How Play Boosts Your Creativity and Resilience | Katina Bajaj | TED

When I was eight years old, I had this ritual. After I finished my homework, I'd head upstairs to my room, turn on my favorite Christina Aguilera CD, and sit on the floor surrounding myself with all this stuff that was supposed to make me playful. I'd take out my Barbies one by one, spread out my markers in every color, and then I'd wait. And I'd wait. And I'd wait until something felt worthy enough, perfect enough to make. That moment barely ever came. Ever since I was a kid, play felt like something that I had to earn. And when I finally did do it, I took it seriously. My favorite game growing up was emergency-room doctor. I’d force my younger brother to scrub in, robes on, Beanie Babies fully prepped, and I was head surgeon, of course, so there was no room for mistakes in my OR. Most people don't become play skeptics until they're adults.

But for me, even at eight, I was questioning the point of it. So I ended up doing what any reasonable skeptic would do, and I became a scientist. I got my master's in clinical psychology and spent almost the last decade studying the science of creativity. And what I discovered surprised me because creativity isn't just a talent. It is a core part of all of our well-being, a pillar that I came to establish and become a fierce advocate for, called “creative health.” And one of the best strategies that we have to strengthen our creative health is exactly what I dismissed as a kid: play. That's because when we play, especially as adults, we unlock this unique type of flourishing. We have deeper fulfillment and stronger resilience and even more original ideas. But the type of play that I'm talking about is probably not what we're all imagining. It's not just being silly or childlike, or even starting up a brand new hobby.

We’ve reduced play to be this cherry on top of an already good life. But from a scientific perspective, it is much more fundamental than that. Play is what happens anytime we choose to do something without knowing exactly where it's going to end up. There are no instructions we need to follow or outcomes we need to achieve. Just two elements: intrinsic motivation and the freedom not to know the answer in advance. The problem is, we've come to treat that type of play as worse than optional. It's something that we avoid and even punish. So much so that upwards of 70 percent of adults around the world today have stopped doing it. I first noticed this pattern as I was interviewing thousands of people about their current relationship with play, and I kept hearing the same thing over and over. They told me they didn't have the time or the talent or the right tools to do it anymore. And when they finally did, it wasn't play.

It looked a lot like my emergency room, something that was scheduled and optimized with nothing left to chance. I know this might not seem like a big deal, like, we're just having less fun. But it's deeper than that. We are living through a “play-deprivation crisis.” We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is. The spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder, from all parts of adult life and replaced it with efficiency and achievement. And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills that we need the most right now. Things like our capacity to adapt and imagine and even feel alive. Play deprivation is tricky, though, because at first we barely notice it's happening. We just feel endlessly busy. But over time, without play, stress can compound and then burnout can become chronic. And then we walk around as playless adults, which ultimately creates a playless society, one where our institutions can grow rigid and lonely and polarized.

But we can change this, though. Not even just for ourselves, but for future generations too. Because play isn't something we age out of. It is a lifelong trait, which means no matter how invisible it might feel, we can always restore it. And how we go about doing that is much simpler and more expansive than you'd think. At my company Daydreamers, one of the things we got extremely curious to figure out was finding the optimal way to play. Are you noticing a trend about me yet? We studied all kinds of people, executives, postal workers, stay-at-home parents from 18 to 85. And we looked at how they played not in a lab, but in the texture of their daily lives. And as we analyze the millions of minutes of creative behaviors that we collected through pictures and psychologically validated assessments, we found the opposite of my hypothesis. Play wasn't some list of actions we could add to our calendar. It was an approach.

The people who became creatively healthy were doing something differently. They were playing all the time in all these parts of life. Thinking playfully, expressing themselves playfully, even noticing when it happened around them. And as they began to embody it, their lives transformed. So while I wish I could stand here and give us one play prescription to follow, that would be the antithesis of what it is. What I can do, though, is paint a picture of what a playful life could look like, because we don't need more stuff. We just need to start injecting it back into how we already live. And the three places to start are during work, before sleep, and in public. Let's start at work because most of us get stuck in this linear, task-oriented thinking, churning through to do's and in back-to-back meetings. But neuroscientists have found that the spontaneous, imaginative thinking that's underneath creative play lives in a different part of our brain, called the default mode network.

