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When Did You Forget How to Play?

· 9 min read ·
#curiosity #compassion

When was the last time you did something for absolutely no reason?

Not to be productive. Not for your health. Not to optimize, improve, or check something off a list. Just because it felt good to do it.

If you have to think hard about that, you’re not alone. Most of us stopped playing somewhere along the way. We traded curiosity for control. Wonder for worry. And we barely noticed it happening.

But here’s what the science (and some very wise teachers) have been telling us: that trade wasn’t worth it. Not even close.

We Forgot How to Play

Dr. Stuart Brown is a psychiatrist who has spent decades studying play. He’s conducted over 6,000 “play histories” (interviews with people from all walks of life, from Nobel Prize winners to incarcerated violent offenders). What he found was striking: highly successful, creative people tend to have rich play lives. And people who were severely deprived of play in childhood? They showed up again and again in his studies of violence and dysfunction.1

But it’s not just kids who need play. Brown’s research shows that adults who lose their playfulness experience what he calls “cognitive and emotional narrowing,” they become less able to handle stress, less creative, less adaptable. Some slide into what he describes as a smoldering depression. His conclusion is blunt: play is a biological drive as integral to our health as sleep or nutrition.1

Think about that. We would never brag about not sleeping. But we brag about not playing all the time. “I’m so busy.” “There’s no time.” “Maybe this weekend.”

The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh had a word for what we’ve lost. He called it apranihita, aimlessness. Not laziness. Not giving up. But the radical idea that you don’t have to run anywhere to be complete. You already are. That’s the spirit of play: doing something not to get somewhere, but because the doing itself is enough.

So What Is Play, Exactly?

Play isn’t just board games and sports. Stuart Brown defines it as any absorbing, apparently purposeless activity that provides enjoyment and suspends self-consciousness. The key word is purposeless. Not pointless, purposeless. You’re not doing it for a result. You’re doing it because something in you comes alive when you do.1

Thich Nhat Hanh captured this beautifully: “Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.” That’s walking as play. Not walking to get somewhere. Walking because your feet are touching the ground and that’s actually kind of amazing if you pay attention.

The moment you add a goal (I need to walk 10,000 steps, I need to burn calories), something shifts. The aliveness dims a little. The playfulness drains out.

Play is what happens when you stop performing and start experiencing.

Click anywhere to play

tap anywhere to stomp

There's no score. No goal. Just a puddle.

Curiosity: The Engine of Play

Here’s where it gets interesting. If play is the activity, curiosity is the fuel. And it turns out curiosity isn’t just a nice personality trait, it’s one of the most powerful tools we have for changing our relationship with anxiety, stress, and even addiction.

My colleague Dr. Jud Brewer, a neuroscientist and addiction psychiatrist at Brown University, has spent over 20 years studying how the brain forms habits, and how to break them.2 His research revealed something that surprised a lot of people: the opposite of anxiety isn’t calm. It’s curiosity.3

Think about it. Anxiety says: Something’s wrong. Figure it out. Fix it now. Curiosity says: Huh. That’s interesting. Tell me more.

Same moment. Same body sensations. Completely different relationship.

Dr. Jud calls curiosity the “bigger, better offer,” something your brain finds genuinely more rewarding than the old anxious habit loops.2 And here’s the key: unlike the quick hits of dopamine we get from scrolling our phones or eating sugar, curiosity is intrinsically rewarding. It doesn’t habituate. You don’t need more and more of it to feel the same effect. It just feels good, every time.

His clinical trials back this up. Participants in his mindfulness-based programs experienced a 67% reduction in anxiety symptoms, not through willpower or white-knuckling, but through learning to get curious about their own experience instead of fighting it.2

Your Brain on Curiosity

The neuroscience here is fascinating, and it confirms what contemplatives have been saying for centuries.

A team at UC Davis, led by Matthias Gruber, put people in an fMRI scanner and had them rate how curious they were about different trivia questions. When curiosity peaked, two things happened in the brain: reward circuits fired up (the same ones activated by things we find pleasurable), and the hippocampus (the brain’s memory center) became highly active. The brain was primed to learn.4

But here’s the remarkable part: at those peak curiosity moments, people didn’t just remember the trivia answers better. They remembered everything better, including random, unrelated information presented at the same time. Curiosity didn’t just open one door. It opened all of them.4

Another study, by Tommy Blanchard and colleagues, looked at how the brain assigns value to information. They found that the orbitofrontal cortex (the part of your brain that decides whether you’d rather have broccoli or chocolate) treats information the same way it treats food. Your brain literally values curiosity as a reward. Being curious feels good for the same reason chocolate feels good. It’s just that curiosity doesn’t come with the crash.5

Todd Kashdan, a psychologist at George Mason University, has been studying curiosity for over 20 years. His team surveyed thousands of adults and identified five distinct dimensions of curiosity, including what he calls “Joyous Exploration,” the pleasurable experience of finding the world intriguing. Across his studies, this type of curiosity was consistently linked to higher positive emotions, lower anxiety, greater life satisfaction, and a stronger sense of meaning in life.6

His earlier work with Michael Steger found a direct pathway: curiosity leads to more engagement, more positive experiences, and ultimately more well-being and meaning. Not the other way around. Curiosity isn’t something happy people happen to have. It’s something that makes people happy.7

And a daily diary study by Lydon-Staley and colleagues confirmed this in real life: people who consistently felt curious throughout their days (not just occasionally, but regularly) reported higher happiness, lower anxiety, and lower depressed mood. Curiosity wasn’t just a trait. It was a daily practice with daily payoffs.8

Even more encouraging: new research from UC Santa Barbara by Madeleine Gross and Jonathan Schooler showed that curiosity can actually be trained. Using a simple app that prompted small daily curiosity practices, participants showed reduced boredom, greater creative engagement, and a stronger sense of meaning in just weeks.9

Why This Matters for How We Treat Ourselves

Here’s where play, curiosity, and self-compassion all converge.

Kristin Neff, the pioneering self-compassion researcher, showed that self-criticism (that harsh inner voice most of us know intimately) is a significant risk factor for anxiety, depression, PTSD, and a host of other struggles. It’s not motivating. It’s not keeping us in line. It’s activating the same threat-detection systems in our brains that evolved to deal with saber-toothed tigers. When you beat yourself up, your body doesn’t know the difference between that and an actual attack. Cortisol spikes. The immune system takes a hit. You contract.10

Self-compassion (treating yourself with the same kindness you’d offer a good friend) does the opposite. It activates the mammalian caregiving system, releasing oxytocin and calming the stress response. Neff’s three-component model is elegantly simple: self-kindness instead of self-judgment, common humanity instead of isolation, and mindfulness instead of over-identification with your pain.10

Play and curiosity tap into the same system. When you’re playing, you’re not in threat mode. When you’re curious, you’re not judging. The soothing system comes online. The body relaxes. The mind opens.

This is why Dr. Jud identifies both curiosity and kindness as the two flavors of intrinsic reward that can replace old habit loops.2 They’re not just nice ideas. They’re biologically different states, and your brain can tell which one feels better.

Meta-analyses of self-compassion interventions show significant, clinically meaningful reductions in self-criticism with benefits that persist over time. And the mechanism is the same one at work in play and curiosity: you’re building new neural pathways. You’re giving the brain a new option. And with practice, that option becomes the default.

The Inner Child Who Never Left

Thich Nhat Hanh taught that inside every one of us, there’s still a child. Not as a metaphor. Not as a psychology concept. Just the part of you that once knew how to stare at a bug on the sidewalk for five minutes and call it the best morning ever.

That part didn’t leave. It just got quieter under all the planning, the worrying, the performing.

