298. How to make your life more fun

00:00:04
Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast, new listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here. Back for another episode as we, of course break down the Psychology of our twenties, Let's talk about something that has been really bugging me recently. I'm not having fun. I am not having as much fun as I think I should be having, and it is really getting me into a rut. I'm not having fun, simple as that, and I feel like in this decade I'm still in my twenties. It's upsetting me. It's frustrated me that there should be my time to be embracing experiences and it's just not happening. Tell me if you relate to this. I feel as if my entire life at this stage is dominated by by my to do list or my should do list, and it is lingering over me constantly. Even when things are done, there is always more to add on to the list. Unhealthy, Yes, impossible to escape. That's what I've been finding. This toxic focus on productivity has made just having fun for the simple act of it kind of feel like a chore, but more so like something that needs to be dismissed for as long as possible, because god forbid, I'm not working hard enough, or I don't prove myself, or I look back at this time and can trace future failures back to this one afternoon that I took off this one day, I said, I'm just going to go to the beach instead. What if my decision then changes my life for the world. What if prioritizing fun in that moment means dissatisfaction long term. It's a pretty toxic mindset to be and I acknowledge that. But the other element of this for me is that life, I think the world in general, feels so serious and terrible at this time. And you know, I had someone say to me the other day it feels like we're living in end times, and I honestly relate to that feeling, So having fun sometimes makes me feel guilty. It's also harder to be present in fun moments at this stage, because you're constantly being pulled back down to earth and back into reality by all the terrible things you see in the news or that come across your feed. And so I asked you, all the listeners this very question I've been asking myself. Are you having fun? Are you enjoying your life right now? Only twenty seven percent of you said yes. When I asked how often you have fun, only eighteen percent of you said every day, and sixty three percent of you said you wish your life was more fun. This final question I asked was do you think we take our twenties too seriously? And seventy six percent of you said yes, yes we do. And so I had to ask myself, is that the culprit behind why we I I'm not having fun right now? And I think it goes even deeper than that. We're going to touch on some of those explanations. But recently I have been reading this book titled The Fun Habit by the psychologist Mike Rucker, and he has this quote in his book that really really stood out for me and which inspired this episode. Happiness is a state of mind, but fun is something you have to do, not just think about. It also doesn't require education, money, or power. All it requires is intentionality and not just I don't know what it was. You know when you hear certain things and they just change something in your mind. That was one of those quotes. And so as of a week ago, I on a mission to make my life more fun, and I want to bring you along with me. Turns out as well, there are not just mental health benefits to this, but it may just be something. Having more fun could be something that extends your life. It keeps you healthier, and really, at the end of the day, I mean you are living your life for you. That is everything that this life should mean. You are living your life to have unique, enjoyable experiences, and I think that is something that we need to be deliberately reminded of every now and again, especially when there are a lot of reasons made up or real to not be prioritizing enjoyment and delight. So today we're going to look at the psychology behind fun, how to find fun in unexpected ways, including in hard work, and some of the best yet also less obvious ways for creating delight, creating playfulness, creating joy. I think it's something we could all do with a little bit more of myself included I'm in this boat with you, and the science also says the same. So without further ado, let's get into our tips the psychology behind how you can just have more fun in your life. Let's start with my argument for why we should be more focused on fun, not just in your twenties, but in every stage of your life. I think so many of us are focused on happiness, not realizing that happiness is one of the hardest emotions to create through external means. We desperately chase this very elusive feeling, but what researchers will tell you is that it's quite difficult to obtain. We need to find a gateway to it, and fun is one of those gateways to happiness. Through joy is like a shortcut. It's like an instantaneous jump the queue card. Like, if you can have fun, you can obtain happiness a lot easier. I think fun is something that is depicted as a very childish and be very frivolous. There is a time and a place for it, mainly in childhood, but at some stage you need to outgrow that. The older you get, the more you need to be mature, the less time there is for that. There's no need for it. This that's what people are kind of assuming. But when we get