Most of us can name the “big three” pillars of health without even trying: eat well, move your body, and get enough sleep. In recent years, (thank goodness) we’ve also begun to understand the importance of a fourth pillar: social connection. We are finally admitting, out loud, that loneliness is not just a sad feeling. It is a real health concern, and that is a major step forward for us.

However, in my conversation with Teresa Davis, I found myself wondering if there is another pillar hiding in plain sight, one that most of us have completely underestimated:

Play.

Teresa Davis is the founder of Davis Studio and Play Intention in South Burlington, Vermont, where she has spent decades helping children, teens, and adults rediscover art, creativity, reflection, and play. Her work begins with a wonderfully liberating idea: creativity is not a rare talent reserved for the chosen few. It is normal human equipment. We all came with it installed.

We Are Wired to Play

When you think of the word “play,” you might associate it with childishness or escapism; as wasting time until the serious work begins again—but what we’re discovering more and more as we continue to study the human mind is that play can actually take the form of intelligence. It’s a kind of medicine, a way back to ourselves when life has made us too heavy, too efficient, too guarded, or too grown-up for our own good.

It may surprise you but in truth, play is not something we are supposed to outgrow. “We are wired by play and wired to play,” Teresa told me, “not just in childhood, but throughout our whole lives.”

Play is, in fact, one of our first languages. It is how we learn connection before we have words for it. Long before a child can speak, they can connect through peekaboo, laughter, rhythm, surprise, and delight. That’s play. Play is one of our first languages. It is how we learn and experience connection before we have words for it.

But as we grow up, somewhere along the way, many of us lose fluency. We become “responsible,” “busy” “professionals” and learn how to be impressive, efficient, and “appropriate.” Then we start saving play for vacation, retirement, or the rare afternoon when every single thing on the to-do list has been finished—which, of course, is never.

Teresa invites us to consider a much more hopeful possibility: What if play is not a luxury? What if it is one of the most practical tools we have for becoming less anxious, more connected, more creative, and more fully alive?

Play Is Not the Opposite of Work

One of the most powerful ideas Teresa shares is that play and work are not opposites. Most of us live with the belief that we must finish the work first, and then we can play—but the thing is, the work refills itself while we sleep. The inbox comes back. The dishes return. The next complicated thing arrives right on schedule.

So play gets pushed to the edge of life.

Teresa suggests flipping the order, because actually, play is often what gives us the energy, flexibility, and spaciousness to do our best workin the first place. 

Take, for example, the simple act of answering emails; something that can begin to feel like a slog through wet cement. But Teresa has found that if she pauses to dance to one good song before returning to the task, something changes. Her brain comes back online; her mood lifts. The emails become warmer, more human, and easier to move through.

Now, that may sound almost too simple, but think about it: How many times have we tried to push harder through something when what we really needed was a tiny pattern interruption? A song, a walk, a joke, a ridiculous dance in the kitchen; just a moment of color, a little dose of delight. That’s actually real nervous system support, and it’s not frivolous—it provides your brain with an extra dose of natural dopamine, boosting your energy and mood, and giving the boot to that “sloggy brain” feeling.

You can start small—you do not have to sign up for a dance class, buy a kiln, or become a radically different person by next Tuesday. All you need to do to hack your brain this way is make tiny changes to your routine: brush your teeth with the opposite hand; take a different route to work; put on one song before tackling the hardest thing in your inbox. Ask a more curious question at a dinner table where you usually feel tense. Play begins when we interrupt the rut.

Foraging for Joy

Teresa has a phrase that I just adore: “foraging for joy.” The phrase came to her after walking through the Vermont landscape with a friend who knew how to forage for plants: Teresa realized that they were moving through the exact same environment, but seeing completely different worlds. Teresa saw grass, trees, and weeds, while her friend saw tea, medicine, salad greens, nourishment, and possibility.

That is what a playful mindset can do: It changes what we notice: joy may not be as scarce as we think, beauty may not be as absent as we fear, and connection may not be as far away as it seems—but we may need to relearn how to see it.

