Play and Rest

Play is what lifts people out of the mundane. I sometimes compare play to oxygen—it’s all around us, yet goes mostly unnoticed or unappreciated until it is missing.
— Stuart Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (2009)

On October 22nd, we introduced Brené Brown’s ten guideposts for wholehearted living. Today we continue with Guidepost #7: Cultivating Play and Rest—Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth.

When Brené Brown first noticed this pattern in her research, she struggled to name it. She told a colleague, “These wholehearted people fool around a lot.” Her colleague asked what she meant. Hobbies? Crafts? Sports? Brown shrugged. “Kinda like that, but not so organized.” Only later did she recognise what she was watching was play in action.

Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent decades studying why it matters. In his book, he draws on more than six thousand interviews with people from all walks of life, from Nobel Prize winners to incarcerated murderers. His central thesis is that play is not a luxury but a biological drive, as essential to our health as sleep or nutrition.

Brown found that play-deprived childhoods were a startling common thread among violent offenders. Those who continued to play throughout life showed greater resilience and creativity. Play, he argues, helps us deal with difficulties, promotes mastery of our craft, and sits at the heart of the creative process. One key insight is that play is apparently purposeless. We do it simply because we want to. And that’s exactly what makes it hard for many of us to allow.

This is where shame enters. When self-worth is tied to productivity, purposeless activity feels like a threat. We convince ourselves that play wastes time, and that sleep does too. The internal pressure mounts. No time to fool around. Keep moving. Get it done. Stuart Brown puts it starkly: “The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.”

Rest carries the same weight. Sleep deprivation is linked to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and depression, yet many of us still wear exhaustion like a badge of honour. We fill every hour, chase every goal, and use our spare time searching for meaning while the very pursuit keeps us too exhausted to find it. In the long run, work does not work without rest and play. And neither does life.

Brené Brown describes a turning point in her own family. She and her husband compared their list of goals (bigger house, higher salary, more accolades) to a simpler list of what actually made life feel good. Sleep. Downtime. Weekends away. Time to do nothing. They realised that letting go of the first list meant they were already living their dream.

Over the holidays, I spent more than 24 hours awake at the Alkathon. I called it service, but it came at the cost of my own wellbeing. I set demands for myself that I would never ask of anyone else. I’m still learning to notice when commitment becomes a form of escape or self-harm.

The Promises speak of serenity, of peace, of a new freedom. These are not rewards for working harder, but gifts that come when we stop trying to prove ourselves. We can let go. We can rest. We can play. Not because we’ve finished the work, but because we were never meant to be defined by it.