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How Play Boosts Your Creativity and Resilience | Katina Bajaj | TED
How Play Boosts Your Creativity and Resilience | Katina Bajaj | TED
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0:08
When I was eight years old, I had this ritual.
0:11
After I finished my homework, I'd head upstairs to my room,
0:15
turn on my favorite Christina Aguilera CD,
0:18
and sit on the floor
0:19
surrounding myself with all this stuff that was supposed to make me playful.
0:24
I'd take out my Barbies one by one,
0:26
spread out my markers in every color,
0:29
and then I'd wait.
0:32
And I'd wait.
0:34
And I'd wait until something felt worthy enough,
0:38
perfect enough to make.
0:41
That moment barely ever came.
0:44
Ever since I was a kid,
0:46
play felt like something that I had to earn.
0:49
And when I finally did do it, I took it seriously.
0:52
My favorite game growing up was emergency-room doctor.
0:56
I’d force my younger brother to scrub in, robes on,
1:00
Beanie Babies fully prepped,
1:02
and I was head surgeon, of course,
1:04
so there was no room for mistakes in my OR.
1:07
Most people don't become play skeptics
1:10
until they're adults.
1:12
But for me, even at eight, I was questioning the point of it.
1:17
So I ended up doing what any reasonable skeptic would do,
1:21
and I became a scientist.
1:23
I got my master's in clinical psychology
1:26
and spent almost the last decade studying the science of creativity.
1:30
And what I discovered surprised me because creativity isn't just a talent.
1:35
It is a core part of all of our well-being,
1:38
a pillar that I came to establish
1:40
and become a fierce advocate for, called “creative health.”
1:45
And one of the best strategies
1:46
that we have to strengthen our creative health
1:48
is exactly what I dismissed as a kid: play.
1:53
That's because when we play, especially as adults,
1:56
we unlock this unique type of flourishing.
1:59
We have deeper fulfillment and stronger resilience
2:02
and even more original ideas.
2:05
But the type of play that I'm talking about
2:07
is probably not what we're all imagining.
2:10
It's not just being silly or childlike, or even starting up a brand new hobby.
2:15
We’ve reduced play to be this cherry on top
2:18
of an already good life.
2:19
But from a scientific perspective, it is much more fundamental than that.
2:24
Play is what happens anytime we choose to do something
2:28
without knowing exactly where it's going to end up.
2:31
There are no instructions we need to follow
2:33
or outcomes we need to achieve.
2:35
Just two elements:
2:37
intrinsic motivation and the freedom
2:39
not to know the answer in advance.
2:42
The problem is, we've come to treat that type of play
2:46
as worse than optional.
2:48
It's something that we avoid and even punish.
2:51
So much so that upwards of 70 percent of adults around the world today
2:55
have stopped doing it.
2:57
I first noticed this pattern
2:59
as I was interviewing thousands of people
3:01
about their current relationship with play,
3:03
and I kept hearing the same thing over and over.
3:06
They told me they didn't have the time or the talent
3:09
or the right tools to do it anymore.
3:12
And when they finally did, it wasn't play.
3:15
It looked a lot like my emergency room,
3:17
something that was scheduled and optimized with nothing left to chance.
3:22
I know this might not seem like a big deal,
3:24
like, we're just having less fun.
3:26
But it's deeper than that.
3:29
We are living through a “play-deprivation crisis.”
3:33
We've systematically removed everything that makes play what it is.
3:37
The spontaneity, the freedom, the wonder,
3:39
from all parts of adult life
3:41
and replaced it with efficiency and achievement.
3:45
And in doing so, we're losing the very survival skills
3:47
that we need the most right now.
3:49
Things like our capacity to adapt and imagine and even feel alive.
3:55
Play deprivation is tricky, though,
3:56
because at first we barely notice it's happening.
3:59
We just feel endlessly busy.
4:02
But over time, without play,
4:03
stress can compound and then burnout can become chronic.
4:07
And then we walk around as playless adults,
4:10
which ultimately creates a playless society,
4:13
one where our institutions can grow rigid
4:16
and lonely and polarized.
4:19
But we can change this, though.
4:21
Not even just for ourselves, but for future generations too.
4:25
Because play isn't something we age out of.
4:28
It is a lifelong trait,
4:30
which means no matter how invisible it might feel,
4:33
we can always restore it.
4:35
And how we go about doing that is much simpler
4:38
and more expansive than you'd think.
4:41
At my company Daydreamers,
4:42
one of the things we got extremely curious to figure out
4:45
was finding the optimal way to play.
4:48
Are you noticing a trend about me yet?
4:50
We studied all kinds of people, executives, postal workers,
4:54
stay-at-home parents
4:55
from 18 to 85.
4:57
And we looked at how they played not in a lab,
5:00
but in the texture of their daily lives.
5:02
And as we analyze the millions of minutes of creative behaviors
5:06
that we collected through pictures and psychologically validated assessments,
5:10
we found the opposite of my hypothesis.
5:13
Play wasn't some list of actions we could add to our calendar.
5:17
It was an approach.
5:19
The people who became creatively healthy were doing something differently.
5:23
They were playing all the time in all these parts of life.
5:27
Thinking playfully, expressing themselves playfully,
5:30
even noticing when it happened around them.
5:32
And as they began to embody it, their lives transformed.
5:37
So while I wish I could stand here
5:39
and give us one play prescription to follow,
5:42
that would be the antithesis of what it is.
5:45
What I can do, though,
5:46
is paint a picture of what a playful life could look like,
5:49
because we don't need more stuff.
5:52
We just need to start injecting it back into how we already live.
