"I don’t know how to let go.." How to have fun as an adult, tips from a psychologist

If you don't know how to have fun then you're not alone - this is something many of my burnt out clients struggle with. The good news is that 'letting go' and 'playfulness' are skills, and due to the plastic nature of the brain, we can learn or improve any skill at any age.

This post explains why you might struggle to let go, the impact this can have on wellbeing, and how you can try build this ability up.

Where does the difficulty with play come from?

Play can easily get squeezed out of life as we age due to the busyness and seriousness of life. This, combined with things like work-place targets, the need to earn a living and growing responsibilities can disconnect us from the skill of letting go, something that comes naturally to children. However, it's also the case that some adults never got the opportunity to learn how to play during childhood either. Some of my high-functioning clients describe early lives where well-meaning parents encouraged endless structured activities like music lessons or sports practice, but left little time for spontaneousness, silliness or curious play. The kind of activities where there was no end goal, certificate, competition or productivity point to win.

There is also a small portion of my therapy clients who suffered from neglect, or lived in a highly stressful environment where play simply wasn’t a safe activity. Their home may have been unpredictable, emotionally intense, or simply too tightly focused on achievement so play got shut down or was forbidden. Examples of this include:

• A parent’s mood was too volatile so playfulness (which is often unpredictable) could trigger an outburst which was too scary.

• Mess or noise created anxiety in the household.

• Productivity or achievement was always the priority and was overly focused on, so everything else felt at best pointless, at worst like you were being bad.

• They were shamed for being playful through comments like “calm down” or “stop being childish” and so on.

  
  

And so it's understandable that play became something to avoid - shameful, confusing or unsafe. Over time, these children grow into adults who still carry that legacy in their nervous systems and feel confused how others around them appear able to let go with apparent ease.

How does lack of playfulness relate to burnout?

The ability to switch off from work is one of the most important protective factors in burnout. When we have the skill of switching out of 'doing' mode into being, or pursuing a non-work related goal, we are building up our identity beyond work and this increases our stress buffers significantly.

But there's another reason that play is helpful - it helps to tone our vagal system which improves our ability to cope with stress. Here is how... Play is a blended nervous system state*. This means it requires the mobilised energy of the sympathetic system (the one that gets us moving in times of stress), combined with the safety of the ventral vagal system (the part of our nervous system responsible for making us feel calm, connected, and curious).

When you play, you practice moving between nervous system states - activating and deactivating stress responses. You develop the neural flexibility that later helps you shift out of anxiety, let go of tension, and come back to calm. You learn that it’s safe to feel excited without it tipping into panic (which can look like self-attack) or overdrive.

I remember a moment from my own life that captures this perfectly. I was playing catch with my three-year-old daughter. She was giggling, running, clearly in a joyful blended state- her body mobilised with energy (sympathetic activation), but underpinned by safety and connection (ventral vagal regulation).

Then a moment later her mood shifted - I chased her a bit too enthusiastically, and she suddenly flipped into fear instead of fun. I scooped her up and cuddled her close and after a few minutes her nervous system had downshifted safely - vagal toning in action.

Moments of playfulness like this in childhood, repeated over time, teach the body it’s safe to move between excitement and calm. They build the internal wiring we all rely on later in life to manage stress: to shift gears out of this and recover from intensity.

Without these early experiences, the nervous system doesn’t get good at downregulating. And that makes adults more prone to chronic stress and therefore to burnout.

The barriers to playfulness in adulthood

Many high-functioning, hardworking adults feel trapped in a loop of over-responsibility or fear of losing their edge. Typical messages I hear about this include:

• “I can only relax if everything else is done.”

• “I feel guilty if I take time off just to enjoy myself.”

• “I don’t even know what I really enjoy outside of work.”

  
  

It's easy to assume that you're too uptight to be playful and that it's your fault, but this is simply a sign that your nervous system is doing what it learned to do early on in life: stay on high alert, stay safe by being useful or productive. As such they remain in 'On' mode all the time.

Another problem is our endless 'to-do' list. It's tempting to believe that we need to get to the end of this before we allow ourselves any time for other things. But this approach fails us - I think the last time I reached the end of my 'to-do' list was in 1996, when I was 16 and had almost no responsibilities. Now I have kids, a job, run a business and a home there is ALWAYS something that needs my attention. The art of letting go is not about getting to the end of all the tasks before we allow this, but practicing how to step away from them and ringfencing time for ourselves despite them.

How to Have Fun as an Adult

Learning or re-visiting the skill of play adulthood can be difficult at first, and the ways these difficulties show up can be broken down into three areas:

1. Beliefs/ mindset: “This is frivolous or pointless”, "I don't know how" - which can feel disempowering.

2. Body held discomfort: difficulty with stillness or staying in a playful activity

3. Emotions: anxiety, guilt, shame being the key ones

If these show up for you too please don't read them as a sign that playfulness is impossible or that you are doing it wrong. Read them instead as signs that you are on the right track but that it takes time - stay with the activity and track how intense these difficulties remain after a week, a month and so on. Overtime, as your system learns that playfulness is a safe activity and you will feel more comfortable doing it; your nervous system will stop treating it as a threat and these difficulties should all reduce.

An important skill in this is mindful awareness - this means noticing when your brain has thrown out a 'doing' mode thought and the associated urge to return back to a work-related task. Noticing this moment highlights an important choice-point - you can either continue with your playful activity or shift back into work mode. Without this noticing ability you will likely give into the urge without a second thought, but with the practice of noticing you are empowered to choose - the longer you choose to stay with your playful activity, the more you build up the skill and the easier it gets over time.

Here Are Tips for Getting Started

✅Choose something you can place your attention on that's away from work, ringfence the time, but start small - e.g. choose a 10 minute block for something; perhaps you could treat yourself to good quality fine liners or pencils so you can doodle, or get recommendations for a funny podcast.

✅Reconnect to childhood favourites (or things that you weren't allowed to do as a child but craved) e.g. what were you drawn to before it got judged or shut down? Can you get yourself that Lego kit, Care-Bear, Ninja Turtle poster, Micro-car set.

✅Allow yourself to do things badly. The goal is NOT to be good at an activity, it's to be alive in the moment. Play is about the 'process' not the 'outcome'. A fun activity for this is to close your eyes and draw something, then open your eyes. It will be bad, but often with funny, playful results.

✅Follow your body: Notice what your hands or body naturally want to do when unwinding - doodle, hum, stretch - that's clue to what you're craving.

✅ Play with others: it's much easier to let go with someone. Share a game, walk or craft session with someone else (but ban work or admin chat!).

Remember, learning to have fun as an adult will take time. If you continue to struggle with this, and it's paired with other difficulties like stress, anxiety, perfectionism or burnout then do consider the support of a therapy. Our team at Plum Psychology can be found here, if you would like to speak to a burnout specialist then we can help.

What Next? Check out my book on burnout which gives more detail about the neuroscience of rest and letting go.

*Polyvagal theory