What is Playfulness?

Everyone knows what playfulness looks like when children play.

But when it comes to adults, people will roll their eyes and get weird ideas… I remember the first time I was trying to find current research on playful adulthood and made a terrible mistake, writing the words play and adults together. Some of the photos are still hard to be erased from my memory. It’s not that adults don’t play at all, but unlike children where play is considered a vital component of development, learning, and growth, adult play is perceived as a luxury in the best case and a total waste of time in the worst. I was not aware of how much I neglected play in my life and the price I paid for becoming too serious until I read Dr. Brene’ Brown’s book “The gifts of imperfection” and realized that play was the part in me, I missed and neglected the most. Armored with the discovery that wiser, science-based people believe play has as many benefits in adulthood as in childhood, I was looking for more research on what playful adulthood is and how it shows in life. (if you don’t want to be too childish) Not surprisingly, Play and Playfulness were mainly researched in children. Still, with the rise of the positive psychology field, the benefits of Play and Playfulness in adulthood became the focus of many studies. Play was researched by scientists from psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. The diverse interest in so many “serious” fields was reassuring. I was relieved to find out that I was not alone. Many scholars and numerous studies have struggled to define Play and Playfulness in adults. We all were so accustomed to associating play only with children. Play has 500 or more different definitions; this is how hard it is to define it. Although scientists have a broad consensus that defining Playfulness is hard, scientists have developed few tools to measure and assess Playfulness in adults. The tools were tested on people of all ages with different groups and gender. All the tools evaluated the level of Playfulness through self-perceived assessment. People were asked questions such as: “How playful do you think you are?” How playful do you consider yourself to be? “How playful do you think others think you are?” Interestingly, despite the difficulty in defining Playfulness, the scientists did not think they needed to explain to the participants what Play, or Playfulness is. People don’t need to necessarily understand what Play or Playfulness is. They know in their heart how Playfulness looks and feels like. You may recall a time when you were awed by a beautiful view or danced as if no one watches you, inspired by a book you read, were running in the rain, admired a rainbow, painted, wrote a poem, or sang with all your heart at your favorite artist’s concert. This is all playfulness and the feeling you felt was being in play. There is not one single way to play, and people have different play personalities (if you take the quiz, you can find yours) so they will enjoy different types of play. Despite the difficulty to define it (a little bit like trying to define love), scientists have agreed that all forms of playfulness have 5 characteristics in common:

❣️     It is a personal choice. We don’t need others’ permission or guidance. We can choose what, how, and when to play.

❣️      The motivation to play is intrinsic and participating, in the process of playing is more important than the result

❣️     The rules of play come from our heart and soul, but they too can be changed to leave more room for creativity

❣️     Play is an endless place for imagination and creativity. Everything is possible in play. It’s the training field for life.

❣️      Engaging in playful activities fill you with energy without the pressure of the intense emotions involved.

 I am being very careful, since I believe that defining playfulness may contradict the entire idea of playfulness, slaving it once again with the ‘serious’ attempt to put it in a box to satisfy our adult rational mind, yet what I found the best way to describe my playfulness was the definition that was given by the researcher Rene.T.Proyer. “Playfulness is an individual differences variable that allows people to frame or reframe everyday situations in a way such that they experience them as entertaining, and/or intellectually stimulating, and/or personally interesting.” No matter how you define your playfulness, the most important thing to keep in mind is to keep playing. “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing”- George Bernard Shaw