I tried this for myself not long ago, I was back in the little Illinois farming town where I grew up, scooting around in a golf cart with an hour to fill. At first, all I could see was what looked rundown: peeling paint, tired houses, the signs of struggle. Then I caught myself. I literally stopped the golf cart and thought, 

“Wait a minute. You see what you look for.”

So I changed the game. I decided to look for beauty instead—and suddenly, there it was: a perfect Midwest front porch, an artistic little garden, a lovingly restored building, a surprising color on a door, some evidence everywhere that people were still caring, still making, still trying. None of those things had appeared out of nowhere; I had just changed the lens.

That is foraging for joy. It is not pretending the hard things are not there. It is refusing to let the hard things become the only thing we can see. This matters most when life is heavy. When we are carrying grief, pain, fear, or exhaustion, finding beauty or play can allow us to set the heaviness down for even 30 seconds—and sometimes that 30 seconds is exactly what helps us keep going.

Play Is a Shortcut to Belonging

One of the most striking things about children at play is how quickly connection happens. A child can spend a few hours playing with another child at a playground and later announce, “I made a friend!” When the adult asks the friend’s name, the child may not know. The connection came first. 

Adults often reverse that process. We gather information before we allow connection: What do you do? Where do you live? What do you believe? Are you like me? Can I safely approve of you?

Children show us another possibility: that play can connect us before status, politics, profession, or biography enter the room. Teresa calls play “a shortcut to belonging,” and once you hear that, you begin to see examples everywhere: A knowing glance in a long line; a joke with a stranger; a shared laugh at a family gathering; a goofy comment that softens a stiff moment. These tiny things may not look like much from the outside, but they are social glue, reminding us that we are not just separate people moving through the day in our own little bubbles of worry. We’re all in this together.

Loneliness and disconnection are not small problems. So many people today are hungry for belonging, but we keep trying to solve disconnection with more information, more analysis, more seriousness. Play offers another door.

Art Is an Experience, Not a Product

At Davis Studio and Play Intention, Teresa meets many adults who arrive carrying the same old story: “I’m not creative.” “I can’t draw.” “I don’t have a creative bone in my body.”

Her response is wonderfully freeing: Great. You are perfect for this—Because the point is not to draw well. The point is to make a mark and notice how it feels. To put one color beside another, to get messy, to try something with no particular goal; to remember that art is not truly a product to be framed, sold, judged, or placed in a museum. Art is meant to be an experience.

At Play Intention, Teresa sometimes leads adults through creative experiences with silent disco headphones. People paint while music plays in their ears, each in their own little world, and yet, somehow, still deeply together. By the end, people who barely know one another often feel surprisingly connected—not because they have not exchanged life histories, but because they have shared an experience.

When Teresa gave me a tour of her studio, I was dazzled. Imagine a basement full of every possible art supply: fabrics, paints, glass, natural materials, pottery tools; bins and shelves and kilns and all the glorious bits and pieces that make a creative person want to run off and start three projects at once.

Teresa has watched adults unfold over weeks of creative practice. People arrive nervous, stiff, and unsure; then, slowly, they begin to notice things in the world around them that had gone unnoticed  before, like the many colors and shades in the sunrise, or the shadows of leaves on the pathway They wake up excited to sketch or paint. They make new friends. They feel more energized. Think of how much easier it was to make friends in extracurricular activities when you were younger: creativity often becomes the first small opening in a much larger return to life.

Play in the Hardest Moments

This is why Teresa sees play and creative expression as a fifth pillar of health: There are decades of research pointing to the physical, mental, social, and emotional benefits of creativity and the arts, and yet many of us still treat them as optional extras. But we would never say, “I’ll eat a good meal twice a year,” or “I’ll move my body only on vacation.”

So why do we save play for the rare moments when everything else is done? Perhaps the most important part of this conversation is that play is not only for easy seasons. Sometimes play helps us survive the hardest ones.

