Joyful play delights, restores, and renews

Conflict and stress can undermine even the best verbal skills, but joyful play strengthens, repairs, and restores relationships. Laughter in the context of mutual play provides a fun opportunity to relax and recharge.

But having fun doesn’t begin to describe the remarkable power inherent in joyous feelings. Joy is more than fun—it’s the emotion of keen pleasure, delight, and deep satisfaction that can boost you up and out of life's inevitable obstacles, disappointments, and losses.

Joy helps you cope with life’s challenges

Joy—like the other core emotions of sadness, anger and fear—is linked to the preservation of life. Joy may be the most critically important of all core feelings because it provides a respite from pain and suffering. When mothers in refugee camps are encouraged to play with their infants, the infants thrive, gaining more weight on the same amount of calories as infants who do not enjoy play. And by playing with their infants, mothers avoid depression.

The Ladder gives you a leg up when you need it the most

The fourth tool of the emotional intelligence, the Ladder, takes advantage of the rejuvenating power of joy. The Ladder helps you overcome frustrations and differences using humor and play.

Playful communication helps you:

• Put problems into perspective, giving you a means for standing back and getting a better view of a situation.
• Be more resilient in the face stress, unhappiness, loss, and grief.
• Feel better, energizing your body and lift your spirits.
• Think better, by sharpening your thinking and inspiring creative problem solving.
• Navigate awkward, difficult, and embarrassing situations by providing a positive respite from the unpleasantness of the moment.

The feelings of joy triggered by laughter and play support survival by:

• Reducing stress
• Supporting physical and emotional healing.
• Promoting positive connections to others
• Relieving pain.
• Activating and energizing your immune system.
• Sharpening your ability to creatively solve problems.

When you suppress negative emotions, you also suppress joy

Your emotions don’t exist in a vacuum. Awareness of one triggers your awareness of the others. This means that if you dampen unpleasant emotions like sadness or fear by numbing or distracting yourself, your ability to experience joy will also be reduced. Joy—the prize for becoming emotionally aware—is directly linked to emotions like sadness and fear in that:

• The more intensely you experience one core emotion the, the more intensely you experience the others.
• If you block one core emotion, you automatically block the others.

In this sense, the experience of joy comes at a cost. But in reality, this cost is quite low. All core emotions serve a purpose—even sadness, anger, and fear. No one welcomes unpleasant feelings, but, like your joyful emotions, challenging emotions also strengthen your life by alerting you that something is wrong and giving you the opportunity to fix it.

Laughing with others is more powerful than laughing alone  

All emotional sharing builds strong and lasting relationship bonds, but sharing laughter and play adds resilience. Shared laughter impacts your brain and nervous system to a degree that laughing by yourself does not. From birth, laughter powerfully and permanently connects us to others. For infants, the social implications of laughter and play link them to survival. When you retain the ability to laugh and play with others, you can remain hopeful and even thrive in the face of pain and loss.

Mutually-shared positive experiences lift you up, strengthen your resolve, and help you find inner resources to cope with whatever life hands you. They also help you sustain a positive connection with friends, loved ones, acquaintances and colleagues.

We laugh and play together in relationships to:

• Practice spontaneity: we get out of our heads and away from our troubles
• Let go of defensiveness: it helps us forget, briefly, our judgments, criticisms, and doubts
• Release inhibitions: our fear of holding back and holding on are set aside
• Calm and energize: our hearts and minds are stimulated and regulated
• Become emotionally authentic: deeply felt emotion is allowed to rise to the surface

Use caution when playing with those who don’t share your sense of humor   

Playfulness that strengthens relationships is a joint investment that can help you over many of life’s hurdles. However, even if a joke is meant to be positive, when it doesn’t consider the other person’s viewpoint, it can undermine trust and goodwill.

