Why We Need More Play, Recreation, and Leisure in Our Lives?

Read the article below. 

For adults, play and recreation have given way increasingly to societal pressures to be ever more productive. We may admit that time spent in play and recreation is important, but most of us feel it’s also superfluous, perhaps even unessential to our lives. However, it turns out that play, recreation, and leisure are necessary for a full and flourishing life.

When we think of play as adults, unless we are referring to participation in an organized sport or performance, we don’t normally use the term play. There is a specific type of play that children engage in that adults don’t. Yes, work is necessary, and in order to put bread on the table and a roof over our heads, we admit that we must work. However, similar to a lack of play in children, a lack of recreation can have grave consequences for adults.

Max Butterfield, Ph.D., PLNU professor of psychology, pointed to the role of recreation in rejuvenating us and calming us down.“We often find ourselves very stressed all the time, and so our cortisol levels are way up,” Butterfield said. “This has negative downstream consequences.” Increased and prolonged cortisol levels can lead to lack of sleep, digestive problems, headaches, lack of energy, and even high blood pressure and heart disease. 

Aristotle placed great importance on recreation, or as he called it, leisure. In fact, he believed that we needed to have time for leisure in order to be fully human. While today we may use the term leisure to mean mindlessly relaxing out on the couch or tanning on some breach, leisure, for Aristotle, was specifically the engagement in some activity that allowed for human flourishing. Leisure was not merely the absence of an activity, or even the lack of work, but rather an active posture of receiving and being. Mark Mann, Ph.D., PLNU professor of theology, admits there is a relationship between leisure — the way ancient philosophers understood it — and recreation. In fact, he would use another term to define the type of fruitful recreation that we’re all called to: Sabbath.