I shared with Teresa a story from one of the most terrifying nights of my life. In 1997, I was only 23 weeks pregnant when my water broke, and our one-pound baby was coming far too early. The medical team was preparing us for the worst. Every couple of hours, someone came in to talk with us about funeral arrangements.

So Chuck and I asked for a deck of cards, and we played gin rummy through that long night.

To the staff, it may have looked strange. Honestly, I think they may have thought we had lost our minds; but for us, it was a lifeline. It did not change the facts. It did not erase the fear—but it gave us somewhere to place our minds and hearts besides the edge of despair.

That one-pound baby is now a 27-year-old engineer with no disabilities.

Play did not save her life—but it helped us stay human while we waited, and who knows how differently it would have gone if we had begun preparing for the worst instead of accessing that mental state. That is the quiet power of play. It can sit beside grief. It can coexist with fear. It can help us ask, “What else could be true here?” 

It can keep curiosity alive when panic wants to take over—and isn’t that something we all need? A way to meet reality with more than fear in our toolbox?

A Responsibility to Be Playful

Teresa said something in this conversation that may stay with me for a long time:

 “I think we have a responsibility to be playful.”

Play makes us more available to life, to one another, and to possibility. Life is not always easy, and it’s not very often when things can all truly be considered “fine.” Cynicism tells us that these things being inevitable means that the story is already over—but play asks, “What else might happen?” In a world that can feel heavy, fractured, and anxious, that question matters enormously.

So here is the invitation: begin small. Disrupt one pattern. Add music to one task. Make one silly note. Ask one curious question. Let your playful self and your professional self come together and shake hands. Try turning some ordinary moment into a tiny game: Can I make the waitstaff smile? Can I get through this meeting by noticing something delightful? Can I sit beside someone difficult and get genuinely curious instead of bracing for battle?

Forage for joy the way a wise friend might forage for medicine in a meadow—because joy is medicine, in a more literal way than we ever truly realized, and it is scattered everywhere: in colors, movement, texture, sound, surprise, laughter, and connection. We may simply need to look at the world through a new lens to see it.

• Connect with Teresa Davis
• Play Intention⁠
• Play Intention Classes⁠
• Play Intention Retreats⁠
• Davis Studio⁠
• Meet Teresa and the Play Intention Team⁠
• Contact Play Intention⁠
  
  
• Books We Mentioned
• Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health⁠ — Daisy Fancourt⁠
• Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection⁠ — Jeremy Nobel, MD, MPH⁠
• You can also learn more about Project UnLonely and the Foundation for Art & Healing⁠.
• Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us⁠ — Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross⁠
• Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose⁠ — Martha Beck⁠
• Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul⁠ — Stuart Brown, MD, with Christopher Vaughan⁠
• Explore the original Eight Play Personalities⁠ or the National Institute for Play’s newer Play Styles framework⁠.
  
  
• Poems and Words to Carry With You
• “The Guest House” by Rumi⁠
  
  Play, Belonging, and Community
• The National Institute for Play⁠
• The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Connection and Community⁠
• Front Porch Forum⁠
• When Technology Makes Us Better Neighbors—with Michael Wood-Lewis⁠
  
  Vermont Organizations and Places Mentioned
• Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility
• The Flynn⁠
  
  
• Explore more reasons to forage for joy at The Goodness Exchange⁠.
  

• 00:00 — Intro & Welcome
• 04:45 — What If Play Was Seen as Wisdom?
• 07:26 — What Children Teach Us About Connection
• 13:28 — Foraging for Joy
• 19:16 — Is Play a Form of Intelligence?
• 20:55 — What Adult Play Actually Looks Like
• 33:13 — Break
• 35:28 — Bringing Play Into Everyday Life
• 41:10 — Teresa’s Story and Permission to Play
• 48:11 — Can Play Make Us More Hopeful?
• 57:05 — Play as the Fifth Pillar of Health
• 1:07:45 — How to Start Foraging for Joy
• 1:16:12 — Curiosity at the Core of Play
• 1:27:47 — Growing the Movement
• 1:31:52 — What Teresa Wishes People Knew