Taking Fun Seriously

By Roz Trieber, MS, CHES

One of my favorite words is Fun. Life has to be fun. Isn’t that what we really wish everyone when we send birthday and holiday greetings? Our greetings convey a message for a healthy, happy, vibrant, life --- Every single day of our life.
What is Fun?

FUN is pure energy. It reflects a certain attitude and willingness to live. Having fun means being amused, creating more opportunities to play, sing, and dance, doing what you love, and feeling the joy of living. When we are experiencing fun, we are living in the moment, with a smile on our face, and a twinkle in our eyes.

Do you have to be a “funster,” somebody who likes to have fun or who enjoys telling jokes, in order to be happy, laugh, and play in this over stressed world packed full of fear, competition, and disease?

What is Play?

Play according to the National Institute of Play “is a state of being that is intensely pleasurable. It energizes and enlivens us. It eases our burdens, renews a natural sense of optimism and opens us up to new possibilities.” Play may be a silly thing and its playfulness and lightheartedness are essential to experiencing fun for its many benefits.

Play has a significant role in shaping our brains, developing creativity, innovation, and helps us adapt to situations. When play is included as part of our social practices, we are able to dramatically effect our personal health and our relationships, the opportunities to be innovative, resilient, and self reliant.
Research demonstrates that play practices are antidotes to public health trends like depression and stress. When you are playing, there is an inherent and unique feeling of reward. Playing generates optimism, seeks out novelty, makes perseverance fun, leads to mastery, gives the immune system a bounce, fosters empathy and promotes a sense of belonging and community. Each of these play by-products are indices of personal health. When play is absent from daily living, stress and its effects are enhanced.
Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, says “without play, ‘‘there’s a sense of dullness, lassitude and pessimism, which doesn’t work well in the world we live in.’’

Give yourself permission to be silly. There is no need to care about what others are thinking. You are living in the moment and laughing all the way!If you didn’t have a funectomy (the removal of our fun gene) when you were born, this is how your sense of humor might have developed.Remember when you were a preschooler and you rolled over laughing when you heard a riddle that went like this: “What do you get when you cross an elephant with a jar of peanut butter? The answer was You get a peanut butter sandwich that never forgets! You weren’t trying to be funny, you were having fun naturally.By the time you were eight years old you were beginning to develop your witty sense of humor and have more fun. You could identify comical aspects in the craziness of daily life; remember this riddle? “Why do hot dogs come in packages of 12 when hot dog rolls come in packages of eight?” This riddle continues to circulate on the internet. You are older than eight years old and you still laugh.
Play and Create Your Own Fun:

With a little bit of creativity, you can create our own fun words. Fun never goes out of style. Try this on for size. A silly rhyming game. Choose a word, any word and follow it with rhyming nonsense words or real words. For example: busy, dizzy, tizzy, frizzy and so on. Now it’s your turn. Turn to the person sitting next to you and rhyme a word for the next 30 seconds.

Have you ever thought about words that have fun as their root and we miss the point! Take the word Fundamental for example: Fundamental means the basics. The first three letters spell fun. That means enjoyment needs to be the basics for just about everything you and I do. If you’re working at a job and not having fun or enjoying what you are doing, get a new job! At least do something that brings you joy, pleasure and laughter no matter what the situation.After all, when we laugh together, we like being together.
I like to think of fun the way Dr. Clifford Kuhn, author of “The Fun Factor” thinks of it:” When you’re making others laugh, you’re having sex with them. But if you’re sharing a laugh with them, you’re making love.”
Have FUN now, why wait?