PLAY

You might not think of PLAY in terms of affective neuroscience, but according to Jaak Panksepp’s years of lab research, it is. Playfulness is the source of one of the most positive social-affective feelings our brains can generate.

The neuroscience of PLAY involves the release of endogenous opioid, dopamine, and endogenous cannabinoid. The release of endogenous opioids stimulates play and governs sexual and maternal behaviors. Endogenous opioids reduce separation distress and pain. Play is a powerful and rewarding if not euphoric activity in the brain. 

Higher levels of brain opioids generate feelings of self-confidence that facilitate winning in competitions. Lower levels of brain opioids, on the other hand, generate feelings of greater social need and hence insecurity.

Squirrels engage in play when they chase each other back and forth and up and down trees sometimes culminating in mating behavior. Rats also love to play. They laugh when they are tickled and come back for more. Jaak Panksepp tickled them and recorded their ultrasound chirps of laughter.

Neuroscientists and psychotherapists have tended to ignore play as a systematic part of psychotherapeutic contexts. But PLAY is a fundamental brain system common to all mammals and perhaps other animals as well. Research suggests the PLAY system may be especially important in the epigenetic development and maturation of the neocortex.

Functions of PLAY

Panksepp divides the functions of PLAY into two broad categories: social and nonsocial. 

Social play: includes learning competitive and non-competitive social skills including bonding, cooperation, and the ability to communicate effectively.

Nonsocial play: includes physical fitness and agility, cognitive skills, using tools, and the ability to think creatively and be innovative in the face of unexpected events.

Social Creatures

Relationships are sometimes an overlooked aspect of therapy. The PLAY system concerns relationships that allow children to learn about social rules of conduct, for example, when to cooperate, when to compete, and the necessity of reciprocity and giving way on occasion. Children will learn these skills because if they do not, their playmates begin to reject them.

PLAY facilitates social bonding, social cooperation, social rank, leadership, and the ability to communicate effectively. So those of us who have not learned to play are at a great disadvantage. We may not be aware of just how disadvantaged if this is not an issue in therapy. A play-deprived child probably has a higher than normal probability of not only being diagnosed with ADHD but of becoming reclusive and even a potential menace to society as an adult. Social play fosters empathy and understanding of others, and prosocial tendencies. Group PLAY therapy should be the go-to therapy for all children.

Social relationships and mental and emotional worlds are intertwined. Raw feelings mix with our higher mental abilities to create complex social emotions like envy, guilt, jealousy, and shame, as well as hope, and humor.

Positive social relationships provide abundant levels of endogenous opioids in our brain, so we experience positive affect and comfort, the kind of feeling one has in the company of good friends and lovers. When these chemicals are low, and corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) is high, we feel lonely, distressed, and often miserable. These painful affects are relieved when and if we find companionship because of the release of endogenous opioids, elevated oxytocin, and prolactin activity within our brains.

The Decline of Children’s PLAY

Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn (Basic Books) and Psychology (Worth Publishers, a college textbook now in its 8th edition, says that when children are in charge of their play, it provides a future for their own mental health as older children and adults. He mentions five ways that PLAY benefits children.

1. Play gives children a chance to find and develop a connection to their own self-identified and self-guided interests.

2. It is through play that children first learn how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules.

3. Children learn to handle their emotions, including anger and fear, during play.

4. Play helps children make friends and learn to get along with each other as equals.

5. Most importantly, play is a source of happiness.

Over the past 50 to 70 years children’s free play time has decreased markedly. During this same time, children and adolescents have been hit with five to eight times increase in anxiety disorders. And this results in a high rate, 31% to33%, of lifetime anxiety of adults. 

According to the National Institute of Health report, during 2017 there were an estimated 46.6 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with any mental illness (AMI).

 This number represented 18.9% of all U.S. adults. The prevalence of AMI was higher among women (22.3%) than men (15.1%).

Young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of AMI (25.8%) compared to adults aged 26-49 years (22.2%) and aged 50 and older (13.8%).

The prevalence of AMI was highest among the adults reporting two or more races (28.6%), followed by White adults (20.4%). The prevalence of AMI was lowest among Asian adults (14.5%).

Gray says the increased psychopathology seems to have nothing to do with realistic dangers and uncertainties in the larger world. The changes do not correlate with economic cycles, wars, or any of the other kinds of world events that people often talk about as affecting children’s mental states.

Rather he says it has more to do with the decline in young people’s sense of personal control over their fate, which is experienced through PLAY. Anxiety and depression correlate significantly with people’s sense of control or lack of control over their lives. People who believe they are in charge of their fate are less likely to become anxious or depressed than those who believe that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201001/the-decline-play-and-rise-in-childrens-mental-disorders

You might think that the sense of personal control would have increased over the last several decades. Progress has occurred in our ability to prevent and treat diseases; the old prejudices that limited people’s options because of race, gender, or sexual orientation have diminished at least a little; and the average person is wealthier than in decades past. Yet the data indicate that young people’s belief that they have control over their destinies has declined sharply over the decades.

