Dr. Goldstein on Play, Mindset, and the Depressive Loop
Look at what the animal research turns up. Rats kept in cages stocked with different objects and surrounded by other rats grow more cerebral cortex, the brain's outer layer, the part tied to thinking and processing. The rats left alone with nothing to play with go the other direction: that same region shrinks. And the ones with company and things to explore, the ones I describe in Uncovering Happiness as having toys and playmates, ran mazes faster than the isolated ones. Which is a strange and useful fact. Adding play to our days seems to make us quicker at the things we already do.
That is part of why so many companies now fold playful activities into the workday. Happier employees. More engaged ones. People who concentrate better and get more done. Play works like a built-in antidepressant, and the question I keep coming back to is how we start finding ours again. What are the toys and playmates in your own life? Most of us stopped asking that a long time ago.
The idea that pulls the whole book together has to do with two mindsets, something Carol Dweck at Stanford lays out beautifully. We can live in either one, and most of us lean hard toward a single one without noticing. The one we tend to default to is performance-based. How am I doing? Am I doing my antidepressant activities correctly, my therapy correctly? How am I measuring up at school, at work? Hitting the mark or missing it?
With depression especially, and with anxiety too, this turns into a fixed picture: I'm here, but I'm supposed to be over there. A gap opens up, and we stare at it. We keep returning to the shortfall, and every attempt to patch it only points us back at the same lack. That is what feeds the depressive loop. The sense that I'm failing, that something about me is broken, and out of that comes shame.
The brain registers shame the same way it registers stress. So shame generates more stress, and the stress pours back into the loop, and the loop keeps running on the fuel we hand it.