express yourself completely. Those are times of play. Introduce those in your life. Set aside time for it because it does have tremendous health benefits.

And that’s Roger’s 2 Cents.