Every Child Left Behind

In an interview, Panksepp https://brainworldmagazine.com/the-importance-of-play-an-interview-with-dr-jaak-panksepp/2/ was asked if the move toward more and more structured educational environments hurt children’s ability to play. He commented on the “No child left behind” as neglecting the power of natural play and the physical activity that children need to mature. This results in teaching toward testing and focusing on reading, writing, or mathematics at earlier and earlier ages.

In a 2003 journal article, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2242642/he commented that one reason for the increasing incidence of ADHD may be the diminishing ability of opportunities for children to engage in natural self-generated social play.

But in “The Archeology of Mind,” (2012) he concludes:

I am not questioning the genetically-based temperamental variability that contributes to the diagnosis of ADHD, and the high efficacy of psychostimulants in reducing impulsive behavior (Faraone, et al., 2006). These are well-established facts. I simply assert that we have, at our fingertips, better social-emotional, maturation-promoting tools to address such problems than are currently widely used to promote childhood development at home or within school systems. At a societal level, we have yet to institutionalize the power of PLAY to promote desirable mind maturation.

 

 

 

 

I have attended business lectures and conferences where most of the audience was staring into their phones or busy texting. Why do we demand and expect the undivided attention of children for extended periods of time? Adults and children need to PLAY

Rough and Tumble PLAY

 

If you allow children to do as they please, then PLAY often leads to disagreements. This is not necessarily bad in itself. But it is if it leads to bullying. 

But with supervision, it can be explained to the offender why this is bad, and if they want to continue playing, they would need to stop the offensive behavior. Then PLAY can lead to exploratory behavior and to learning productive social skills.

In Panksepp’s lab, when animals engage in rough-and-tumble play and one animal wins more than 70% of the time, the losing animal no longer enjoys the game and may drop out of the play. So when children play, they learn valuable social skills, such as the necessity of reciprocity and giving way on occasion. Children learn these skills, and if they do not, their playmates may begin to reject them.

The seven primary emotion systems function apart, and then together in an emotionally healthy person to promote the construction of fully-social minds. Our childhood need to PLAY integrates with our capacity to CARE for others, and to feel GRIEF when social bonds are severed. This all promotes social bonding, social understanding, and ultimately and hopefully empathy and concern for others.

Verbal PLAY

Adults engage in verbal play. One engages the other with an often personal biting quip and the other person responds and tries to up the other person with a clever retort. It continues as each tries to show they are more than a match for the other.

I never learned about this and took mild teasing as a personal attack. I recall sitting in the back seat of a friend’s car and unable to join in on any of the conversation. One of the guys started joking about my silence. I can’t recall, but he said things like Joel sure is noisy back there. Simple joking comments. But I got raging angry and got into a physical fight with him.

PLAY FLOWS

Activities that promote FLOW are often PLAY. These activities are different for each of us: running, mountain climbing, skiing, dancing, and reading and writing. They are so different, yet all offer us a sense of FLOW.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term “flow,” said that the natural state of the mind is chaos and this is why we need to constantly work at flow.

Csikszentmihalyi came up with the term flow, thinking of a river. When we are left alone with no demands on attention, entropy is the normal state of consciousness, a condition he says is neither useful or enjoyable. Entropy is a state of disorder, deterioration, randomness; not a place we want to be.

Alone in our heads, the brain moves like a digital radio in rapid-search mode. With the radio, we stop on something that gives us pleasure. But unless we actively attend, the brain may seek pain, grudges, and real and imagined unsettling conversations and events.

An antidote to Stress & Anxiety

Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as the antidote and breaks activities offering flow into seven components.

1. Completely involved in what we are doing – focused.

2. A sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.

3. Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well we are doing,

4. Knowing the activity is doable – that our skills are adequate to the task.

5. A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego. 

6. Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present; hours seem to pass by in minutes.

7. Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

Habits and strategies offering a sense of flow are activities you are so into that you lose a sense of time. Writing, drawing, painting, sports, nature, yoga, meditation, dance, music, and gaming are some activities that can transport you into this state of flow.

Capturing Flow

Flow requires a delicate balance between skill level and challenge. A good video game is programmed so that the level of challenge stays just ahead of skill level. If the skill level is set too low you get bored. If it is too high you get frustrated. The precise balance between challenge and level of skill contributes to flow.

Gaming offers a world with immediate feedback so you know how well you are doing moment to moment. You enter into a world where the activity is intrinsically rewarding, concentration is deep, problems are forgotten, and control and a feeling of mastery is possible. Self-consciousness disappears and it is possible to transcend the limits of ego, self, and time, lifting you out of a powerless state of ennui or chronic stress.