5:56
And the three places to start are during work,
5:59
before sleep, and in public.
6:03
Let's start at work because most of us get stuck in this linear,
6:07
task-oriented thinking,
6:08
churning through to do's and in back-to-back meetings.
6:11
But neuroscientists have found that the spontaneous,
6:14
imaginative thinking that's underneath creative play
6:17
lives in a different part of our brain,
6:19
called the default mode network.
6:21
And that gets activated
6:22
when we do things we don't normally consider productive.
6:26
Playful people mind wander.
6:28
They daydream.
6:30
We often call that laziness, but underneath the surface,
6:33
our creative brain is actually hard at work,
6:35
connecting all these disparate ideas that don't make sense yet.
6:39
Even Einstein swore by this.
6:41
He credited his most innovative ideas not to doing math behind a desk,
6:45
but to thought experiments.
6:48
And right now, protecting our nonlinear thinking
6:51
matters more than ever.
6:53
And that doesn't happen through doing cringey icebreakers.
6:56
So next time you see Mark staring off into the distance during a meeting,
7:00
or even you want to look away from your inbox,
7:03
celebrate it because your thinking is starting to play.
7:07
OK, that sounds doable, right?
7:09
But what happens when we get home from work?
7:12
Well, most of us feel exhausted, so we reach for ease.
7:16
We scroll [and] order food at the click of a button.
7:18
We want our lives to be frictionless.
7:21
But our play and our lives need friction.
7:25
There's actually a type of positive stress called eustress
7:28
that comes about when we do things that require effort from us.
7:32
That's why physically playing
7:34
or making things with our bodies
7:36
actually expands our energy
7:38
and even our perception of time.
7:41
But we've come to engineer the friction out of that too, though.
7:44
We think playing at home
7:45
is perfectly completing a page of that adult coloring book
7:48
or following a YouTube tutorial to a tee.
7:51
Real play, though, is freer than that, which can feel uncomfortable at first.
7:56
It's experimenting with a bunch of different ingredients without a recipe
8:00
or doodling in the margins of your notebook.
8:03
It can be that simple.
8:04
That's actually exactly what I was doing
8:06
when I had my own creative breakthrough.
8:09
Normally, I'd get home from work and try to "relax,"
8:12
or if I was feeling extra adventurous,
8:14
I'd take out my notebook and try to write something profound,
8:18
neither of which are very playful.
8:20
But one night while I was writing, my pen moved to the left,
8:25
and then it made a circle.
8:27
And then a bunch of random shapes and patterns started to flow,
8:30
and while I did feel uncomfortable, I was also incredibly liberated.
8:36
And when I came back to reality and tried to make sense of it,
8:40
I thought of my eight-year-old self, sitting on the floor of her room,
8:44
waiting for something worthy to make.
8:46
And I realized in that moment that she, like so many of us,
8:50
got it backwards
8:51
because we don't need to wait for play to feel good to do it.
8:56
Doing it in the face of resistance and discomfort is how we begin.
9:02
But we can't just play alone at our desks or in our rooms.
9:05
We need to play in public, too.
9:08
The last and most insidious sign of play deprivation is cultural.
9:13
It's when we don't just deprioritize it ourselves,
9:15
but we actively punish it in the world,
9:18
silencing music in our parks or calling leisure time lazy.
9:22
Almost a hundred years ago,
9:23
philosopher Johan Huizinga warned us about this,
9:26
suggesting that when a culture loses play,
9:29
it can become brittle and polarized,
9:32
unable to cope with change.
9:34
I know that might seem familiar and maybe even scary,
9:37
but know that play is inherently contagious.
9:41
Research actually shows
9:42
that just being in proximity to people doing it
9:45
can motivate us to do it, too.
9:47
So we don't always need to be the main character.
9:50
We can just amplify it when we see it.
9:54
I'm sure you've noticed this happen before,
9:56
when a crowd begins to form around a musician,
9:59
but most of us end up racing past.
10:02
So next time,
10:03
I want you to take out your headphones and listen for a moment.
10:06
Maybe be the first to laugh or clap or join in.
10:09
Because when we make play visible,
10:12
it allows our communities to come alive too.
10:16
I know that even these small moments of play
10:19
can feel like an act of rebellion
10:21
in a world that's convinced us doing it as adults is unnecessary,
10:26
and oftentimes they are.
10:28
But it wasn't always this way.
10:31
Since the beginning of our species,
10:33
we have been making these beautiful, weird,
10:36
funny, interesting things for no bigger purpose at all.
10:40
Anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake actually has a name for this capacity.
10:44
She calls it “making special.”
10:47
In her work studying early human societies,
10:50
she also kept noticing an interesting pattern.
10:53
Every culture, without having spoken to one another first,
10:57
kept adding these playful touches
10:59
to the most ordinary aspects of their lives.
11:02
They decorated their tools with intricacy,
11:04
they made clothes and filled them with beads and shells,
11:08
they danced and told stories and appreciated beauty
11:12
for no functional or productive reason.
11:16
Just because.
11:17
So this exact capacity,
11:20
to play, to “make special,”
11:22
isn’t just inside of you --
11:24
it’s wired into our entire species.
11:28
It's always how we've stayed human,
11:31
how we've bonded and adapted
11:32
and even made meaning in life's most difficult moments.
11:36
And I see that as our responsibility to keep that part of ourselves alive.
11:42
So we need to play again in any form, in every part of life.
11:48
Not necessarily because it will lead us somewhere better,
11:51
but because we are human
11:55
and humans play.
11:57
Thank you.
11:58
(Applause)