And that gets activated when we do things we don't normally consider productive. Playful people mind wander. They daydream. We often call that laziness, but underneath the surface, our creative brain is actually hard at work, connecting all these disparate ideas that don't make sense yet. Even Einstein swore by this. He credited his most innovative ideas not to doing math behind a desk, but to thought experiments. And right now, protecting our nonlinear thinking matters more than ever. And that doesn't happen through doing cringey icebreakers. So next time you see Mark staring off into the distance during a meeting, or even you want to look away from your inbox, celebrate it because your thinking is starting to play. OK, that sounds doable, right? But what happens when we get home from work? Well, most of us feel exhausted, so we reach for ease. We scroll [and] order food at the click of a button. We want our lives to be frictionless.

But our play and our lives need friction. There's actually a type of positive stress called eustress that comes about when we do things that require effort from us. That's why physically playing or making things with our bodies actually expands our energy and even our perception of time. But we've come to engineer the friction out of that too, though. We think playing at home is perfectly completing a page of that adult coloring book or following a YouTube tutorial to a tee. Real play, though, is freer than that, which can feel uncomfortable at first. It's experimenting with a bunch of different ingredients without a recipe or doodling in the margins of your notebook. It can be that simple. That's actually exactly what I was doing when I had my own creative breakthrough. Normally, I'd get home from work and try to "relax," or if I was feeling extra adventurous, I'd take out my notebook and try to write something profound, neither of which are very playful. But one night while I was writing, my pen moved to the left, and then it made a circle.

And then a bunch of random shapes and patterns started to flow, and while I did feel uncomfortable, I was also incredibly liberated. And when I came back to reality and tried to make sense of it, I thought of my eight-year-old self, sitting on the floor of her room, waiting for something worthy to make. And I realized in that moment that she, like so many of us, got it backwards because we don't need to wait for play to feel good to do it. Doing it in the face of resistance and discomfort is how we begin. But we can't just play alone at our desks or in our rooms. We need to play in public, too. The last and most insidious sign of play deprivation is cultural. It's when we don't just deprioritize it ourselves, but we actively punish it in the world, silencing music in our parks or calling leisure time lazy. Almost a hundred years ago, philosopher Johan Huizinga warned us about this, suggesting that when a culture loses play, it can become brittle and polarized, unable to cope with change.

I know that might seem familiar and maybe even scary, but know that play is inherently contagious. Research actually shows that just being in proximity to people doing it can motivate us to do it, too. So we don't always need to be the main character. We can just amplify it when we see it. I'm sure you've noticed this happen before, when a crowd begins to form around a musician, but most of us end up racing past. So next time, I want you to take out your headphones and listen for a moment. Maybe be the first to laugh or clap or join in. Because when we make play visible, it allows our communities to come alive too. I know that even these small moments of play can feel like an act of rebellion in a world that's convinced us doing it as adults is unnecessary, and oftentimes they are. But it wasn't always this way. Since the beginning of our species, we have been making these beautiful, weird, funny, interesting things for no bigger purpose at all.

Anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake actually has a name for this capacity. She calls it “making special.” In her work studying early human societies, she also kept noticing an interesting pattern. Every culture, without having spoken to one another first, kept adding these playful touches to the most ordinary aspects of their lives. They decorated their tools with intricacy, they made clothes and filled them with beads and shells, they danced and told stories and appreciated beauty for no functional or productive reason. Just because. So this exact capacity, to play, to “make special,” isn’t just inside of you -- it’s wired into our entire species. It's always how we've stayed human, how we've bonded and adapted and even made meaning in life's most difficult moments. And I see that as our responsibility to keep that part of ourselves alive.

So we need to play again in any form, in every part of life. Not necessarily because it will lead us somewhere better, but because we are human and humans play. Thank you. (Applause)