Adult Play: Why We Lose It and How to Get It Back

When you dig into research on burnout and rest, you come across the phrase, "The opposite of play is depression." We followed it to its origins with play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith in 1997. This idea is particularly salient now because Gallup’s 2025 poll reports that 47.8 million Americans struggle with depression. This piece is for people who write about play, work with it, or teach it, from journalists to counselors and educators. It gathers research across areas to answer why we stop playing as we get older and what brings it back. 

The short, resounding answer is that we do not lose the ability to play. Instead, we lose the permission to do it. 

 

Play throughout the lifetime. 

Researchers who study play treat it as an internal, human drive that lasts a lifetime. The founder of the National Institute for Play, Stuart Brown, defines play as the experience that happens inside the player rather than what the activity looks like from the outside. His book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul describes how to identify when it occurs with the following list:

• It looks purposeless
• We choose to do it
• It is immersive 
• It affects our sense of time 
• It quiets the observer self that watches and makes judgments 
• It happens through improvisation 
• We want more of it 

These attributes mean that two people can do the same thing, and only one of them would describe it as play. The difference is about intent and motivation. 

When we look at the research, we know that the drive to play lasts a lifetime, so what compels us to stop? 

 

Why do we stop playing 

If our natural state leans toward play, what happens to that as we age? A few forces push it out of adult life, and each one paves a different way back. 

First, the tendency to evaluate, judge, or place a grade on play gives us a strong answer. In 1973, a study in a preschool found that children who loved to draw were promised a Good Player award for drawing. After, the ones who drew for the award spent less time drawing than children who drew for no outside reason. In 1999, a series of experiments found the same patterns where expected rewards decrease our natural interest in playful activities. External pushes drain the play from activities that were once fun and joyful. 

Second, self-consciousness begins to increase over time in play. A scientist studying flow, the state of losing time while immersed in an activity, found that people who were concerned about being observed showed much less task engagement. Life’s demand on our time increases with responsibility as we grow older. We learn to see empty time as wasted, and often choose to fill it with something perceived as more productive or reward-giving. 

A strong sense of guilt is present for adults who carve out time for play.

Sociologist Max Weber tied this concept of sacred duty to the establishment of pleasure and joy, treating them as akin to vices. Industrialization and the commodification of labor leave play on the back burner too often. Somewhere along the way, we are taught to feel guilty for playing. Societal structures and external expectations impose that guilt. 

Reason 1: Permission to play 

Each field comes to the same conclusion around play: it's about permission. Adults need to be permitted to play or grant it to themselves. 

Psychologists like Brown and Vaughan in 2009 began their list of required play components with permission and naming the guilt out loud. Motivation research labels this approach "self-determination," grounded in autonomy and the awareness that we choose our actions. A cultural perspective from anthropologist Johan Huizinga defines play as freedom. 

The good news is that permission can be accessed and routinely granted under a set of agreed conditions. 

 

Reason 2: The fear of looking foolish

The block most of us feel first is social: the flicker of worry before asking a question that might sound stupid. Two findings take most of the air out of it.

The first is that the audience is mostly imaginary. A run of studies on what psychologists call the spotlight effect showed we badly overestimate how much others register us. In one, volunteers wore an embarrassing shirt and then guessed how many onlookers would recall it. They guessed about half. The real figure was closer to a quarter (Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky, 2000). If you've ever chosen not to ask a question because the room felt like it was watching you, here's the reassurance. Most of the watching is yours.

The second is that you can take the real judgment out of a setting, and behavior shifts when you do. The psychological safety studies above already show it. Fear of being punished suppresses the very asking that learning runs on. Remove the punishment, and the suppression lifts.

The conditions that let curiosity start are simply the opposite of the forces that stop it. Each one lowers the cost of being wrong, and a low cost of being wrong is exactly what a self-conscious adult needs in order to ask.

• No grade: Nothing is scored, ranked, or marked right or wrong.
• No gotcha: No one is waiting to catch the mistake, or the people nearby aren't keeping count.
• No single answer: There's no one correct result to land on.
• A low-stakes place to be wrong: A guess can be revised, so an error leaves no lasting mark.
• An open question: This allows for curiosity and exploration.

 

Beginning with a blank slate 

The setting of the play is critical. One psychologist describes the space of play as the magic circle. It happens inside fixed limits of time and place, a small zone set apart from ordinary life where its own rules hold (Huizinga, 1938). The boundary is what makes the space safe to step into.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described a potential space, a third area that sits between our inner world and the outer one, where play and creativity live. It's "in playing and only in playing," he wrote, that a person can be creative and use the whole self (Winnicott, 1971). He went further. He described therapy itself as the work of moving a person from being unable to play to being able to play again.

A space you can wipe clean puts both ideas to work at once. If you can undo any move and nothing counts, there's no wrong answer to be judged for, and the thing that makes a self-conscious adult freeze has nowhere to grab. The blank slate grants permission all on its own.

 

Playing again is like riding a bike 

Curiosity is a capacity you can practice and rebuild over time.

The psychologist Todd Kashdan has mapped it into distinct kinds:

• the joyous exploration of new ideas,
• a deprivation sensitivity that itches to close a knowledge gap,
• social curiosity about other people,
• and a tolerance for the discomfort that novelty brings (Kashdan et al., 2018).

 When studies ask adults to exercise curiosity, it behaves like a muscle. Small, repeated efforts move it. Write down the questions you sat with today. Bring one real question into a meeting that usually has none.

From a cognitive scientist's perspective, inquiry is a genuine adult activity that runs the whole lifespan, a disposition built from intrinsic motivation, a sense of agency, and the freedom to follow a question wherever it leads (Loewenstein, 1994).

The capacity to play stays with us. Our setting and the conditions we are in decide whether it shows up.

 

In closing

We set out to answer why we stop playing as we grow older and what brings it back, and the research lands somewhere reassuring. We never lose the ability to play. We lose the permission, worn away by evaluation, self-consciousness, the press of responsibility, and inherited guilt.

Getting it back involves restoring permissions. Take the judgment out of the setting. Quiet the imagined audience, because most of the watching is your own. Keep a forgiving surface and an open-ended object within reach, so any move can be undone, and nothing counts. And say plainly that it's allowed. Taken together, you have the ingredients to access play again. 

One place to start is a sand tray called a Wonderscape. It is a round Baltic birch tray holding a shallow bed of fine sand, roughly a quarter-inch deep, with cast concrete spheres that you roll across the sand's surface. Each sphere is left slightly irregular in shape, a quality the studio calls perfectly imperfect. As your hand moves one around the tray, it leaves a track that follows wherever you take it.

 

Sources

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Engel, S. (2011). Children's need to know: Curiosity in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 625–645.

Gallup. (2025, October 10). U.S. depression rate remains historically high. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/694199/u.s.-depression-rate-remains-historically-high.aspx

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222.

Kashdan, T. B., Stiksma, M. C., Disabato, D. J., 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.

Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the "overjustification" hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129–137.

Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75–98.

Nicholson, S. (1971). How not to cheat children: The theory of loose parts. Landscape Architecture, 62(1), 30–34.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.