existential about it, which we often do in this podcast, what does life really mean unless it is filled with experiences that leave an impact and that you can enjoy, that you can reminisce on, that fill you with this unnameable, bright, gowey feeling. Maybe that's what piece is. You may not be able to have fun all the time, but you're also not a machine. And as the saying goes, an unexamined life is a life not worth living. And I think a fun life is a life not worth living either. I'm going to throw some psychological research at you as well, if you need more convincing that fun is important. Fun also, on a practical level, fosters what is known as psychological flexibility, and that is our ability to adapt to life's demands with openness and curiosity rather than rigidity. So it's the distinction between a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. So if you are having fun, you're also going to be more flexible, more adaptable, You're going to be a better problem solver, You're going to be less pessimistic. Fun also deeply strengthens social bonds. Between others, which we're going to explore in a second, and having more fun and playfulness enjoying your life has been proven to lower QUARTERSOL levels and increase neuroplasticity in the brain. Neuroplasticity is one of the most essential concepts that you need to understand if you want to achieve, do, create, be anything. It is the explanation. It is the single thing that is responsible for you being able to change who you are, grow, learn and adapt throughout your lifetime. So if you want to achieve anything in life, whatever it is for you, you have to tune into the ways that you are going to allow your brain to be plastic and to be moldable. And it turns out fun is one of those things. Fun can also come in various packaging. I guess there is this idea of type one and type two fun that I came across recently, and it's a concept that was created by very serious outdoor enthusiasts who realized that their idea of fun was very different to the average person. You know, they didn't find much pleasure in going to the movies, but they could run one hundred miles and feel ecstasy and enjoyment. Like nothing else. They could cycle until their knees gave out, jump off cliffs, do extreme things. That was where fun lay for them. So what was created was this distinction between type one and type two fun. Type one fun it's very typical. It's enjoyable when it's happening, going to the beach, classic type one fun, hanging out with your friends, card games, rollercoasters fun. You can opt into them and the fund surrounds you. Type two fun you have to work for. It's very different. It is the kind of fun that only comes after you have completed the activity, not during it. It is the feeling of doing something difficult and almost hating it, like feeling uncomfortable, but having this predominant feeling of adventure and accomplishment and enjoyment. Now you're probably thinking, what, that's just relief, right, That's the relief of finishing something not necessarily. You know, you're not going to finish a major assignment or a larger work project and be like that was fun. Who we're going to be like, thank gosh, that's over. Type two fun is specifically to do with things that are still leisure and that are not required of you, but that you opt into and that you work towards what you're experiencing. When you experience type two fun is called harmonious passion. It is being absorbed in an activity that you choose to do because you love it and you love how it makes you feel, even when it's not making you happy at the time. So there's also this final category of fun called type three fun. This is the kind of fun. It's not fun in the moment, it's not fun in retrospect, but it makes a good story. It's a story or an experience that bonds two people together. So being chased by a bear on a hike that's type three fun. Type three fun we're kind of going to ignore here. The argument that is typically made is that it's very easy to just have type one fun these days. Anything that gets out dopamine going, that connects us is type one fun. We need to be having more type too fun. We cannot just reserve hard work for things that don't bring us joy or that aren't things we want to do. We have to use hard work for things that will challenge and excite us in a fantastic, leisurely, self directed way. The thing is we know that fun is doing good things for our brains and for our bodies and for our social connections. There's not necessarily something that we can prescribe, Like your doctor isn't going to prescribe you an amusement park. They're not going to give you a pill full of fun. I find this statement like are you having fun? So interesting. It's like are you having dinner? Are you having a glass of wine? Are you having this thing we call fun? Like it's something that we can serve up or that we can buy, or we can consume or create a dosage of. What we really need to be focused on is everyday behaviors and ways that one is reinforced in our minds as a priority. