Play is one of the keys to good health.  Are you getting your daily dose?

Quick, what’s completely pointless and absolutely indispensable? Why it’s play, of course. 

Sadly, we don’t get nearly enough play time with negative ramifications for our health and relationships. ”We are pushed from play, shamed into rejecting it by a culture that doesn’t understand the human need for it,” according to Stuart Brown, M.D., author of Play: How It Shapes the Brain. “Playing is seen as a childish activity not done in the adult world.”

Phooey!

The remedy, luckily, needn’t involve hopscotch or skipping rope (unless that’s your thing). Brown defines play as any apparently purposeless, inherently attractive endeavor that makes us forget time and ourselves.  Reading Shakespeare qualifies is you really want to do it.  Same goes for knitting a scarf, studying algebra, or listening to Merle Haggard.

If you love it and lose yourself in it, it’s playtime.

Done with dread or out of obligation, it’s something else. “To really regain play in your life, you will need to take a journey back into the past to help create avenues for play that work for you in the present,” says Brown. In other words, think back to something that gave you that goofy, happy feeling when you were young, and dream up ways to re-create that feeling now.

Go ahead…I double dare you.