Interactive play is not a competitive game; you’re not trying to win or lose. Instead, the play you engage in has to be interesting and equally fun for both people. Something isn’t funny unless it is funny to both parties—and this includes teasing. Before jumping into humor, you need to consider your motives and your partner’s or colleague’s frame of mind. If the other person isn’t likely to consider it fun, don’t say it or do it. When playfulness is one-sided instead of mutual, it can harm the relationship. For example

Using laughter and play to navigate sensitive and challenging situations

Laughter and play are powerful tools for resolving problems, negotiating sensitive issues, and overcoming challenges. Playful communication:

• Builds trust between yourself and others, providing a base for creative problem solving.
• Gives you stress-free timeouts that restore energy and focus.
• Reduces defensiveness in others, as it's hard to be oppositional with someone who makes you laugh.

Laughter and play defuse conflict

Everyone has bad days when they get overloaded and do things they later regret. Even people who recognize when they feel stressed and know what to do about it (e.g., go to the golf course or for a run, meditate, or ask for a foot rub) occasionally do or say things they regret. But those who can navigate challenges with humor and playfulness are usually able to avoid boiling over, shaming, or blaming.

Playful communication allows you to make light of potentially divisive situations—giving you a huge leg up in your relationships. Laughter and play can quickly defuse tense situations. Assuming you have a solidly based friendly or loving relationship, you can turn frustrations and negative experiences into opportunities for shared fun and intimacy by:

• joking about your frustrations
• making a game of pretending to like things you really dislike
• spoofing and playfully exaggerating problems
• making up silly games that help get your point across

Playing with problems sparks creativity and transforms them into opportunities

Creativity is another bonus of playfulness. The goodwill and camaraderie that humor and play generate are of particular value in businesses that feed on constant change and innovation. Playing with problems comes naturally to children. When they are confused or afraid, children make their problems into a game, giving them a sense of control and an opportunity to experiment with solutions.

People who are fortunate enough to remain playful as adults retain this creative ability. Those who have lost this problem-solving resource, or never learned it at all, can master or regain it by deliberately choosing to interact with others in playful ways.

Playfulness softens difficult subjects

Humor and play offer a way to communicate with colleagues and loved ones about subjects that may be awkward or embarrassing. In playful settings, you are able to discuss difficult things without creating a flap or hurting feelings. When you’re in a playful mood, you also hear things differently and can tolerate learning things about yourself that you otherwise might find unpleasant or even painful.

For example:

Whenever you approach ego-sensitive subjects, you are treading on thin ice. So before playfully addressing what might be a sensitive subject, ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you feeling calm, energetic and warmly connected to the person?
• Is your true intent to communicate positive feelings?
• Are you confidant that your humorous gesture will be understood and appreciated?
• Are you aware of the emotional tone of the nonverbal messages you are sending?
• Are you sensitive to the nonverbal signals the other person is sending?
• Do you back off if the other person seems hurt or angry?
• If you say or do something that offends, is it easy for you to immediately apologize?

Learning to play again

Some people don’t retain the ability to laugh easily and often, because it wasn't part of their early life experience.  Fortunately it's never too late to develop your capacity to experience joyful emotions. Even if you are not naturally playful, you can learn to be. Moreover, if you continue to practice the second EQ tool, The Glue, your developing emotional awareness will make it increasingly easier to experience joyous emotions and enter into playful communication with others.

If you grew up in an environment where people rarely laughed or only laughed at someone else’s expense, it will take some effort to build up your funny bone, but the process will be one that delights you! The more you play, the easier it becomes, and the more you practice, the more you learn.

Making daily time for play

Start by setting aside regular, quality time to explore your playful side. Learning to play begins by thinking about the playful things you already do: telling and listening to jokes; going to the movies; making faces in the mirror; daydreaming; etc. Once you’ve made your list, start adding to it and incorporating more playful activities into your daily life.

Take an improvisation comedy class, throw a costume party, sing karaoke, or schedule game night with friends. The important thing is to find enjoyable activities that loosen you up and help you share your playful nature with others.

Keep in mind that self-consciousness and concern for how you look and sound is probably limiting your playfulness. Just remember: as a baby, you were naturally playful and didn’t worry about others’ reactions.

As humor and play become an integrated part of your life, your creativity will flourish and new discoveries for playing with loved ones will occur to you daily.

Next Step – Go to Video Lesson 4: The Ladder