The Most Productive Thing You Might Do Is Play
There is a yellow piece of paper in my house that nobody needs. It isn’t content. It’s not going into my book. I’m not selling it and I’m definitely not becoming a botanical illustrator. I’m just slowly filling it with daisies, crooked, uneven, some of them looking like they gave up halfway through becoming flowers.
And that’s exactly why I love them.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t doing something to get better at it. I wasn’t documenting it or wondering whether the algorithm would like it. I was simply drawing. And that felt strangely radical… not because drawing is revolutionary, but because my brain kept interrupting me with questions.
What’s this for? Where is this going? Shouldn’t you be doing something more productive?
When the answer was “nothing” and “nowhere,” I almost stopped.
That’s when I realized something worth paying attention to: somewhere along the way, many of us stopped believing joy was reason enough.
Everything has to justify itself
We don’t notice it happening gradually. Walking becomes step counts. Reading becomes a goal. Photography becomes content. Cooking becomes meal prep. Drawing becomes a side hustle. Even rest somehow becomes something we’re only allowed because it’ll help us perform better tomorrow.
Everything has to produce something.
And while that might make for an impressive résumé, I’m not convinced it makes for a very alive human being.
So here’s the uncomfortable question worth sitting with: what have you stopped doing simply because it stopped feeling useful? Not because you stopped enjoying it — but because you stopped believing enjoyment was enough of a reason.
Play isn’t an activity. It’s a state of mind.
Research from the National Institute for Play describes play not as a specific activity but as a state of being ; freely engaged, curious, absorbed. The activity itself matters far less than your relationship with it.
Drawing isn’t automatically play. Running isn’t automatically play. Cooking isn’t automatically play. You can turn any of them into work the moment your brain starts measuring, optimizing, or monetizing them. The activity stays the same. The mindset changes everything.
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That’s what happened with my daisies. The point wasn’t to improve. The point wasn’t to create something shareable. The point was simply to exist inside the experience for a little while. I think a lot of us have forgotten what that feels like.
We didn’t outgrow play. We suppressed it.
Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp spent decades studying what he called the brain’s PLAY system — finding that across mammals, play is deeply connected to learning, emotional regulation, and social bonding. It isn’t a childish luxury. It’s a biological need.
Children understand this instinctively. Put four kids together who don’t share a language and they’ll figure out how to play before they figure out how to talk. Play becomes the language.
Adults tend to do the opposite. We think connection happens through perfectly worded conversations. And yes, those matter. But some of the most connected moments in my own relationships aren’t the serious ones, they’re when we’re laughing so hard we can’t breathe, making ridiculous voices, sending each other the dumbest memes imaginable. Those moments aren’t distractions from intimacy. They are intimacy. Play is often what happens when a nervous system stops asking am I safe here? and quietly starts answering yes.
A note for the neurodivergent among us
As someone with ADHD, this topic became personal.
Growing up neurodivergent often means growing up with the same messages on repeat: sit still, focus, control yourself, finish this first. Then we become adults and wonder why movement feels like oxygen, why novelty gives us energy, why laughter makes us breathe differently.
Maybe we’re not incapable of focus. Maybe we’ve been trying to focus in environments that give our brains nothing to genuinely engage with. I don’t think play is the opposite of productivity. I think it might be one of the things that makes sustainable productivity possible in the first place.
What would your play sanctuary look like?
Not necessarily a room. Maybe it’s one hour a week where nothing can become content. A sketchbook nobody ever sees. Baking without photographing it. Wandering through a museum without taking a single picture. Laughing with someone who knows the version of you that doesn’t always have to look composed.
Whatever it is, a place where nothing has to prove its worth. Including you.
Children play to discover who they are. Adults often stop playing because we think we should already know.
But maybe the parts of you that feel a little lost aren’t waiting for another breakthrough or another productivity system. Maybe they’re waiting for you to put the serious adult down for an hour and come find them again.
So this week; do one thing that serves absolutely no purpose. Do it badly. Do it privately. Do it simply because you want to.
You might be surprised by how much of yourself is still waiting there.
And feel free to listen to the whole pod on Apple here, you can find it here on spotify and follow me around on insta here! Let’s build mental wealth together.