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about the six ways you can integrate fun as a daily practice, the same way you shower, the same way you make breakfast, the same way you exercise. The first way that we can be having more fun is to put fun on the calendar and to be deliberate about it. The reason I found I couldn't allow myself time to have fun is not because I didn't have the time or I didn't have the space. It's because I didn't make the space. I didn't make the time. Your life is truly made of the things that you prioritize. That's a choice that you get to make. And I'm going to ask you a very serious question. How much time do you prioritize spending on your phone each day? How much time do you spend staying late at the office or the library when you don't actually have anything to do. How much time do you spend doing things for other people that probably won't appreciate it. Not being intentional accidentally ends up causing us to prioritize things we don't actually see is important, or that we shouldn't see is important. So this is the challenge. Once a week, I want you to take an afternoon, even an evening, or a whole day off on the weekends to schedule in fun the same way you would schedule in a check in with your boss. Perhaps you can even adapt this to be once a month, whatever works for you. Once a month, you take yourself out of town for a fun day, you do an activity the way I've integrated this, but there's a couple of ways. But the first is that I've made a bucket list of sorts of all the things that i want to do in Sydney, in the city that I live that I am working to tick off. And I say work because that's sometimes what it feels like at the beginning. It's always going to feel like work when you are changing your routine. But it takes on average three months for something to become a habit, three months according to the European Journal of Social Psychology. So if you make fun of practice, that's literally only twelve weeks before it is an in built part of your life. Here's another way that I'm integrating this. It's called the Sunday Dilly Deli. And I'm almost at two months of doing the Dilly Deli, so I've got one more month before hopefully it's a habit. But this is how it works. Me and my friends, we have our run club in the mornings on Sundays. We call it Anti social social run Club. We meet at eight thirty at the park. We don't even run together, like we do not even run together. We have our headphones in the entire time, but we meet back at the same spot after about an hour and then we all go and we do chores together. And we have no agenda, no plan, no timeline. The only objective is to dilly DEALI if you want to go and try all the samples at the deli, Okay, we don't, Yeah, let's do it. We want to buy new shoes, that's fine. You want to randomly get your ears? Do you want to get your haircut? Great? And you know, my friends are all these really impressive people, their social workers, their department heads, their lawyers, And what we always say at the end of this is like, isn't it just so nice for one day of our weeks to not be structured, to allow us to have fun in an organic way. Before this, I think it even felt like sometimes my Saturdays and Sundays were like becoming workdays for me, because I would still be working, first of all, but I would also be scheduling in people, and I felt pressure to be the most productive I could be with my free time, which is ridiculous and such an oxymoron. But the dilly dally has been the solution for me, So scheduling your fun. If you don't make something a conscious priority, it will slip through the cracks, especially when there are objectively millions of other things that you could do with that time. The thing to ask yourself is why do I see those other things that are often chores or requirements of me is more important than my enjoyment. The dilly deli example actually brings me to tip number two, and it was inspired by a study titled fun is more fun when others are involved. You need to invite people into your deliberate, delightful moments and it will make them better. So the study I was talking about it was conducted in twenty sixteen and the researchers recruited one hundred and nineteen individuals, some of them in New York, Arizona, across the United States, and they would essentially call these individuals multiple times a day and ask them, Hey, what are you up to? Are you enjoying yourself? Are you alone? Are you having fun? Are you with others? They then also included a bunch of other psychometrics and measures for low arousal and positive affect So basically they wanted to know was someone calm, with someone relaxed, were they content at ease, or were they stressed? And what they found These results were so clear, fun experienced with other people is more positive and more enjoyable than solitary fun. Actually, they even want to step further and said that just having other people around us, specifically friends, automatically activates a pre fun mindset and state. Now the highest form of fun amongst friends, it's actually learning something new together or engaging in an activity. This could also be known as parallel play. I love the term parallel play. It's something that was borrowed from developmental psychology, and it basically refers to two people being together in the same room doing things side by side without necessarily doing the same thing. They're just enjoying each other's presence and conversation, and that, for us is fun. It really activates some very primal human instinct for community and this idea that enjoyment needs to be shared. Fun needs to be shared. I think parallel play also removes the pressure to be on all the time and to fill the space with