The Power of Play
DR SHAADY HARRISON | 3 minutes
It’s October 2008, and Airbnb is dying.
The company’s been running for a year, and co-founders Chesky, Gebbia and Blecharczyk are living on credit card debt and cheap pasta.
They’ve been rejected by every investor in Silicon Valley – they need money, and they need it fast. One day, Chesky starts playing around with an idea.
The presidential election is coming up. What if they sell limited-edition cereal boxes with oversized cartoons of Barack Obama and John McCain on the front?
Spending their last bit of money on hot glue guns and seriously cheap cereal, they assemble every single box by hand, folding cardboard at 3am in their apartment like an eccentric school project.
Brightly coloured, big cartoon faces, comic-book fonts.
It’s absurd.
And it works. They make $30,000 – enough to keep them afloat for another couple of months. More importantly, investors who've ignored them for months suddenly want meetings.
It’s not complex business strategy that saves Airbnb.
It’s play.
Our Brains Need Play
Playfulness is easy to dismiss.
It can look indulgent, pointless, and like a big waste of time.
But biology has never invested energy in trivial behaviours. Across the animal kingdom, play appears with remarkable consistency. When mammals are deprived of play, they don’t become more controlled or mature.
They struggle socially, react more strongly to stress, and are less flexible in unfamiliar situations.
Play is written into our DNA.
When adults become playful, the brain shifts into networks associated with reward, curiosity and social connection. The downstream effect is subtle but significant – the nervous system moves out of protection and into exploration – a state in which learning, creativity and problem-solving all become easier.
Source: Airbnb, X, 14 August 2019.
Our brains don’t just enjoy playfulness - they thrive on it.
Play is one of the oldest and clearest signals of safety the nervous system can receive.
When we become playful, our biology receives a message: there’s no immediate threat right now. Animals don’t play when it doesn’t feel safe. Neither do humans.
We do our best thinking when our brains feel safe enough to experiment.
In other words, play isn’t the opposite of work.
It’s the opposite of threat.
Why Play Feels Hard Now
Our nervous systems evolved in environments where play was woven into daily life. Movement, exploration, novelty, laughter, social rough-and-tumble – all built in.
Modern life has done a pretty good job of stripping this all out.
We’re now living in a time of chronic low-grade stress. Notifications, constant connectivity, overflowing inboxes, and a never-ending to-do list keep the body in a state of mild vigilance.
Stress is supposed to be a biological tool – it was never meant to be a lifestyle.
Checking our phones as soon as we wake up, rushing from one activity to the next, clearing the to-do list right up until we go to sleep. Many of us are living our days like they’re a constant series of mini-emergencies.
Our culture optimises for seriousness – urgency, output, performance, optics. Free, purposeless play feels pointless and inefficient.
Our biology strongly disagrees.
Be More Silly
A life without play tends to produce a certain type of adult. Highly competent, often successful. Great at meeting expectations.
Not so great at having fun.
Becoming more playful doesn’t require a personality transplant. It also doesn’t need grand gestures, silly hobbies, or large blocks of free time.
Instead, it lives in micro-moments that gradually train your brain to stop taking itself so seriously. Racing your child to the car, throwing a ball around aimlessly, doodling badly during a phone call, putting music on and dancing while you cook.
Whether you’re seven or seventy, your brain needs play.
When we’re under pressure, our instinct is often to become more serious. We tighten, narrow our focus, and eliminate anything that looks remotely unnecessary.
Neuroscience tells us we should be doing the opposite.
Play doesn’t teach your brain to waste time. Instead, it provides an ancient and uncomplicated signal to your nervous system.
It’s safe – stand down.
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Playfulness and coping with stress: A test of the protective buffering hypothesis. Proyer, R. T., Tandler, N., & Brauer, K. 2019. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1148.
Playfulness, ideas, and creativity: A survey. Bateson, P., & Nettle, D. 2016. Creativity Research Journal, 28(2), 181–187.
The role of play in the stress and coping process in adulthood. Magnuson, C. D., & Barnett, L. A. 2017. Leisure Sciences, 39(4), 1–17.
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About The Author
Shaady Harrison is a British medical doctor, writer and private advisor specialising in the intersection of psychology, calm and performance.