The pandemic put fun on the backburner. It's time to prioritize it, says science journalist

It's supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year.

But this year, as COVID-19 case counts climb and we scramble to get rapid tests and third vaccine doses, the holiday season doesn't feel particularly wonderful.  

And fun? Well, that feeling can be pretty elusive right now. 

But science journalist and author Catherine Price says finding fun wherever you can should be a priority now more than ever – not only because it feels good, but because it's also good for you.

Price shared the science and the stories behind her new book, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, with The Sunday Magazine's Piya Chattopadhyay.

Here's part of their conversation.

Was there a moment your pursuit for the power of fun began? 

I had this guitar, and my grandmother gave me money to buy the guitar in college… but I'd never learned how to play it beyond just a couple of chords. And I said, "You know what? I'm going to learn to play the guitar."

So I started going to this class, and I started to notice that when I was in the class, I felt this feeling of buoyant energy, this sense of joy that buoyed me through the whole week. It quickly became the highlight of my week, and it gave me energy that was not confined to the class itself.

I became really interested in what that feeling was. And I was trying to put a word on it, and the most accurate word that came to mind was fun.

Does that mean the definition of fun is buoyant energy? How should we think of fun?

If you look up the word fun in the dictionary, you'll find things that say "lighthearted pleasure." But that wasn't what I was experiencing. Sure, I was having lighthearted pleasure, but … it really was lingering. There was something deeper.

So I recruited this big group of people I called the "fun squad." It was more than a thousand volunteers from all around the world, and I had them recount to me experiences from their own lives that they would describe as having been quote "so fun."

When I read through their anecdotes, sure enough, I had a huge smile on my face, but I also was often moved almost to tears, because there was something so powerful about the stories people were sharing with me, where clearly it wasn't just lighthearted pleasure. These were the moments in which they felt the most alive, and they were some of their most treasured memories from their lives. It was much deeper. 

You coined a foundation for that feeling that you had sort of gathered from other people. As I understand it, you call it "True Fun" — capital T, capital F. What is True Fun?

The definition, I believe, of True Fun is that it's the confluence of playfulness and connection and flow. And I could tell you more about each of those states.

Please do.

So playfulness tends to make adults clench up, or they shut down a bit because they think, "Oh, I can't play. I'm not a kid," or, "That makes me feel self-conscious," or, "I don't like games," or whatever.

I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the attitude of playfulness, where you have a lighthearted approach to things and you're not caring too much about the outcome. You're doing things just for the sake of doing them.

That's something we don't do that much as adults. But it's incredibly freeing and energizing and important.

In terms of connection, I noticed … that in the vast majority of memories of True Fun, there's a feeling of a special shared experience, and it's usually with another person. Sometimes it's with a dog, but normally with a person — and that was true even for introverts.

And then flow is the psychological state in which we are so wrapped up in our present experience and so engaged in it that we lose track of time. So the most common example of flow is an athlete in the midst of a game or a musician playing a piece of music. 

Meaningful flow.

Meaningful flow. And it stands in contrast to to what I call "fake fun" … which is my term that I use to refer to activities that are marketed to us as fun, but that, upon reflection, aren't fun at all.

And one of the biggest culprits there is, for sure, social media or binge watching things to the point that you actually feel gross afterwards. It's very much like junk food, where it's pleasurable in small doses but, ultimately, doesn't nourish you. And I think that's an important distinction to make.  

You are a science journalist. What does the science tell us, Catherine Price, about why having fun matters? What does it do for us?

The main goal of having fun, the main reason to do it, is that it feels good, and we deserve to enjoy our lives.

But the one thing that's fascinating about fun is that there's actually very little research that's been done about fun, if you just call it fun. I think in large part because we haven't decided on an agreed upon definition. Also because we tend to think about it as frivolous.

But if you break down fun into those three parts — playfulness, connection and flow  — you'll find that there's plenty of research on each of those states. And that research shows that they're good not just for our emotional health, but also our physical health, which really fascinated me.

We're stuck in this pandemic right now. At some point it will end … but it has stopped us from seeing or maybe having the same lifestyle that we had pre-pandemic. I think it's hard for a lot of people to prioritize fun right now.

I think that's definitely true. It's hard to prioritize fun in general. It's even harder now when there's so many sources of fear and stress and anxiety in our lives.

But ... that is even more of a reason to prioritize it, because one of the many physical effects that connection and flow and playfulness have on us is that they lower our stress levels, and anything that lowers our stress levels is actually enormously good for us ... both in terms of our emotions and our physical health.

A lot of that has to do with this hormone called cortisol, which is a stress hormone that our bodies release when we're encountering a threat. It's meant to help us survive and respond to physical threats, like being chased by something. And it does things like speed up our heart rates, increase our blood pressure and our bood glucose or blood sugar levels.

That's great if you're trying to run away from a threat. But if your cortisol levels are chronically elevated over time, you can see how those same effects would be very bad for us.

And it makes sense that increased cortisol over time has been proven to raise our risks for things like heart disease and stroke, depression, even fertility issues, dementia — the list goes on. Stress is very bad for us when it remains chronic over time, and that's exactly what we're experiencing now.

So that alone is an argument for why fun is not frivolous at all, but actually should be at the top of our priority lists.

Written and produced by Tracy Fuller. Q&A edited for length and clarity.