Take our Burnout Test

Find a life coach near me

A quarter-life crisis can come early for Olympic hopefuls.

Alysa Liu, figure-skating prodigy, needed to find both joy and autonomy before she could win a gold medal.

Competition can elbow out play.

Here is a question that invites an obvious answer: is play playful? Playfulness seems part and parcel of play.

But hang on. Call to mind sedentary, intensely engrossed grandmasters welded to their checkered boards at a tournament. They go off their feed. They sweat buckets. They lose ten pounds or more as they play their intricate, drawn-out mental game. Exhausted, stressed, win or lose, they withdraw after a match to a soak in warmed, bentonite clay, Slavic lullabies playing on the spa speakers.

In the electronic games universe, some of the multiplayer contests are so demanding in their detail, so complex in their character relations and retaliations, and so intwined with fantasy physics that need mastering, that high-level players will lose themselves in the contests that come to seem more work-like than play-like. It’s a second job, some will say, ruefully.

Or traditionally, consider golf. Some adepts will become poised during a round, entering a deep, rewarding, flowlike state. The force is with them. Not seldom in fact, though, everyday duffers will cuss at an off-fairway lie or sputter as they hack away once trapped in sand. Golf…

Finding the Playfulness in Play

Even among those who make a living at play, professionals in high-stakes games, though, playfulness will sometimes poke through. The Buffalo Bills number 17, quarterback Josh Allen who is playing a serious and dangerous........

© Psychology Today