Once you have entered this effortless, spontaneous state, whatever you are doing is worth doing for its own sake. It is a state in which you are doing something that you really like to do and are totally involved. You lose track of time and may not notice when you are hungry or tired. It is a state when both the skill level and challenge are higher than average, with the challenge slightly higher than the skill level. You can be doing practically anything, riding the balance between the challenge and skill level, constantly working a bit beyond your comfort zone to reinforce and advance from each level of skill. 

Csikszentmihalyi searched for ways to make flow accessible to more people. It comes to artists, gamers, and athletes naturally. But many people rarely experience flow, so the challenge is to incorporate it into our educational system from the earliest grades. All of us should be able to shift into a flow activity offering a sense of serene clarity and focus.

Are Work and Flow an Oxymoron? 

The fortunate achieve flow from their work, even though their work may be ordinary or hard. Freud said: 

Laying stress upon the importance of work has a greater effect than any other technique of living in the direction of binding the individual more closely to reality; in his work, he is at least securely attached to a part of reality, the human community . . . As a path to happiness, work is not valued very highly by men. They do not run after it as they do after other opportunities of gratification.

If a job offers variety, flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback, by its very nature it can offer flow. It fits the definition of autotelic or inherently satisfying. If a person is autotelic, they are internally driven as opposed to externally driven by such things as comfort, money, or power. Some people will not find flow in the most satisfying job, while an autotelic person may find flow in an otherwise common, boring, and even stressful work environment. People who know how to find flow are able to enjoy situations where others find only despair.

Csikszentmihalyi says in theory any job could be changed to make it more enjoyable by adjusting it to fit the seven components of flow. If you can view difficult aspects of the job as a challenge, the very attempt at adjusting these aspects of the job to fit components of flow can be a source of flow. For example, if stress is a difficult aspect of the job, the challenge of working with stress can offer a sense of flow.

The process involves linking it together into an all-encompassing set of components that gives a higher purpose to the challenges of work.. Csikszentmihalyi writes: 

To gain personal control over the quality of experience, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.

Ultimate Meaning

Though we stay in flow when the challenge slightly exceeds our skill level, Csikszentmihalyi says we need to eventually take this to a higher level where activities are linked to one another in a meaningful way. This involves an overarching goal where all of the unrelated activities merge into an all-encompassing set of challenges that give purpose to everything we do.

Whoever achieves this state will never really lack anything else. A person whose consciousness is so ordered need not fear unexpected events or even death. Every living moment will make sense and much of it will be enjoyable.

Few achieve this state. Many people are stuck in the day to day rut of personal survival. They need to focus their psychic energies on themselves with little or nothing left for the goals of the wider community, no less for family. But they still require flow. 

It is not necessary to achieve goals to bring meaning to your life. You bring meaning into your life when you put intent to reach the goal into action. What matters is that psychic energy is expended to reach the goal, not wasted on doubt, regret, guilt, and fear.

The activities that bring us to optimal experience are not all fun and games. The best moments can be when the mind or body is stretched to its limits in an effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is a process of attempting to gain mastery, sometimes over the mind or body. The key is a constant “attempting.” When you get there, the challenge is over. So maybe, fortunately, we never really get there. 

Putting intent to action and working toward your goal takes more resolve than most people have. Climbers and runners go through excruciating pain to experience the rewards of optimal experience. Working toward goals leads to blocks, dead ends, and troubles, and it is far easier to give it up when faced with barriers than plodding on.

If you maintain focus on putting intent to action despite pain and failure, Csikszentmihalyi says that life is felt to be meaningful and can become extended episodes of flow.

Victor Frankl said the meaning of life is finding your own meaning. Personal meaning may change completely at different stages of life. It may be concrete and external like total commitment to a job, a cause, a sport; or internal, as the quest for self-knowledge and mental health. But it is important to think through the consequences of any long-term commitment. If I commit all my resources to my job and sacrifice my family, is it worth it? In the best of all worlds, we would have balanced commitments. 

Our commitments can fit the rules of family and society or they can be an expression of what we truly feel and believe. The more intrinsically motivated, the more authentic; the more externally driven, the more inauthentic.

As important as an intrinsic, authentic lifestyle, Csikszentmihalyi says the optimal condition is when you no longer see yourself in opposition to the environment, insisting that your goals and intentions take precedence over everything else. The optimal condition is when you are in tune with and feel a part of whatever goes on around you, and you attempt to do the best within the system in which you operate. Goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity and you may have to play by a different set of rules from what you might prefer.

My sense of FLOW comes through my reading, writing, and research, and helping others. I group these into what I’ll call bibliography.

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body