just talking or to constantly maintain emotional openness and focus. You know, at this time in my life, sometimes I'm just too exhausted to just sit with someone for three hours and talk and have dinner. Fun is like the easy way to still really enjoy someone's presence, but to be doing things independently that you equally enjoy. There is this amazing article from the New York Times. It's titled Let's ignore each other in the same room, and it basically articulates how much this kind of practice and these kinds of activities are really essential for us, especially in this day and age, when it is a lot easier to interact and maintain social bonds online. Parallel play might just be the solution. Okay, we're going to take a short break, but when we return, let's discuss my final three tips, including some contributions from you guy the listeners, on how to make life more fun. A few of these suggestions were genuinely hilarious and also genius, so stay tuned after this short break. Having fun and being silly seem to go hand in hand. Sometimes they're seen as synonymous. And this really brings me to my third tip for making everyday life more fun. Turn mundane things into a game. Pair a thing you hate doing with something that is like just short of feeling stupid, but so enjoyable. So this kind of strategy, it's actually called lifestyle gamification, and it was a method that I believe was first emerging as a way to help people with video game addictions. So these individuals were becoming addicted to the artificial environments presented by video games, where things were rewarded and it was you could win, and nothing was too serious and it was magical and amazing, and people would obviously become engrossed in that. And to get them out of that, these researchers were basically like, what if we turn everyday life into a game. You could do this for yourself. Think about a chore you hate, the thing you hate most in the world having to do. How can you gamify this so that it's more enjoyable. And I'll give you an example. I have this terrible habit of making an absolute disgrace of my house in the mornings. If you're like gross admitting it, because it's like my little sacret. But I never put things back where they belong. I just like throw things everywhere. But I also despise not having a tidy house. When I go to bed, you know, if there are clothes on the floor, if things are not in order, I'm not sleeping. Well, two different people are operating in the morning and in the evening. In my brain, major contradiction. But my sister taught me this trick, and she calls it ten minutes to save the World, where she puts on a ten minute timer and she has ten minutes to clean as much as possible before the timer goes off, or she will do it for five minutes and just see if she can get all the dishes done. And it's like this race and suddenly perhaps what is probably the worst part of your day has this new kind of fun glimmer to it. And it's not just fun, it's also motivational. There was even an app developed to help people with this I need I think it's called Habit RPG, and it essentially lets you choose habits you want to promote and habits you want to kick, and it ties them to real life rewards in like a super gamified, enjoyable way, and you can even create teams.

00:21:41
Speaker 1: So it is.

00:21:41
Speaker 2: Literally like a video game, and it's turning things that we would ordinarily hate and that might suck joy out of your life into a game in a more simple way. You can also play into any area of your life, not just something that is annoying or frustrating. You can try not to step on the tracks on your way to the train in the morning. You can see how many times you can spot someone wearing the same shoes. Place imaginary bets on what the people next to you at lunch are going to order. With your friends, I think it's just inviting this open like, just being open to how like silly life kind of is, and how so many things that we do are actually like not that serious, but we make them so on our mind. This implicitly links to our fourth tip, Do things the way your childhood self would skip instead of walking. Who cares if someone judges you? Eat cereal for dinner, have ice cream for breakfast, like watch cartoons. Let yourself be unseerious on purpose. Healing you in a child I think it really had a moment a few years ago, but the value of it hasn't disappeared. Every version of you, who ever exists, still exists within you. They are holding on to memories, They are representing the lessons you learned and who you were at certain stages in your life. That version of you, with the childlike wonder is still there. We contain all these parts, all these roles everyone we have ever been, and healing any part of you often comes from listening, to acknowledging and honoring those parts, especially the younger ones. Who may have had to grow up too quickly. And you know I talked about how doctors won't prescribe you fun. Sometimes a psychologist or a therapist just might if there is a part of you from childhood who they believe is still wounded or injured. You will find once you start listening to this version of you who is silly and playful and innocent, it's very easy to slip back into that mindset, not because you're regressing, but because you are rebelling against implicit, unconscious forces that have told you that this kind of silliness