Why Adults Need Play Too: The Importance of Play for Adults
When was the last time you did something simply because it was fun, rather than because it was productive, good for your career, good exercise, something your family needed, or another item you could cross off your to-do list? For many adults, that question is surprisingly difficult to answer.
Play is often treated as something we are supposed to leave behind when childhood ends. As adults, our days become increasingly organized around responsibilities, productivity, work, caregiving, household tasks, and planning for what needs to happen next. Somewhere along the way, activities without an obvious productive purpose can begin to feel unnecessary or even irresponsible.
However, play is not exclusively a childhood activity. Research on adult playfulness suggests that play and playfulness remain relevant throughout adulthood and may be associated with well-being, positive emotions, creativity, relationships, and how adults approach everyday experiences (Proyer, 2017; Proyer et al., 2018). The importance of play for adults may be easier to recognize when we expand our definition of what "play" actually looks like beyond childhood.
What Does Play Look Like for an Adult?
When we hear the word play, many of us picture children building with blocks, playing pretend, or running around a playground. Adult play often looks very different, and there is no single activity that qualifies as the "right" way to play.
For one person, play might mean painting pottery. For someone else, it could mean playing a video game, gardening, dancing around the kitchen, doing a puzzle, playing a recreational sport, experimenting with a new recipe, going to trivia night, making something with their hands, or joking around with friends.
Adult play might include:
Creating art or crafting.
Playing or listening to music.
Dancing.
Gardening.
Playing video or board games.
Participating in recreational sports.
Completing puzzles.
Building or making something.
Trying improv or theater.
Exploring somewhere new.
Playing with pets.
Being silly with people you trust.
Engaging in hobbies without trying to master them.
What makes something playful is not necessarily the activity itself. It is often how we experience the activity. Play tends to involve enjoyment, intrinsic motivation, spontaneity, engagement, curiosity, or doing something because the experience itself is rewarding rather than because it produces a specific external outcome (Van Vleet & Feeney, 2015).
The same activity can therefore feel playful to one person and like another responsibility to someone else.
Adults Are Very Good at Turning Play Into Work
Imagine deciding that you want to start running because you enjoy being outside. Eventually, you buy a watch, start tracking your pace, set weekly mileage goals, compare your numbers, and sign up for races. Before long, the activity that once provided freedom from expectations has another set of expectations attached to it.
Adults do this surprisingly often. We start painting and immediately wonder whether we could sell our work. We begin exercising and start tracking every metric. We pick up photography and consider starting a business. We enjoy reading and suddenly create a yearly reading goal that we feel pressured to complete.
Goals are not inherently bad, and hobbies can absolutely become meaningful accomplishments. The problem arises when we begin to believe that everything we enjoy needs to become productive.
One of the unique qualities of play is that it can give us permission to experience something without constantly asking, "What am I getting out of this?" Sometimes enjoying an experience is enough.
Why Can Play Feel Uncomfortable for Adults?
If play is enjoyable, why do so many adults struggle to make room for it? Part of the answer may be related to the expectations we associate with adulthood.
Adulthood is often connected with responsibility, productivity, achievement, and self-discipline. In environments where busyness is rewarded, rest and recreation can begin to feel like something that must be earned. Adults may find themselves thinking, "I should be doing something productive," "I don't have time for this," "I'm terrible at this," or even, "What's the point?"
That last question is particularly important because play does not always need a point. Research examining adult playfulness suggests that playful adults may approach everyday situations with greater spontaneity, humor, curiosity, creativity, or flexibility (Proyer, 2017). Playfulness is not simply about participating in games. It can also describe the way someone engages with experiences and finds opportunities for amusement, curiosity, and enjoyment.
The Importance of Play for Adults Experiencing Stress
Play does not eliminate stress, nor should it be presented as a cure for burnout, anxiety, depression, or other mental health concerns. However, recreational and leisure experiences can provide meaningful opportunities for psychological recovery from everyday demands.
Research on recovery from work has identified experiences such as psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control during nonwork time as important components of recovery (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007). Playful activities may naturally create opportunities for several of these experiences.
For example, becoming absorbed in painting may provide temporary psychological distance from work. Playing basketball with friends may offer movement, social connection, and enjoyment. Completing a puzzle may provide a sense of mastery without the consequences attached to professional performance.
The activity does not need to "fix" stress to be worthwhile. Having parts of our lives where we are not constantly being evaluated, measured, or asked to perform can have value in itself.
Play Can Give Our Attention Somewhere Else to Go
Have you ever become so absorbed in an activity that you temporarily stopped thinking about your email, deadlines, responsibilities, or worries?
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described "flow" as a state of deep involvement in an activity in which attention becomes highly focused and the experience itself can become intrinsically rewarding (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
Playful activities can sometimes create opportunities for these deeply engaging experiences. Someone might experience this while painting, gardening, playing music, building something, gaming, solving a puzzle, playing a sport, or creating something with their hands.
For a period of time, attention shifts away from everything waiting to be completed and toward what is happening right now. In lives that constantly ask us to think about what needs to happen next, opportunities to become absorbed in the present can be meaningful.
Play Creates Space for Creativity
Play also gives adults opportunities to experiment. When there is no pressure to produce a perfect outcome, we can try things, make mistakes, change directions, and simply see what happens.
This mindset has connections to creativity. Playfulness has been associated with creativity and innovation in adults, although researchers continue to explore exactly how different dimensions of playfulness relate to these outcomes (Proyer, 2017).
Creativity also does not have to mean producing art. Creative thinking can show up in problem-solving, relationships, work, parenting, cooking, decorating, storytelling, humor, and finding new ways of approaching everyday challenges.
Play gives us an opportunity to ask, "What happens if I try this?" Adults who spend much of their lives focused on outcomes, responsibilities, and expectations may not have many other opportunities to experiment without worrying about the result.
