Why Play, Vol. 1

I’m calling this Volume 1 because I already know I’m going to write about play again. It deserves to be talked about more than once—its importance, its power, and why I’m actively encouraging women to bring it back into their lives on a regular basis all warrant more than a single post.

This morning, I woke up with a song playing in my head. My experience of life has taught me that there are no coincidences, so I paid attention. I put the song in my AirPods while I made my first cup of coffee, fed the dogs, and sat down to journal. Almost immediately, it brought me back to my 21-year-old self. I remembered that album playing in my car, long walks through Chicago with that music in my ears, and the feeling of who I was then. I found myself wondering why this song, this memory, this part of me had shown up this morning.

Within a few moments, I knew. I was remembering how I saw the world at 21. There was so much more possibility in my everyday life then. As we get older, that tends to change. Possibility is gradually replaced by probability as the brain keeps firing the same patterns over and over again, and what once felt open begins to feel fixed.

And yet, for anything in our lives to truly change, possibility has to remain available to us. Possibility is what makes change possible. The problem is that the brain is not primarily interested in possibility. Its primary concern is survival.

That is the brain’s first job: to keep you alive. Everything else comes later. So when you encounter something challenging in life and your nervous system has to decide how to respond—whether that response is action, freezing, silence, withdrawal, people-pleasing, numbing, or escape—the brain is tracking one basic question: did this keep me safe? In biological terms, “safe” simply means that you survived.

If the answer is yes, the brain stores that pattern. The next time something similar happens, it will try to run the same response again because it is efficient, familiar, and already associated with survival. Over time, and especially over decades, the nervous system becomes organized around probability: repetition, prediction, the familiar, the known. This is one reason real change can feel harder as we get older. It is not necessarily because we are failing, lazy, or incapable of transformation, but because our systems are doing exactly what they were designed to do.

Play, however, asks something different of us. It invites the nervous system into possibility, even if only for a few moments. It interrupts old patterns, softens rigidity, and begins to loosen the grip of well-worn neural pathways. Little by little, it helps the brain recognize something that many of us have not deeply known: possibility can be safe too.

That realization feels especially important to me right now because just yesterday I could feel my own brain swirling in probability. Bringing this work into the public eye has made me feel vulnerable, and vulnerability tends to activate the old patterns quickly. Thoughts arise that tell me to back up, to stay small, to stop. Who is going to listen? Women already struggle to care for themselves in basic ways—do I really think I’m going to convince them that play matters enough to make space for it?

Those thoughts are familiar to me. They are the voice of an older version of safety, one that taught me not to say what I really know, not to be too visible, not to be too much, not to risk social rejection. It taught me to calm down, fit in, and make myself more digestible for other people. But that version of safety was never freedom. It was constriction. It was self-abandonment. It was silence dressed up as protection.

Making play part of my daily life has helped me live with more ease, more joy, more presence, and more freedom than I have ever known. It has made me less braced and more alive. And if I can do that with a brain that was heavily wired for safety above all else—something childhood trauma only reinforces—then I know it is possible for other women too.

We are living in a world that is changing at a breathtaking pace. Many of the structures people once relied on for certainty and security are shifting in real time, and it can leave us asking what is real, what can be trusted, and whether safety is even possible anymore. This is one reason I keep coming back to play. In the possibilities created through play, the nervous system is offered a new experience. It gets to feel movement without panic, expression without punishment, presence without performance, and aliveness without danger. It gets to learn that possibility is not the enemy, but part of the way back.

That is why I speak up about this. That is why I bring this work forward. That is why you see me dancing on social media. It is not random, and it is not superficial. It is real, it is worthy, and I believe we need it now more than ever.