Not so serious! I've said before that seriousness is a kind of evil, and so now I'm going to talk about playfulness. We all used to play, but suddenly some of us have become very serious.
Are you tired of seriousness and it's time for adult playfulness? Then take a moment to read this blog.
Benefit of playfulness
Playful adults can often transform any space or environment to make it more stimulating, enjoyable and entertaining[1]. Characteristics given to playful adults are:
- Cozy
- Unobstructed
- Comic
- Dynamic
Many people think that play is the opposite of work and that there is no room for playfulness at work, but that is not true.
Imagine if you had no play colleagues at all, what would your work be like?
Other research on the benefits of playfulness at work showed that adult playfulness had a correlation with creativity and spontaneity.
The more playful a person was, the better this was for work performance, evaluations, perceptions of work and engagement with work. Consequently, people felt more like they could perform the work[2].
Having a little playfulness up your sleeve has benefits in all areas of your life. For example, it also helps you distance yourself from difficult situations or problems so that you can then look at them with an open mind, an open mind, to find a solution, and it even helps you accept setbacks better[3].
Improve playfulness at work
You might think it's important to be super serious at work, but that's not always best. After all, playfulness promotes creativity, which can be useful for finding solutions to business problems.
Encouraging playfulness during a meeting can therefore help, and this does not even have to reduce the productivity of the meeting. Candy, toys, games and other signs of playfulness, for example, can trigger playfulness during meetings[4]. Even in very serious business settings, stimulating playfulness can help promote creativity. These kinds of cues cause an adult to give himself/herself permission to let his/her inner child play.
Everyone is familiar with the fact that Google's office has a slide to promote playfulness in the workplace.
Besides being good for creativity, playfulness is also good for promoting intrinsic motivation, provides a sense of openness and can foster interpersonal relationships (source 4).
What is important is that there are cues to promote playfulness, but people should not "have to" play. After all, forced play is not fun, nor does it promote playfulness (source 4).
Another way to promote playfulness is through improvisational theater training. A study comparing 2 groups of people found that the group that had received the training subsequently had more playfulness at work, more creativity and group creativity than the group that had not received the training[5].
Playfulness and stress
Stress is something that affects almost everyone at some point in their lives, but it only becomes problematic when you can't manage it properly. Chronic stress can cause all kinds of physical and mental problems.
If you are playful as an adult, you often suffer less stress than people who have lost the playfulness. In addition, you have often found other ways to deal with stress. You are then less likely to use negative strategies in which you try to avoid stress[6].
Playfulness and feeling good/wellness
One benefit of playfulness is that you can reframe any situation you find yourself in to something that is actually fun or at least more fun[7]. This alone can do much to improve your well-being.
People who are more playful often have more energy as well. As a result, those people are often physically healthier as well, because they play sports, for example.
In addition to being good for creativity, it is also good for your school performance. Research on students in Hong Kong shows that if they saw themselves as playful they often also had better well-being than students who did not see themselves as playful (source 7).
Letting go of seriousness and allowing playfulness
So allowing playfulness into your life can do an awful lot of good for you. But if you are always super serious or find it difficult to allow playfulness, for example, at work or in stressful situations, there is work to be done.
So how do you let go of that seriousness?
Initially, you can try to figure out why you let go of playfulness in the first place . There are several strategies you can use to figure this out. For example, you can use Socratic conversation to repeat the why question several times to get to the heart of your answer. A hypnotherapist can help you with this.
Then you can then check whether that core belief makes sense or not. If you notice that it does not make sense, then it is easy to let go.
Another way to figure out how your lack of playfulness came about is to use regression. This is a hypnosis technique that you then use to go back to the first moment when you thought you couldn't be playful in a particular setting, or even in general.
Then the hypnotherapist helps you reinterpret this moment. Because often these are moments from your childhood and now you know much more than you knew then. Because of this, if you look at it again, you can think very differently about what happened and therefore you can think very differently about playfulness and seriousness.
This alone can do much to release seriousness and allow playfulness back in.
Sometimes, however, a little more is needed than just reinterpreting. You can then also get hypnotic suggestions that give you new beliefs that fill the gap of letting go of the belief about earnestness.
You can then repeat these at home with self-hypnosis, such as:
"I get to see the playfulness of a situation."
"Life is a game, the rules of the game are not fixed."
"I can look at everything in a different way."
These are just examples. Depending on your beliefs and issues with playfulness, you may receive other suggestions from your hypnotherapist.
In addition, you can also get post-hypnotic suggestions that help you retain playfulness in your life even after the hypnosis session and really make it a feature of yourself.
Playfulness and hypnotherapy
Hypnotherapy also often uses the inner child to solve problems. For this, some form of playfulness is also important. And you can use this playful archetype to heal or transform something within you[8].
You can also be very playful with metaphors and stories you use when giving (or receiving) hypnotherapy[9]. In fact, you can make those metaphors nice and crazy. This can be very useful for playfully overcoming fears and transforming other problems.
If you want to learn more about what hypnosis is and how it can help you with playfulness or other issues, come to the free online master class .
Or enroll directly in one of our training courses. Ideal for self-development or if you want to help people. The trainings are conducted online with enough assistance for 1-on-1 attention, so you can become the best hypnotist and put your playfulness to good use.
Sources:
