If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?
Pink Floyd’s massive 1979 hit, Another Brick in the Wall, says a lot about common attitudes to work and reward. (and if you didn’t grow up belting those lyrics at the top of your lungs, I don’t even want to know what decade you were born in).
Eat your greens before you can have dessert. Swallow your frogs. Work hard, then play hard.
That sort of advice might have worked well in past decades, when houses were affordable, climate change was a mere whisper on the warming wind, and a decent pension at a reasonable retirement age was in reach.
Working hard and saving play for later worked (though not without pitfalls) when our working weeks were ‘normal,’ predictable and sandwiched between weekends that we could actually fill with activities; friends, travel, connection, and all the other stuff that makes life good. Then, it made sense to get the hard stuff out of the way because there was plenty of good stuff to look forward to.
2020 and 2021 pretty much cancelled fun for most of us (unless Solitaire is your jam, in which case you’ve had a cracking 24 months and I am happy for you).
For 2022 I have a new proposition.
Forget ‘getting the hard stuff’ done. Postpone your frogs, or just chuck them straight into your out tray and let them croak. Grasp joy wherever you can get it, grab it as soon as you can, and hold onto it for as long as possible.
We live in a culture that glorifies stoicism, productivity and battling to achieve, to be busy, to tick things off our to-do lists, and it’s not doing us any favours. So much of our lives now is made up of things that are serious. When was the last time you let your hair down and had a good time?
This might sound like impractical hedonism, however, research has found that play, fun, and flow might just be the antidote to a population burned out by overwork and a pandemic.
Play at work has commercial value. Google did not introduce Lego playstations, a giant Connect 4 game and a T-Rex to their offices because they want to be nice. They did it because play stimulates creativity and innovation; and having fun at work keeps employees happy.
An image from Google’s office in Russia: the stuff fairytales are made of (if your fairytales include corporate meetings. Let’s presume for the sake of daydreams the meetings that happen here are fun ones).
Here’s why and how play works, and how you can introduce more of it into your life.
In children, play helps to stimulate nerve development, creativity, proprioception and social skills; and is widely considered to be a crucial component of learning and brain development.
In adults, the impact of play is somewhat under-researched due to the complexity of defining play and playfulness across different groups, and the overlap with other personality traits. One person’s ‘play’ might be another person’s torture. If you consider yourself an introvert, the thought of attending a laughter yoga class might make you break out in hives rather than happiness.
We can, however, surmise the power of fun and play from their overlapping factors. For example, laughter has been shown to increase endorphins, reduce stress and improve vascular function, reducing the risk of heart disease.
According to Laurie Santos, Cognitive Scientist, Professor of Psychology and author of ‘the Power of Fun,’ play is an active state of connection to flow (not the relaxation or enjoyment you might get from a non-active activity like watching Netflix.)
Achieving a flow state is different for all of us. For some people, solo-crafting activities like building models or knitting might create that state. For others, dancing, singing, baking, boxing, playing board games or pretending the floor is lava.
What you’re looking for is that feeling of easy, joyful freedom that comes from being totally present. Where you don’t even notice time passing. Think of a dog chasing a stick on the beach, ears blowing back in the breeze and absolutely no thought in the world of anything else.
This is flow state.
The only way to know what works for you is to think about the last few times that you had fun; that you were playful, and then work out what it was about those moments that was fun for you and how you can recreate that now. Bear in mind that in kids, researchers have noted that being free to choose how they play matters. Organised fun then, is off the table. Ditch the laughter yoga and pick something you don’t secretly dread.
Fun for you might involve activities that are not possible right now, depending on the Covid restrictions that you are living with. I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t absolutely suck. It really, really sucks, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no fun at all to be had.
Think about what your mum and dad used to say to you as a kid when you whined ‘but I’m bored.’ The response mine came up with was usually ‘go and play outside.’ (or ‘I’ll give you something to do then, often followed up with a large bucket of potatoes to peel.)
Maybe, right now, we’re all just a little bit bored. Bored of the news, bored of the updates, bored of not being able to do all the stuff we want to do. Bored of spending too much time inside the same four walls.
The antidote to that is go and play.
During the 2020 lockdown, I bought myself a hula hoop, and every sunny evening after work I would go to the park, put my headphones on and vibe. Now it’s mid-winter in the UK, hula hooping in the park is not so much fun for me. Instead, I pop my headphones on morning and night – usually when I’m in the bathroom brushing my teeth – and I dance.
Here I am demonstrating exactly what 12 months with limited social interaction and no haircuts does to a person. I’m about two Zoom calls away from Tom Hanks in Castaway.
In those minutes, I don’t think about anything at all. It’s just me, Tina Turner singing Proud Mary and my Oral B 2500. It might not sound like much but it improves my mood no end. Life has been tough for the last 24 months and I miss my regular visits to NZ so much, but on the whole I’ve been pretty happy, and part of the reason is this habit. I also took up baking and drawing (poorly).
Portrait of my friend’s dog. This genuinely took me hours.
Mental Fitness is a bit like physical fitness. It’s the little things that you do every day that, over time, add up to make you more well than you would have been otherwise. You don’t need to make it into a marathon or aim for CrossFit level happiness. It’s not about being happy all of the time. That isn’t possible. Nor even advisable.
I’m not trying to polish a turd here. There’s plenty about life in the 2020s that is about as much fun as a cold cup of sick. Live, Laugh, Love posters make me want to poke myself in the eye with a hot fork. Ditto ‘audience participation’ and ‘everyone get up and introduce themselves! We’re going to have fun today!’
Be mad, be sad, feel free to acknowledge that a lot of things really suck.
Keeping up your Mental Fitness doesn’t mean adopting the saccharine cheerfulness of the Brady Bunch or pretending that life right now is a bunch of rainbows. It means practising daily habits to keep your brain in the best shape you can.
This year, make having fun one of your habits. Don’t make it into a chore; don’t try to compete with yourself about how fun you can be. Just do stuff that gives you joy and do it as often as you can.
‘Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays’ - Friedrich Schiller
‘Do anything, but let it produce joy’ – Walt Whitman
‘Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down’ – Toni Morrison.
‘There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing’ -Lorraine Hansberry
We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.
What we need is multiple moments of happiness. Fill your joy tank every chance that you get. Play. Flow. Dance. Get into your car, chuck on your favourite tune and belt it out as loud as you can.
That’s Mental Fitness in 2022.
Would you or your team like help finding the fun moments?
Check out our 2022 schedule here, including our brand-new ‘The Power of Fun at Work’ 90 minute workshop. No death by PowerPoint, no bad-Dad jokes (unless they really are funny) and absolutely no forced audience participation. Consent is very important to us, so faux-fun won’t be pushed onto anyone. And, we’re actually quite funny. (at least, we do try).
Blog by Ngaire Wallace