Dr. Jud’s three-step framework maps perfectly onto reclaiming it:2

First Gear: See the loop. Notice when you’re stuck in “doing mode.” The endless to-do list. The feeling that you have to earn rest. That’s a habit loop. Trigger: discomfort or boredom. Behavior: more doing. Result: temporary relief, long-term exhaustion.

Second Gear: Feel the reward value. Get curious about what that constant doing actually gives you. How does it feel in your body when you’re grinding? Is it working? Really? Most people, when they actually pay attention, discover it’s not as rewarding as they thought. That’s disenchantment, and it’s the beginning of change.

Third Gear: Find the bigger, better offer. This is where play comes in. Not as an escape, but as a genuine alternative. Something your brain finds more rewarding than the anxious striving. A walk with no destination. Drawing something terrible and enjoying it. Laughing at nothing.

Which one feels better, the grind or the play?

Your brain already knows the answer. You just have to let it choose.

Small Ways to Start

You don’t need to overhaul your life. You just need a crack in the armor. Here are a few:

Try the half-smile. Thich Nhat Hanh taught this: the tiniest lift at the corners of your mouth. It sends a signal to your whole nervous system: we’re safe, we can be easy here. Try it right now. Notice what shifts.

Meet one moment like a kid meets a puddle. Not “should I step in it?” Just, oh look, a puddle. Apply this to anything: your morning coffee, a sound outside, the feeling of your feet on the ground.

Ask “what do I notice?” instead of “what should I do?” This is the curiosity switch. It moves you from problem-solving mode to discovery mode. And discovery mode is where play lives.

Do one thing today for no reason. Doodle. Hum. Walk the long way. Skip. Build something pointless. The more useless it is, the more your brain needs it.

The Invitation

Thich Nhat Hanh said: “Present moment, wonderful moment.” Not because every moment is pleasant. But because every moment is alive. And alive is always interesting, if we let it be.

Play isn’t something you earn. Curiosity isn’t something you outgrow. They’re both still here, waiting for you to stop being so busy.

The research is clear: your brain was built for this. Play shapes it, curiosity fuels it, and kindness holds it all together. It’s not frivolous. It’s not a luxury. It might be the most important work you’ll ever do.

So the question isn’t whether you have time to play.

It’s whether you can afford not to.

Footnotes

  1. Brown, S. (2009). Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. Avery/Penguin. ISBN: 978-1583333334 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Brewer, J. A. (2021). Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind. Avery/Penguin Random House. ISBN: 978-0593330449 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Brewer, J. A. (2016). A simple way to break a bad habit. TED Talk. ↩

  4. Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit. Neuron, 84(2), 486–496. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.08.060 ↩ ↩2

  5. Blanchard, T. C., Hayden, B. Y., & Bromberg-Martin, E. S. (2015). Orbitofrontal cortex uses distinct codes for different choice attributes in decisions motivated by curiosity. Neuron, 85(3), 602–614. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.12.050 ↩

  6. Kashdan, T. B., Stiksma, M. C., Disabato, D., McKnight, P. E., Bekier, J., Kaji, J., & Lazarus, R. (2018). The five-dimensional curiosity scale: Capturing the bandwidth of curiosity and identifying four unique subgroups of curious people. Journal of Research in Personality, 73, 130–149. DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2017.11.011 ↩

  7. Kashdan, T. B., & Steger, M. F. (2007). Curiosity and pathways to well-being and meaning in life. Motivation and Emotion, 31(3), 159–173. DOI: 10.1007/s11031-007-9068-7 ↩

  8. Lydon-Staley, D. M., Zhou, D., Blevins, A. S., Zurn, P., & Bassett, D. S. (2021). Hunters, busybodies, and the knowledge network building associated with deprivation curiosity. Journal of Personality, 89(3), 497–511. DOI: 10.1111/jopy.12515 ↩

  9. Gross, M., & Schooler, J. (2025). Mindful curiosity training app study. UC Santa Barbara META Lab. ↩

  10. Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101. DOI: 10.1080/15298860309032 ↩ ↩2

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