and fun isn't available to you anymore. It's not for you. You're too old for that, And I'm really here to say no, you are not. Silliness and playfulness and fun are not just reserved for childhood. So what can you do to make your daily life more fun by treating it the way your five year old self, maybe even your ten year old self would have. What things would they be fascinated by? What are the things you always asked for as a kid or wanted that now you have adult money you can kind of provide genuinely when you start thinking this way, like the world is your oyster. Do you know how much fun it is to get on a train if you're imagining your five year old self getting on the train with you. There's just so much that you see and that you appreciate that your adult mind doesn't. There's so many things that like surprise you about the world. Once you deliberately say, hey, maybe the random stuff I take for granted is actually really really special, and initially it is going to feel strange. You know that that's the social conditioning kick in the social conditioning that's saying you're an adult, now behave like one, and then acting like a child sometimes is going to feel really really liberating. And you know what, who cares if you feel weird or cringe? I think feeling cringe is better than feeling joyless, and better than feeling cold, and better than never trying anything new. And I always say this if you're a longtime listener of the show. People who are weird and who are fune and who threw caution to the wind, they're the most interesting people out there. I want to now quickly give some airtime to the tips that you all the wonderful listeners sent in about how you are making life more fun for yourself in the most nache and interesting ways. So I went on Instagram, and I was like, I'm in a crowdsource some joyful, delightful activities, and a lot of them were somewhat similar. It was like romanticize dance, sing, and then some of you were just so creative. And I will say, there's a couple of these I have done, and I had so much fun doing it. It made me feel so peaceful when I went to sleep at night. Okay, here's the list. Buying small bundles of flowers to make my own bouquets for family and friends. I read my book at a coffee shop for an hour, and I call it book camping. I love that neurf war with my roommates. Yes please, I chase my partner around the house and we play tag. I actually do that one. This one was so funny and I've been thinking about it all day. Go to karaoke and use the microphone to gossip, which like, yes, that's hilarious. This person said, always have bubbles or party poppers in a small jar in my house for small accomplishments. Me and my friend schedule meetings with each other throughout company emails, even though we work in a completely different place, and we jump on business calls with each other. Once a week when I go running, I try to smile at everyone who I run past. This person just said trinkets. Another person said dance party at least once a day. This one I thought was really really sweet. I keep stickers in my cash register to give the kids at work. How joyful is that. I want you to notice something about all these suggestions. None of them cost more than twenty dollars. In fact, most of them are free. That's the brilliant thing about fun that we mentioned before. Fun is probably one of the most affordable medicines. It's one of the most affordable wellness trends, most affordable health remedy you will probably ever encounter. And I think the things that we take for granted are sometimes the things that come to us most easily, like breathing, like spending time in nature, like connecting with someone, like having fun. So I hope that this episode has persuaded you in some small way to make this a daily practice. If you do any of these things, take a photo, tag me in it. I want to see it. Message me. If you do anything from that list and tell me how it goes, especially if you do the karaoke one, because I don't know. I'm just so fascinated by that. Whoever set that in, Like you have changed, You've changed my mind about so many things. I feel like I need to go and do that, like treat it like a podcast almost, But this is something I want to be honest, I'm still working on myself, and I know there are a lot of excuses to not feel joyful, and I know there are a lot of excuses that I personally am making myself to not just take a freakin afternoon off, to not just say yes to things that are silly. And I have never once regretted having fun, but I have a lot of times regretted saying no to opportunities for fun. Just the simple math that I think is persuasive enough for me from a very utilitarian perspective, fun is regret proof. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure that you are either subscribed on YouTube or you were subscribed on Spotify, Apple turnal notifications so you know when new episodes come out. And you can also share this episode with a friend someone who you think might get a real kick out of it someone you think may or may not need some more fun in their life. I really enjoyed speaking about this, probably one of my favorite episodes I've ever made. So if you've made it this far, leave a little emoji that represents fun for you in the comments, and until next time, stay safe, be kind, have more fun, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very very soon,