Play Can Strengthen Connection
Some of the most meaningful forms of adult play happen with other people. Think about laughing uncontrollably with a friend, playing cards with family, participating in a recreational sports league, playing a ridiculous party game, or sharing an inside joke with your partner.
Play can create opportunities for connection that feel different from sitting across from someone and having a serious conversation. Research on adult play and relationships suggests that playfulness can contribute to relationship experiences and may support bonding and positive interactions between partners (Van Vleet & Feeney, 2015).
Meaningful connection does not always require a deep conversation. Sometimes relationships are strengthened through shared enjoyment, humor, silliness, competition, creativity, and laughter.
What If I Don't Know How to Play Anymore?
If you have spent years focused on work, school, caregiving, parenting, or simply getting through difficult periods of life, you may genuinely have trouble identifying what you enjoy. This does not mean you are bad at having fun. It may simply mean you have not had many opportunities to explore what feels enjoyable without expectations attached to it.
Instead of immediately asking yourself, "What hobby should I start?" it may be more helpful to think about what you have enjoyed throughout your life. Consider what activities make you lose track of time, what makes you laugh, what you are curious about, or what feels satisfying even when nobody else sees the result.
You might also think about what you loved doing as a child before you became concerned about whether you were good at it. Maybe you loved drawing, building things, playing outside, making up stories, collecting things, dancing, exploring, playing games, or creating elaborate imaginary worlds.
You do not need to rediscover a lifelong passion. You are allowed to experiment, try something once, decide you dislike it, and move on to something else.
Play Doesn't Have to Be Expensive or Time-Consuming
Another misconception is that recreation requires large amounts of free time, money, or planning.
Play can happen in small moments throughout ordinary life.
You might doodle while drinking your coffee, put music on while cooking dinner, build something with your child instead of supervising from across the room, throw a ball for your dog, spend twenty minutes working on a puzzle, try a new craft, play a game with your partner, or dance badly to a song you love.
The important thing is not to turn play into another item on your wellness checklist. If you find yourself thinking, "I need to play for thirty minutes every day because it's good for my mental health," you may have accidentally transformed play into another task you are expected to complete.
There is no requirement to become good at playing. Making space for enjoyment, curiosity, or silliness is enough.
Play Is Not the Same as Avoidance
There is also an important distinction between restoration and avoidance. Taking a break from responsibilities can be healthy, and temporarily stepping away from work, stress, or difficult emotions can give us time to recover.
However, recreation may become less helpful when it consistently prevents us from addressing things that require our attention. Spending an evening playing a video game after a stressful week might feel restorative, while using gaming every night because thinking about work, relationships, finances, or emotions feels intolerable may be serving a different function.
Instead of simply asking, "Am I playing too much?" it may be more useful to consider whether the activity helps you return to your life feeling restored or whether it consistently helps you avoid parts of your life that need attention.
Healthy play and responsibility can exist together.
You Don't Have to Earn Play
Adults often treat enjoyment as a reward. We tell ourselves we can relax after the house is clean, play after the work is finished, or enjoy ourselves once everything on the list has been completed.
The problem is that adult responsibilities are rarely completely finished. There will almost always be another email, another load of laundry, another deadline, another appointment, or another task waiting.
If enjoyment is only permitted after everything else is done, it can easily become something that rarely happens. Research on recovery from work suggests that experiences outside of work matter for well-being and our ability to recover from ongoing demands (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007).
Making room for enjoyment does not mean ignoring responsibilities. It means recognizing that rest, recreation, relationships, and enjoyment are also parts of a full life.
What Can Play Look Like During Burnout?
When people are exhausted or experiencing burnout, they sometimes assume they need to find an exciting new hobby. In reality, learning something complicated or adding another commitment may be the last thing an exhausted person has energy to do.
If you are depleted, play can start small. You might revisit something familiar instead of learning something new, choose an activity with no performance expectations, or engage in something sensory, creative, social, humorous, or physically engaging.
Most importantly, try not to turn play into another self-improvement project. Play does not have to become another way to optimize your health, productivity, creativity, or performance.
Sometimes play is simply an opportunity to remember that you are a person outside of your responsibilities.
Maybe We Never Outgrow Play
Children rarely need research to convince them that play matters because they naturally seek opportunities to explore, create, imagine, move, and have fun. Adults are often the ones who begin questioning whether these experiences are valuable enough to deserve their time.
Making room for play in adulthood might mean creating something badly, playing a game you will never master, laughing loudly, trying something new, spending an afternoon on a puzzle, making something nobody will ever see, or having an interest that will never appear on a résumé.
Adult life contains plenty of responsibility, and those responsibilities are real. Making room for play does not require ignoring them. Instead, it means recognizing that productivity is only one part of being human.
At Premier Psychotherapy, we believe mental health includes more than simply reducing symptoms or getting through responsibilities. It can also involve reconnecting with creativity, curiosity, relationships, enjoyment, and parts of ourselves that may become harder to access during periods of stress or burnout.
You do not have to justify every enjoyable thing you do by proving that it makes you healthier, more productive, or more successful. Sometimes doing something because it brings you joy is reason enough.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Proyer, R. T. (2017). A new structural model for the study of adult playfulness: Assessment and
exploration of an understudied individual differences variable. Personality and Individual Differences, 108, 113–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.12.011
Proyer, R. T., Gander, F., Bertenshaw, E. J., & Brauer, K. (2018). The positive relationships of playfulness with indicators of health, activity, and physical fitness. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1440. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01440
Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The recovery experience questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076- 8998.12.3.204
Van Vleet, M., & Feeney, B. C. (2015). Play behavior and playfulness in adulthood. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9(11), 630–643.
Comments