Isabelle, David welcome Isabelle's husband, Bobby, and David’s friend and clinician, Noah (who also have ADHD) and all connect four weeks into the lockdown of 2020 to meet virtually and play online game to help beat the pandemic fears and the scared and cooped-up blues. We’re overstimulated with grief, shame, sorrow, anxiety, etc, and yet under stimulated with the lack of transitions, being cooped up in our house, seeing the same two rooms every day. David talks about missing novel chaos, and also, what game should they play? After spending a while playing some online games together, Isabelle talks about gaming as a coping strategy; game play as a way to cope. The opposite of play is not work, it’s depression, or neural death. A play state is new neural connections firing and wiring together (neurologically similar to learning, see below for more!). We’re often play-deprived anyway as adults. We’re in a place of a lot of pain and depression as a society; toxic positivity aside, people are experiencing a lot of loss, and we experience grief and depression when we have loss. When we’re in it for so long, it’s important to know how we get out—and play might not be a go-to or feel intuitive or easy—even David wanted to not play but talk about other things, like functioning in a society without clear rules or boundaries. But it meant a lot to David to try to play. Noah points out that we are missing human interaction, limited ability to be in the world, getting that social itch scratched in a safer way. Bobby had fun playing a game. Isabelle drops some knowledge about play: play as an impulse, like sleep, common to social mammals. It’s an impulse that can even be prioritized about other needs, such a food. Example of polar bear playing with huskies while starving and waiting to go into their hunting grounds (and then returning when not hungry) How we need play as neotenous (juvenile) brained creatures. Washing dishes could be play, even—if you’re in the flow state, not something you have to do, but maybe you hum on the way to the car. Really social, too. Recognizing that play is a hard subject for those of us who experienced neglect or other traumas that impacted whether or how we could play. Safety needs to be established for play to happen: play happens whether or not you believe you did in the past, but how you viewed your past as playful or play-deprived or whether you had enough safety.

More on play

• Stuart Brown, MD - Ted Talk that mentions consequences of play deprivation
• National Institute for Play (co-founded by Stuart Brown)
• To check out more about play and learn more about the polar bear story, check out his book (co-written with Christopher Vaughan): Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul
• Husky playing with polar bear story (Real Wild documentary) — please note, initially the polar bears were hungry, and then they would return every year and keep playing even when not (for the full story, see above book)

ISABELLE’S DEFINITIONS 

Play: an impulse and a human right, according to the UN. Borrowing from Stuart Brown’s definition, includes a purposeless, a continuity desire (want to keep doing it) and is often a simulation where you can take risks with no consequences (or limited consequences, like animals play fighting, they’re not going to bite down as hard). Play can be daydreaming, writing, art-making, watching a movie, doing dishes, humming a song. On a neurological level, play in the same as learning (a neural state where neural connections are being wired), which is the opposite of the brain state of depression (or neural slow-down or death). 

Flow state: A term coined by Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, it’s a state of being or performance where you are in the zone: fully absorbed or engaged in your task, you lose a sense of time and self (you get lost in it, your worries or self-consciousness melts away).

For more on flow, check out Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal book: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

For a cool article on how flow may work in the brain: The Neuroscience of the Flow State: Involvement of the Locus Coeruleus Norepinephrine System

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Cover Art by: Sol Vázquez

Technical Support by: Bobby Richards