I’ve realised over the years how easily adulthood squeezes the play out of us. What I didn’t expect was how much play affects the way we handle change. Jiujitsu brought that part back into my life, and with it came more looseness, creativity, and adaptability than I had before.
One of the most important things I learned from jiujitsu is how beneficial it is for adults to continue to engage in play, and how much it is lacking from our modern lives. Last week, I tried a new sweep and got immediately countered. My training partner laughed, I laughed, and we reset. Those thirty seconds reminded me why I keep showing up. I had no idea I was missing this element of life before I took up jiujitsu, but once I got in the gym, I realized how much freedom there is in the kind of play that grappling is. And soon I realized the freedom of playing more in the gym was showing up outside of it as well. It was easier to tap into my creative side, I was more relaxed and playful, and I felt more connected to the people around me.
If you haven’t tried it before, you might think jiujitsu is all about fighting, or aggressive cuddling as we jokingly call it. But after you’ve practiced it for a while, you realize that you aren’t really fighting most of the time. Often, you are sparring with people smaller, less skilled, or just a friend that you’ve trained with a hundred times before, and you aren’t going 100% and trying to crush them. That’s where the play comes in. An upper belt rolling with me might let me get to the same position five times in a roll, just because they want to practice from that position, that’s play. When I try new things that I don’t know how to do at a high level yet, and get shut down, that’s play. If there’s a new person who I’ve never trained with before and we slap hands and start grappling, that’s an intense form of play that engages all your senses. When you are having a good training session, the play is built in; you’re automatically engaging in creativity, imagination, and connectedness.
This wasn’t just my experience; it turns out there’s science behind why play matters. Research shows that play is not childish. It is a biological need. Stuart Brown, who has spent decades studying play, found that adults who make space for unstructured play are more adaptable, more resilient, and less rigid under stress. Other studies go further. Playfulness is linked to cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift strategies quickly when things change, and to higher creativity because the stakes are low enough for experimentation to happen. Play also improves social connection and reduces stress hormones. In other words, the things most of us say we want, such as clarity, resilience, and creativity, do not come from trying harder. They come from giving ourselves permission to play.
There’s a common phrase that jiujitsu is for everyone, and while I think that’s true, I’m not saying everyone needs to try it. But we all could use more play in our lives. More impromptu moments, more trying something without knowing the outcome, more taking the ball from a partner and going with the flow, more using our creativity in an unstructured way. We spend hours studying how to be more organized and efficient, when sometimes what we need is exactly the opposite. Play is not a break from real life. It is what keeps real life from hardening into something we can’t grow in.