I ask my patients to do a lot of things: reduce stress, move more, and eat healthier. I also encourage them to use phones, cigarettes and other addictive substances less. One thing I don’t often ask them to do is play more, and I think I am missing something important. And maybe I am missing it because, as an adult, play is not something I do in high enough doses. Adults should play more in 2025.
Are adults play-deprived?
Kids are great at playing. And it serves an important role in their learning about themselves, others around them, and the world they live in. Is play something that adults naturally grow out of as we “grow up”? Or are adults just deprived of the chance to play frequently and with others? 
In the words of Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and founder of the National Institute for Play: “The opposite of play isn’t work, it’s depression.” He adds, “The adult-play deficit is becoming a public health crisis.” I interpret this as meaning that we are sick if we are not playing. And so why would I, as a physician who wants to keep people healthy, not promote this?
Creativity and spontaneity are core to both play and innovation
A 2011 article looking at playfulness in adults showed a correlation between one’s propensity to play and positive emotional and intellectual functioning. They looked at five elements of this behavior – spontaneous, expressive, creative, fun, and silly. And they concluded, “The fun-variant of playfulness was most strongly related with emotional strengths while intellectual strengths yielded robust relations with all facets of playfulness.” In short, adults should play more because it has intellectual and emotional benefits.
Connecting our ability to play as adults with intellect seems a bit wild if we dismiss it as nothing more than the things that children do. But think of creativity and spontaneity, and their value to both innovation and complex problem solving. Dr. Brown shared an interesting finding from interviewing some of the highest-level thinkers. “When I interviewed Nobel laureates, I was struck by how most of them didn’t separate work and play. Their labs were their playgrounds.”
Play is an antidote to loneliness
When considering the increasing number of people who feel isolated and alone, the social aspect inherent in play becomes quite timely. The CDC and Surgeon General have increasingly paid attention to loneliness as a public health crisis, with the latter releasing a report “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” in 2023. A 2021 survey showed that 8 in 10 young adults 18-24 felt lonely, compared for 4 in 10 aged 66 and older.
A recent National Geographic article explored this in depth, connecting what we see in animals and to human behavior. For instance, adult animals that engage in similar-appearing behaviors tend to live in cooperative social groups. “This observation has led biologists to discover what is perhaps the most important function of adult play: building and maintaining relationships.”
Play offers an antidote to the ways in which we might feel isolated. Put simply, it is hard to play and be lonely at the same time. (Solitaire excluded). And it doesn’t require extensive (or any) resources. Play can happen in many different forms in our workplaces, houses of worship and right on our street. Finding ways to get people playing is important.
Bottom line: play more and especially with others this year
A few thoughts on how we can do this:
- Thinking of the above study that identified five key aspects of play – spontaneous, expressive, creative, fun, and silly – take a quick assessment of where you are in each domain. Maybe you are doing a lot of creative play but have left behind the silly. From this list, create some play goals for the first 3 months of 2025. Also, find a new way to play this year. Try something you haven’t tried before and embrace the risk-taking and unknown that this entails.
- For health care providers like me, we can find ways to promote and encourage play more than we currently do. Assess whether people are playing and point out ways that you feel play may improve their quality of life, address mental health needs, help their isolation, etc. Side note: Given our sick-care health system, we should work on developing an ICD-10 code for “playlessness” so we can count this work of play promotion as productive. (Gee, that idea was a bit of me playing.)
- Policy approaches to encouraging play. This is an interesting angle to think about how we might make more play-conducive environments. Workplaces like the U.S. Dept of Defense that allow time for exercise and wellness within the work week are great examples. Meanwhile, Head Start advocates for the idea of “adult recess” with games that encourage adults to help improve their own emotional regulation.
I will end with a quick story
It was July 2024 and I was given a lesson on play from Senior Olympians from Laguna Pueblo, an Indigenous nation in New Mexico. They had set up a classic toss-the-ring-on-the-soda-bottle game at their community’s July 4th celebration. I was in awe as I watched how much the Senior Olympians enjoyed the recreational aspect of this game, as they fundraised for their next competition. In fact, I think they were having more fun than their 5- and 8-year old customers! And then I caught the motto for the New Mexico Senior Olympics on their shirts: “You don’t stop playing because you grow old, you grow old because you stop playing.”
A good reminder for us all. Enjoy playing in 2025!
