Play More: It’s Essential to Your Wellbeing
Written By Brandi Fleck
This is advice on healing through play. This post explores the importance of relaxation and play while giving you ideas for how to play more.
In this article, we’ll be exploring how relaxation and play are vital to life rather than luxuries, why that is, and different ways to relax that feel like restorative breaks, but without losing momentum in your healing process.
Table of Contents:
Play is NOT a Luxury. It's Required.
Healing doesn’t have to be all hard work and no fun.
Part of healing is finding joy, perpetuating that joy, and giving yourself a restorative break - giving yourself grace while restoring your body, mind, and spirit.
Part of healing is taking care of yourself holistically - every part of you, not just the body and not just the mind and not just your spirit.
You are a whole human.
Play, laughter, and relaxation are not a luxury. They are necessary to our wellbeing as humans.
But perhaps play, laughter, and relaxing feel like a luxury. Or perhaps you haven’t embraced play and relaxation because you’re still stuck in an avoidance cycle with busyness—needing to fill in your time so you don’t spend too much time thinking about what you don’t like about yourself or dealing with the hard emotions that come with life sometimes.
So, let’s treat relaxing like a reward, even though it’s necessary to your wellbeing.
This is a minor mindset shift that will enable you to welcome relaxation and play into your life more willingly—if you feel like you’ve earned it. In other words, while your’e still trying to work it in more regularly, you can use it as part of your celebration for accomplishing something hard.
Relaxing is important because:
If you’re stuck in anxiety; fright, flight, or freeze; or just have an extremely sensitive nervous system, as many highly sensitive people do, relaxing allows you to disrupt the flow of stress and nervous energy so you can redirect your energy to clarity of mind and self reflection. This allows you to notice things about yourself that allows you to heal, such as who you are, what brings you joy, and what mental state you’re in.
And honestly, relaxing just downright feels good.
A Prolonged State of Stress Causes Harm
Just like looking at this bright crazy image, right, really probably gets your nervous system going? The frenetic intensity of it has an effect that is the opposite of calming.
So when you think of ways to relax, you want to think of ways to lower your cortisol levels - basically, lower your stress levels and calm down.
If you want to learn more about what staying stuck in a state of high stress does to you, check out the optional additional reading linked below this video:
My favorite is 11 Natural Ways to Lower Your Cortisol Levels by Healthline.
This article really gets to the root of why chronic and extended stress can be harmful. For folks like me who can get super technical, this really hits home the importance of relaxing. The article explains, and I quote: “Cortisol is a stress hormone released by the adrenal glands. It’s important for helping your body deal with stressful situations, as your brain triggers its release in response to many different kinds of stress. However, when cortisol levels are too high for too long, this hormone can hurt more than it helps.”
We have a great article called Stress effects on the Body by the American Psychological Association.
And we have an article called 5 Things You Should Know About Stress by the National Institute of Mental Health.
All are helpful in telling you the effects of stress on your body and a couple of them give suggestions for how to minimize that effect. Relaxing is part of their suggestions, but they have many others as well that are worth your time.
This is not to scare you—reading about the effects of stress on your body is really to help you understand why it’s important to reverse it. You have time.
Ways to Relax and Play More
Just to get your mind going about how you can relax more, some of my favorite ways to relax are:
Laughing—you can find laughter by:
Telling jokes
Watching stand up comedy
Finding the humor in the ridiculous parts of life
Not taking yourself too seriously - mistakes can be funny
Being a friend
Another way is, I love connecting with nature. Examples include:
Walking
Hiking
Watching birds outside your window
Using crystals and sage, if you’re into that
Going barefooted in your yard or a park
Planting a flower or vegetable garden
Snuggling with your pet or pets
I also love practicing self care, and you can do that by doing something like:
Taking baths
Journaling
Yoga
Detoxing
Meditating
Praying
Eating well
Staying hydrated
Listening to Music
Making music or other art
There are a ton of other ways to relax. I don’t even think I put reading in there or, you know, skateboarding or playing bad Minton - whatever it is that helps you decompress.
All of these examples played a major role in my own healing process.
Permission to Play
So, take some time to play. You already have permission. I give it to you. Give it to yourself if you need to as well. Start as soon as possible.
You Might Also Like: Coping with Caretaking and Building Strength in Your Family
Join the conversation!
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions in the comments.
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Hi, I’m the founder of Human Amplified. I’m Brandi Fleck, a recognized communications and interviewing expert, a writer, an artist, and a private practice, certified trauma-informed life coach and trauma recovery coach. No matter how you interact with me, I help you tell and change your story so you can feel more like yourself. So welcome!
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