In July 2020, just weeks before the first lockdown hit, Cat’s husband of fifteen years walked out on her. “On a good day I was blergh and on a bad day I wanted to scream,” she says. Cat, who is chief operating officer at deep work startup Flown, spent much of the pandemic struggling through different coping mechanisms like drinking and partying.
Then she thought of a different solution. In July of this year she booked a room at a boutique hotel in East London, packed up all the fanciest clothes she had never had a chance to wear, and held her own personal fashion show. This ‘playcation’, as she called it, was a chance to play around, have fun and break out of the unhealthy routines that had formed during lockdown. “Initially you are self conscious and think am I being silly, but then you keep twirling and twirling until you get dizzy and light headed, and you end up going with it,” she says. “I realised not just how important play is but how easy it is to play.”
Jessica, a 24-year-old PR manager from Staffordshire, spent lockdown honing her fishing and garden design skills in Animal Crossing. Right before the first lockdown, she bought a Nintendo DS as a way to escape from the stresses of the pandemic. Alongside Animal Crossing she picked up other classics like Professor Layton's Curious Village and Dr Kawashima's Brain Training. “They remind me of being younger. I really fancied playing some of the games again as life was easier then,” she says. “I used to play Animal Crossing before and after work, it sounds silly but it helped me to separate reality and gave me a good distraction from what was going on.” That ability to escape through play, she says, really helped with the challenges of lockdown. “Lockdown made me feel quite isolated. I also struggled with working from home because I love my team and wanted to see them,” she explains. “If I'd have let reality consume me I'd have really struggled.”
While Jessica played Nintendo and Cat dressed up, Mary found a trampoline in her local park and started jumping. Hannah, meanwhile, has been knitting and mastering the art of LEGO. Others have turned to jigsaw puzzles, spray painting and a plethora of arts and crafts. And they’ve all got one thing in common: using play to help cope with stress and burnout. And scientific research backs up their approach. In one study of 898 university students playing around more frequently caused a marked reduction in perceived stress levels. Another study found a correlation of around 18 per cent between the level of sociable, playful activities and overall life satisfaction.
“Play makes you more productive, it relieves stress, it improves brain functionality, it stimulates your mind and boosts creativity and when you’re playing it improves relationships and your connection to others,” says Jeff Harry, a consultant specialising in the value of adult play. “In my opinion, I feel it’s almost as important as eating, sleeping, breathing and love.” Experts in the field warn these studies are from perfect – it’s very hard to work out how an act of play affects you and it’s an understudied area – but there is increasing belief that there is significant value to be gained for adults beyond just reducing stress.
“Jigsaw puzzles engage different parts of your brain and have these huge meditative benefits,” says James Edwards, who co-founded start-up Piece & Quiet, which creates bespoke jigsaw puzzles and adult colouring books to help combat stress and strain. “We’ve tried to reinvent the puzzle so it’s not just a game for kids.” Their company is just one riding the latest adult play wave that stretches from puzzles to board games, arts and crafts to video games . Between 2015 and 2020 the number of escape rooms shot up from zero to over 2,000 in the US. £4.4 billion, or almost half of all UK entertainment sector revenue in 2020, came from video games, and thanks to the pandemic around 62 per cent of the UK adult population now play some form of video game. “All these things have risen in popularity over the last couple of decades. It’s probably the most diverse it’s ever been,” says Dave Neale, an affiliate of the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning at the University of Cambridge. “We’re now in this golden age of play.”
And that golden age might be needed now more than ever. The pandemic, as well as the blurring of work-life balance, have had a major impact on people’s mental health. One study by the Office for National Statistics estimated that one in five adults had experienced some form of depression during the pandemic – around double the rate they had recorded before. At the same time, employee burnout from stress and overwork is on the rise – 37 per cent of UK employees reported an increase in stress-related absence, while another study found 40 per cent of employees were now working well beyond their usual hours.
While much of our lives, particularly at work, are goal-oriented and structured, the opposite is often true for playing. It is an end in itself. “It tends to involve adding things or doing things that aren’t necessary,” says Neale. “Play is not as goal directed as the rest of life, it’s done for its own sake to add flavour and liveliness.” And it’s something that has been part of human life for an extraordinarily long time. The oldest still playable board game, The Royal Game of Ur, is around 4,600 years old. Others we haven’t found the rules for date from thousands of years before that. “It’s one of the things that make us human,” says Neale. “It’s potentially linked to our success as a species. This ability to adapt to whatever environment seems to go hand in hand with this ongoing playful nature.”
But just because playing more might help address burnout, that doesn’t mean making it a part of your life is easy. For one, it takes a lot of time, a lack of which is one of the main drivers of rising burnout in the first place. Also, while Cat enjoyed dressing up and Jessica loved Animal Crossing, would either be happy if they were forced to swap, or worse, if a manager tried to introduce them to mandated play time? “You don’t want to force play. Forced fun is the worst, like team building events,” says Harry. “It should be voluntary. You open the door and if people want to walk through they can.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
